Designgineering

I read Jeff Atwood’s blog regularly. He’s a great developer, has some great insights into technology, and he’s an interesting writer. Of everything I’ve seen of his, though, I think this post of his yesterday is the most important he’s ever written.

You may have more discipline than I do. But for me, the mission is everything; I’m downright religious about it. Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.

He’s right. Too many business and engineering types – especially men – think they’ll find lasting satisfaction in their jobs. Too many answers to deathbed questions point the other way, though. No one ever says, “I wish I had worked more and spent less time with my family.”
Farewell Stack Exchange →

Mike Loukides hits most of the right notes (pun intended) over at O’Reilly Radar, even if his ending goes a little wide of the mark:

So the notion that creativity can be owned, and that any use of someone else’s ideas requires compensation, is nothing but an attempt to steal all of creativity. Whoever can pay their lawyers the most wins. Anyone smell pirates in the room? I am not willing to sacrifice this generation’s great artists on the altar of Hollywood. I’m not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven’t paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity.

On pirates and piracy→

Trent Walton is one of my favorite developer/designer types. In a class he taught at a recent conference, he challenged people to make good use of the best CSS3 and modern Javascript tools to reproduce movie poster titling with nothing but web interface tools. You’ll have to see the results to believe them. My favorite? Toy Story. New Adventures 2012→

It is even rarer for me to gush with praise for Democrat politicians than for Republicans (rare enough already). But Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) deserves serious praise for being one of the few voices on Capitol Hill who consistently opposed SOPA and PIPA on principle. This editorial at Wired is yet another example of his being right on target:

While some have derided the events of last week as a departure from the way we do things in Washington, I believe last week is an example of the way Washington can change for the better. If more Americans took the time to be informed and call Congress when something matters to them lobbyist and special interest power would be greatly diminished.

So the question is, did Congress learn anything? Will Washington lament last week like it was a bad review that cost it business or will it recognize what happened as an opportunity to learn and do better?

Sen. Ron Wyden: PIPA/SOPA is a Congressional Wake-up Call→

Clay Shirky is a consistently solid thinker on media and policy. No surprise, then, that his thoughts on PIPA/SOPA (now dead, thankfully) and the approach of the old media conglomerates in general:

Traditional American media firms are implacably opposed to any increase in citizens’ ability to create, copy, save, alter, or share media on our own. They fought against cassette audio tapes, and photocopiers. They swore the VCR would destroy Hollywood. They tried to kill Tivo. They tried to kill MiniDisc. They tried to kill player pianos. They do this whenever a technology increases user freedom over media. Every time. Every single time.

Pick up the pitchforks: David Pogue underestimates Hollywood→

Okay, now this is just fantastic – CSS3, 3D transforms of divs, and a Javascript editor to make it all easier to manage. I love seeing people really push the limits of what browsers can do. Doing it in a way that degrades elegantly? All the more excellent. Making Love to Webkit (@acko.net)→