The beauty of finished software
Kai Krause on how short-lived software is relative to other art forms:
You can hum a tune you once liked, years later. You can read words or look a painting from 300 years ago and still appreciate its truth and beauty today, as if brand new. Software, by that comparison, is more like Soufflé: enjoy it now, today, for tomorrow it has already coll... See more
alex added
To be fair, computers — both the desktop kind and various mobile kinds — enable seemingly-impossible things. But it feels frustrating to see the pioneering spirit that originally led to the development of modern computers giving way to uninspired flat interfaces and CRUD SaaS apps. The things you can do are limited to bespokely-implemented features... See more
Feifan Zhou • Page not found • The Blog of Feifan Zhou
Tanuj added
when you get software right, something magical happens: You don’t need hordes of programmers to keep it working. You don’t need massive requirements documents and huge issue tracking systems.
Robert C. Martin • Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design (Robert C. Martin Series)
And this also brings us to the why now and and why is this hard if this is the fully generalized form of digital documents, why didn't software start this way? I think a big part of it is just that it's hard. We talked about how it's hard to write a text editor, but what if you now need to write a text editor and image editor, a video editor and au... See more
Muse • Infinite canvases with Steve Ruiz // Metamuse podcast episode 59
Tanuj added
Great software products aren’t simply a collection of buttons, icons, and menus. They shape how we think and who we aspire to be.
The problem isn’t that machines are becoming more human-like, it’s that humans are becoming more machine-like in an effort to keep up.
There are no shortcuts to hard-won insight.
No one does this in a snap.
But it’s hard to ... See more
The problem isn’t that machines are becoming more human-like, it’s that humans are becoming more machine-like in an effort to keep up.
There are no shortcuts to hard-won insight.
No one does this in a snap.
But it’s hard to ... See more
Take the humble “document” as an example. For decades, document editing programs like word processors effectively emulated a printed sheet of paper, onto which the user typed with an emulated typewriter. Other software tools like spreadsheets did better, managing to escape complete skeuomorphism in favor of an infinite canvas. Notion is another goo... See more
Linus Lee • How we create | linus.coffee
sari and added