“What’s your job?” Programming.“What’s your hobby?” Programming. “What do you do when you’re not programming?” Think about programming.
— David Reid (@dreid) March 9, 2013
We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?
Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed | Thought Catalog
This is a very fine examination of our culture or work and consumerism. As with all great work, it will make you very uncomfortable. At least it should.
(via minimalmac)
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons that crunch time is a failed development methodology, […] developers get tired and start making stupid mistakes. It’s far more effective to work reasonable hours, go home, have a life, and come back fresh the next day.
I sincerely believe that people (even designers) who say Helvetica is legible are simply confused. It’s pervasive, certainly. We see it everywhere — that’s why we think we can read Helvetica — but it is not nearly as legible as, say, Frutiger or Syntax, for the reasons I have stated above. Syntax is not merely a legible typeface: Syntax is beautiful, it’s sublime, it sings. Well, you argue, Helvetica is neutral. Yes, Helvetica is neutral, but it also symbolizes blandness and conformity and… well, sorry Swiss people, boredom.
More importantly, it’s not about being right so much as it is about acknowledging, identifying, and working to fix the problems in our industry. People going around saying “there is no problem with sexism in tech!” based solely on them personally not having experienced or observed it, are actually contributing to the problem. Because it means that rather than discussing solutions on how to address this dramatic and obvious gender imbalance our industry suffers from, we’re forced to first convince these people that this very real problem is, in fact, a real problem.
Jailbait defenders would often argue that if 14-year-olds didn’t want their bikini pictures to be posted to Reddit, they should not have taken them and uploaded them to their Facebook accounts in the first place. If Brutsch did not want his employers to know that he had become a minor internet celebrity through spending hours every day posting photos of 14-year-olds in bikinis to thousands of people on the internet, he should have stuck to posting cat videos.
Red Bull vs. Coffee (via Der Flix)
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
Mark Twain
