Andrea Buran’s Site ^5.0

Focusing on coding inflates the importance of finding the “right” method to solve a problem rather than the importance of understanding the problem.

What advice does anyone have for me?

I tend to finish a presentation with some questions of my own. I ask whether they feel the project will achieve its desired goals, meet the needs of users and fulfil organisational objectives.

Audrey, you’re missing a really important step. I think you need to just listen to them.

Uber is far from alone among technology giants in using machine learning systems to attempt to profile its users at a granular level to find the activity and users that stick out as abnormal.

If you use a group chat tool, there’s only one way to find out if the unread number is relevant: You have to click through and read everything just to figure out if there was anything worth reading. That’s the very definition of wasting time.

You want insights, not numbers. You want truth, not graphs.

[…] and the ball went for being like a stupid tennis ball to a motherfucking comet or something.

Actually, sometimes a cancelled project is something you should be proud of. Regardless of the talent of the team, if you can’t reach a compelling first playable, it’s time to kill the project and move on.

Understanding what you can afford to build—how much runway you have and how long you really want to work on a single project—is crucial to making it to the finish line.

[…] First, data is just information and alone does not represent objective reality. Next, whatever data you have is never, ever complete, and finally, getting more data does not necessarily mean more clarity.

Create harmony in your environment by sticking to a coherent shape language. You can then create focal points by using dissonance, which is the breaking up of the environment’s shape language.

Don’t fall into the trap of assuming your players will find gathering collectibles as interesting as you find placing them. While alternating the pace of your action is good, having your player travel for long stretches, no matter how much beautiful art she looks at, is just boring.

Underlying your need to micromanage is a fear of failure. By magnifying the risk of failure, your employees engage in “learned helplessness” where they start believing that the only way they can perform is if you micromanage them.

You can’t leave home to rebuild that feeling again somewhere else. You dilute that feeling. It’s what Voldemort did with his soul: he split it up into parts, and it could never be whole again.

The form — in its many manifestations — provides a gateway for user submission.

[…] and what we’re left with for the most part is a polished UI that can’t quite stand toe-to-toe with the world it’s framing.

Start early. […] Talk preparation will expand to fill all available time. […] It will take a lot of time to do your talk, way more than you think.

One method that I use for characterizing the relative size of development tasks is a variation of the tee-shirt sizing method. Each task is given a relative size corresponding to five tee-shirt sizes […] XS: Half day or less S: Half day to one day M: Two to three days L: One week XL: One to two weeks.

Even in my tiny design practice, every decision I make is shaped by my biases; every decision I make is capable of harm. And it’s so, so easy to forget this […] I occasionally forget to ask myself who’ll be impacted by my work and, most importantly, to ask how I can mitigate that harm.

[…] people that have names that websites and computers don’t seem to like—for example, we spoke to a guy named William Test, and a woman named Katie Test, both of whom can’t seem to keep a hotel or airplane booking because the name “test” is flagged by internal systems.

[…] and writing three things that are most important and really should happen that day on a Post-It Note, then sticking it to the back of my phone.

La gatta frettolosa fece i gattini ciechi.

Today, we are all cyborgs. This is not to say that we implant ourselves with technology but that we extend our biological capabilities using technology. We are sharded beings; with parts of our selves spread across and augmented by our everyday things.

Use multiples of 8 to define dimensions, padding, and margin of both block and inline elements.

All frameworks are opinionated. This is not an issue if you don’t have a strong opinion or if yours is the same as the frameworks. But sometimes you do have strong opinions.