06 8 / 2012
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
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14 5 / 2012
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
30 4 / 2012
"The best way to complain is to make things."
(Source: swiss-miss.com)
14 4 / 2012
"There was now little value in doing the same thing even twice; almost all the value was in performing a valuable creative act for the first time."
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10 4 / 2012
"There’s only one way to make a beginning, and that is to begin; and begin with hard work, and patience, prepared for all the disappointments"
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04 4 / 2012
“The Clock Man”
“How much will you pay for an extra day?”
The clock man asked the child.
“Not one penny,” the answer came,
“For my days are as many as smiles.”
“How much will you pay for an extra day?”
He asked when the child was grown.
“Maybe a dollar or maybe less,
For I’ve plenty of days of my own.”
“How much will you pay for an extra day?”
He asked when the time came to die.
“All of the pearls in all of the seas,
And all of the stars in the sky.”
The Clock Man by Shel Silverstein, as it appears in his book of poems and drawings, Every Thing On It.
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29 3 / 2012
"
The question remains: Why bother at all? Why not just leave the cryptic world of coding to the coders?
As I see it, it’s a bit like the world of cars: You’ll probably be a better owner and driver if you are at least minimally cognizant of what’s happening under the hood. In a world increasingly dependent on technology, our economic productivity - -both individually and collectively — is increasingly incumbent on our ability to interface fluidly with all things tech.
More broadly, these tools demonstrate new models for instruction at a time when our nation faces a growing crisis in our stressed and antiquated education system. Initiatives like Code for America are poised to inspire a generation of students to pursue science with an enthusiasm not equaled since the Space Race of the 1960s…
"
Raymond Schillinger: Why (and How) I’m Finally Learning to Code
The answer, in part: @CodeforAmerica.
(via codeforamerica)
(via codeforamerica)
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01 3 / 2012
"I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you."
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26 2 / 2012
"I say no to a lot of formal invitations, events, dinners and business meetings. I see time as sailors see wind or photographers see light, as something to use, manage and shape, not as something to be a victim of, or to see go by. I rather stay at home with my wife and kids than go to some useless business meeting."
21 2 / 2012
Programming is problem solving. Design is problem solving. The problems and tools may be different, but they are pursuits cut from the same cloth.
I’ve seen many past posts about designers needing to program. This post focuses on the need for developers to design.
Somewhere in there, I’ve gotta be doing something right.
13 2 / 2012
tommy's tenacious tumblr: What I've Learned About Smart People.
Going to Harvard means I have the very unique opportunity to be around a lot of smart people. Now, when I say “smart people,” I don’t mean that guy who always wins trivia night. I mean, blazingly intelligent individuals who are regarded as the pre-eminent scholars in their field. It’s pretty…
(Source: tmac721)
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06 2 / 2012
"Craftsmanship is a basic human impulse: the desire to do a job well for its own sake."
05 2 / 2012
TextExpander as Behavior Modification: Adding friction to the top of a slippery slope
Trying to be productive on the web is like trying to stick to a diet with an all-you-can-eat buffet sitting next to your desk. One moment of weakness—or even inattention—and you can find yourself going up for “just one more” helping from the Reddit trough.
A big part of this, for me, is muscle memory. When faced with an empty browser window, there are a few go-to URLs that my fingers reflexively type into the address bar: “reddit.com”, “facebook.com”, “plus.google.com” (though that last one has been less of a problem lately). You probably have a similar set of guilty distractions.
This is where TextExpander comes into play.
In a nutshell, TextExpander is native Mac app that gives you the ability to set up “snippets”—abbreviations which, when typed, are replaced by the string of characters you set up in advance (very useful for boilerplate responses, email signatures, et cetera).
For instance, when I type “wiki-biases”, TextExpander replaces that short string of characters with “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases” (a page I link to far more often than I care to admit).
So in the case of the weak-willed web developer trying to stay on the straight and narrow (and productive) path, said developer can simply add a TextExpander snippet with the abbreviation “reddit.com”, and set TextExpander to return any given string of characters—from the phrase “Get back to work!” to the URL of a motivational post (I suggest “http://learntoduck.com/startups/just-fucking-sell/”, which is what prompted me to change this behavior in the first place).
Of course, there are ways of getting around this when you really need to—from relying on your browser’s URL autocomplete (clear your browsing history to patch this loophole), to temporarily disabling TextExpander.
That doesn’t matter. All we’re trying to do is overcome that initial “muscle memory” impulse. If we can make it even a few steps more difficult to seek distraction, it’s far less likely that we’ll wander that direction at all.
Every user experience designer knows that removing friction (obstacles, requirements, steps) from a desired action makes a user much more likely to perform that action. As a corollary, we can be sure that strategically adding friction to an otherwise simple—almost reflexive—undesired action will make us less likely to “slip” into that behavior in the first place.
