The perfect unit test external
In this blog post, Jack Franklin explains how to improve unit tests by keeping it all simple and clear.
Thu 14 May 2020
Fri 27 Mar 2020
How To Make Life Easier When Using Git external
You don’t need to know your trees from your dangling blobs, if you use Git every day and feel like it’s a juggling act then here’s some tricks and tips to help make your life a bit easier when using Git.
Thu 30 Jan 2020
Day.js external
"Day.js 2KB immutable date library alternative to Moment.js with the same modern API" This seems like a good step forward, Moment is brilliant it is quite large, this could be a good replacement.
Wed 29 Jan 2020
Useful git commands external
These are some of the git commands that Alejandro Narvaja has found most useful.
Sat 25 Jan 2020
How it feels to make the right decision
At the New Adventures 2020 conference in Nottingham, I went over to simply say “I really liked your talk” to Akil Benjamin. He thanked me, then stopped me as I was about to walk away and invited me to join the conversation. I thought that was kind but then it got interesting... he asked me really specifically what I liked about it. That threw me. I enjoyed the whole thing but he was wanting specifics.
New Adventures 2020 – Tatiana Mac's Our Banal Binary
What a fantastic talk. I can't promise that I understood all of it, but from the way gender is weirdly portrayed on bathroom doors through to trying to prove the existence of God via boolean logic... Tatiana Mac gave a brilliant talk encouraging us to realise that everything is a spectrum and that the world would be a better place if we all understood that.
New Adventures 2020 - Florence Okoye on Designing for a collective futurity: mapping the unseen
I had the incredible opportunity to have Florence Okoye speak at the local meeting I was involved with running, so I was very happy when I saw Florence was on the lineup for New Adventures 2020. Her talk was absolutely brilliant and it complemented the other talks really well by focussing on thinking further than we currently do.
New Adventures 2020 – Laura Kalbag on defying the mainstream: building technology that respects our rights
Laura Kalbag knows her stuff when it comes to the intersection of privacy and design. My notes below don't even scratch the surface of all the knowledge she shared. I knew it was bad. I knew how much targeting happens but I didn't have a clue how far it has got with putting us all into precise buckets. Only 15 data points are needed to remove anonymity from most people and yet the large data brokers often have up to 3000 of them for an individual person. It seems impossible to move away from all of this, but Laura is encouraging us to make better decisions with everything we build and that "small tech" is surely the way to beat "big tech".
New Adventures 2020 – Liz Jackson's Productivity recreates disability
This talk by Liz Jackson really made me question how we all see disability. Even those of us that think they are "on the right side", designing and building with accessibility in mind, can in some ways be as misguided as those who don't give it a seconds thought. "Disability doesn’t get funded we get fixed".
New Adventures 2020 – Natalie Kane's "Unknown Unknowns: Collecting our digital lives"
As if working in a museum wasn't already an exciting idea, Natalie spoke about how her job as a curator is far more about collecting stories than it is about collecting objects. I found it particularly interesting how they have to have everything open to the public so, for example, they cannot have an Amazon Echo running because they don't own the software. The solution to this was to collect a gigantic map of everything involved from mining ore to training the models. This was an insightful talk, not all of us will be collecting items for the V&A but it does encourage us to look past the objects themselves and look for the story within.