Links, July 26, 2024

Paper: Designing for Expertise

For perhaps the fourth or fifth time since I’ve gone independent, I’ve been asked to make a product design decision that requires the domain expertise of the people I’m designing for… probably because I’m the person with the most intersectional knowledge around the topic.

Instead, I use this as an opportunity to facilitate a discussion between the stakeholders & practitioners to help better define what the options are in solving the problem, and the consequences of each.

I mentioned this in a tech worker chat I’m in and Fred Hebert shared his review of this paper, which is compelling me to do something I rarely do: read a paper.

That requirement for innovation is one of the tricky ones when trying to design for experts: the time spent by the designer in the domain can never match that of the domain expert. The observations can’t easily be linked to practice, so there is a need for a very iterative process of trial and evaluation to anchor the design.

I’ve often described the need for iterative development in more general terms: We’re creating something novel, the best we can do is create a theory of what’s going to work and test it, but I think this framing will help me better communicate the need.

Your Smartest Dumb Tech

I’m catching up on CJ Chilvers’s newsletter, and this episode from last year has a great argument in favor of re-embracing an old friend:

For now, being everywhere at once with the most control, and the least amount of time and effort, means embracing an old technology: RSS.

He’s also got some novel ideas for uses of Feedbin which has been my feed service of choice since Google Reader bit the dust.

On Open Source and the Sustainability of the Commons

I doubt I will ever release anything under MIT ever again. There’s a lot of good points about the software commons at large.

We need to remember that most (if not all) free software is provided, “without liability”. That rule should be enforced. We should not care about corporations.

It also touches on why I’m moving off Github for my personal work:

We should also actively fight against automatic installation of recursive dependencies. No, it is not normal and no sanely engineered system should do this. We should not trust the Microsoft-owned Github to distribute software. A git repository is a development tool, not a distribution mechanism for end users.

CrowdStricken

My thoughts about the CrowdStrike outage are manifold but ultimately end with This is a failure of administration, and while I’ve seen many great takes, this one from Skylar MacDonald (who has proven a good steward of bork after I burned out on it) touches on something I hadn’t seen discussed elsewhere:

is it not a key business function to come up with a disaster recovery plan? I mean, hell, if you’re operating a health service — is having a business continuity plan not a moral imperative?

Practical SVG

Since A Book Apart closed shop, Chris Coyler put his book online, for free. It’s a good place to start if you’d like to pick up the technology. His argument for learning SVG:

The cool thing about SVG is that very little has changed with it. It’s an awfully slow moving technology.

I will make a further argument: Knowing how to use SVG directly opens a lot of possibilities for you if you are a person who draws with pixels on a screen. Especialy if you are doing data visualization work, you owe it to yourself to understand the basics — otherwise you’re like a web developer who doesn’t understand HTML.

If you’re already working with an HTML generator and need to make a simple chart or something, it’s probably easier to just generate the SVG yourself than it is to pull in some charting library to render a few <rect />s for you.

Poisoning the AI well

The lack of separation between the data and control planes in LLM-based software is proving ever-so-fruitful. I’ve added a similar poisining instruction to the bottom of my template.

Benny - A modular software playground for making live music

Over 20 years ago, I took my own stab at making a modular environment in Max/MSP. I’ve seen a lot of people pursue similar ideas since, and this is the most compelling one yet.