Category: Software

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) design is hard, no doubt about it. Sadly, many software applications appear to have been built by narcissists, because they seem to assume that: We enjoy being constantly interrupted by them We love to repeatedly try out every feature available they have, including things we will never need … Continue reading 3 Signs of Narcissistic UI Design

If you’ve built an application that calls any kind of remote Web API – be it based on SOAP, REST/HTTP, Thrift, JSON-RPC or otherwise - your code must absolutely expect it to fail. Expecting your remote API calls to always work is a recipe for a late-night call to your phone during a future system … Continue reading The Web APIs You Use Will Fail

Beginner Know nothing about it Know enough to successfully pretend to know it during lunch Know enough to be dangerous with it Know enough to be employed to be dangerous with it Intermediate Know enough to ask intelligent questions about it on stackoverflow.com Know enough to answer n00b homework questions about it on stackoverflow.com Know … Continue reading The Programming Language Skill Scale

If you spend any time writing software, you'll eventually hit an interoperability wall: two components that should talk to each other just refuse to do so. Maybe it's a web API that has just been modified without proper concern for backward compatibility, breaking your existing application in the process. Or perhaps you're trying to use … Continue reading Interoperability Success Stories