Misc Posts

Stop treating the development community like it’s a fucking boys club.

It’s okay to have a little fun from time to time.

Found on the UXMad call for proposal form.

Jack brightened up our busy Friday afternoon with this gem.

You can check out Unlikely Friendships on amazon.

While creating a new google group I was directed to the newly formed group page. I was pleasantly greeted by a warning and disclaimer that a feature that I have yet to use will be deprecated in a few months.

I wonder if it would have taken them much more time to add some logic to only display this if a) the group has used this functionality and b) it’s not a brand new group.

Additionally, if I click on the “Download Pages” link… my browser happily downloads a zip file, which contains an empty index.txt file.

…it’s unfortunate that they’re deprecating this useful functionality.

While wrapping up an iteration for a client, the team was caught testing out one of the new video chat features.

Back in March I signed up for an account on Venmo because people said it was going to be a game changer. I thought I’d give it a go and planned to take a second look when time permitted. I haven’t found the time, but since signing up my only other experience with them has been a weekly email to remind me that:

• I have received no money
• I have sent no money
• I have no friends
• I am not active
• I need to make these emails stop showing up… but who has the time?

I don’t mind that status emails like this get sent out, but in this scenario.. it’s just not valuable. Is it necessary to communicate that nothing has happened?¹ To be fair, Venmo is in beta and is working out the kinks. They are far from the only service that does this, they just happen to be the one that triggered this post (which I will be pointing them to). :-)

There’s a ton of information being sent to people’s inboxes every day. When we decide to communicate with our users, we should be mindful of the value of the information as well as how and when we ask for their attention. Is the email useful? Is it actionable? Or is it just undesired noise?

¹ Context is fundamental here. If you’re a sales manager and your sales team has had zero sales… this might be valuable information.

Our healthcare provider’s employer web interface for making online payments is using the latest in web technology…

My favorite is that the, “Macintosh Platform can not support the site” versus… they haven’t taken the time to support the Macintosh platform.