The difference between code written by men and code written by women, according the senior VP for engineering at Ingres: “Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later. They’ll intersperse their code – those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs – with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it. Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code. They try to obfuscate things in the code and don’t leave clear directions for people using it later.”
Why shouldn’t listen to “hasn’t someone done that already?”: Because doing something that someone else has done, just better, can work. Ray Grieselhuber lists 19 success stories that did just that.
UX Rule #1 – All HTML Form Control Elements Require Labels, and this rule is illustrated by showing the differences between Facebook’s and GMail’s login forms.
“New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe suggests that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home.” I think we sort of knew this already, but it’s nice to get confirmation with experimental data.
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LinkedIn’s Architecture
Cookies are for Closers (great blog name!) has a post about LinkedIn’s architecture, featuring links to slide decks for two JavaOne 2008 presentations by people from LinkedIn and an overview of LinkedIn’s architecture covering its iterations over time.
Eli Bendersky decided to give Python a try about three weeks ago. He summarizes his experiences and impressions in his post, Python Impressions, and summarizes with “All considered, I really like Python. The cons are mainly nits that are easy to overcome, while the pros are significant.”
Why We Skip Photoshop is a 37signals piece that lists 7 reasons why they go straight from a paper sketch to HTML/CSS and skip the step of making a static Photoshop mockup when building web apps. Why We Don’t Skip Photoshop is a response to that article, listing 3 reasons why Blue Flavor doesn’t skip the Photoshop step. Both are worth reading, especially if you’re looking at your own web app design process.