Variegated Perspectives

Latest entries from Turning Left Against Traffic, Robby's weblog on current trends in technology, commerce and culture:

- The Clueless and the Cowards (08-Jul)
- There Are No Minor Mistakes (28-Jun)
- The Public Radio Paradox (16-Apr)

Go to the complete blog archive.

Full-length essays in five areas of expertise.

Usability

The hardest problem in technology is not making something work, it is making something in a way people can work out how to use it.

Dialog Box Archaeology Deducing the culture and conversations of software development through the analysis of artifacts

Software Development

Writing software is precisely unlike anything else --- everyone knows how it should be done but no one can manage to do that.

Who Cares How This Website Was Built? Does the underlying technology really affect the user? Not as long as it works.

Process and Methodology

Process is not about what you are doing. Process is understanding how you are doing what you are doing.

	The Four-Sided Civil War The software development community is battling itself, but most programmers don't even know it.
	Innovation and the Crane Shot Brilliance comes from extraordinary use of the ordinary, in Hollywood and elsewhere.

Technical Communication

Too much has been written, not much has been said.

Clarity, Brevity, & Politics Writing well means saying it clearly, succintly, and to the audience. This is hard.

Data Architecture

The structure of information is as important as the information itself.

No additional essays in this category