My favorite links
Some things that make the web great (a work in progress).
- How do committees invent?: The basic thesis of this article is that organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
- How complex systems fail: Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety
- Big ball of mud: This paper examines this most frequently deployed of software architectures: the BIG BALL OF MUD. A BIG BALL OF MUD is a casually, even haphazardly, structured system. Its organization, if one can call it that, is dictated more by expediency than design. Yet, its enduring popularity cannot merely be indicative of a general disregard for architecture.
- Software Architecture Guide: Like many in the software world, I’ve long been wary of the term “architecture” as it often suggests a separation from programming and an unhealthy dose of pomposity. But I resolve my concern by emphasizing that good architecture is something that supports its own evolution, and is deeply intertwined with programming.
- Public Domain Review: Dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions.
- Net Art Anthology: Net Art Anthology aims to address the shortage of historical perspectives on a field in which even the most prominent artworks are often inaccessible.
- UbuWeb: Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. By the letter of the law, the site is questionable; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission.
- A Few Observations on the Marvelous Resilience of Bone & Resilience Engineering: The possibility of deliberately exploiting or enhancing resilience is tantalizing. But what exactly is resilience engineering? There are at least two possible forms: first, engineering that exploits what we know about resilient systems and, second, engineering that shapes resilience itself. Bone is useful example of resilience and both types of resilience engineering.
- On the Spectrum of Abstraction: This talk goes over the tools we've come to recognize, from Angular, Ember and Grunt, all the way go Gulp, Webpack, React and beyond, and captures all these in a unifying mental framework for reasoning in terms of abstraction levels, in an attempt to make sense of what is and might be happening.
- Promoting Civil Discourse with Software: Jeff Atwood compares the design of Stack Overflow to his new project, Discourse, and discusses how designing to promote useful answers is different from designing to promote civil discourse and empathy.