Roundup: prototyping, flyering, monitoring maps, cursor fun, ShellCheck, Facebook friends, and ruby performance
Murray Steele
July 14, 2017
Why You Should Be Prototyping - Boris D
http://heydesigner.com/blog/why-you-should-be-prototyping/
Thoughts on prototyping in engineering teams at Netflix. You should always be prototyping and testing solutions as early as possible to get things right. Iterate early and often with your prototypes, and you'll find that a good design materialises much more quickly.
How we tried to increase temporary card registration with flyers - Graeme M
https://digitalblog.coop.co.uk/2017/07/06/how-we-tried-to-increase-temporary-card-registration-with-flyers/
A fascinating (and very insightful) look into how the Co-op Digital Team are running experiments with their customers in test stores.
Watching Google & Apple maps over a year - Tom S
https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps/
A year's worth of investigation of two map services, Google and Apple, and the changes that have been monitored. Google has had several 'refactors' to switch the emphasis of their map from roads to places. Apple on the other hand... well, you can see for yourself.
You can't click this - Tom S
http://javier.xyz/control-user-cursor
A fun little experiment that prevents the cursor from getting near the button.
ShellCheck - Charlie E
https://www.shellcheck.net
A tool for pointing out potential errors in shell scripts. It also makes style suggestions. It's meant to be installed as command line tool but you can also paste in scripts on the project homepage.
The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem - Elena T
http://boffosocko.com/2017/07/11/the-facebook-algorithm-mom-problem
How one person had to overcome his mom liking his posts in order to reach a wider audience.
Is Ruby Too Slow For Web-Scale? - Elena T
https://www.speedshop.co/2017/07/11/is-ruby-too-slow-for-web-scale.html
Nate Berkopec's new book is out ("The Complete Guide to Rails Performance") and he's been rustling up the old discussion of how to choose a framework when you want to start a new app, and whether you should care about performance.
Track of the Week - Andrew W
During the Eighties I was a big fan of Thomas Dolby who later went on to found the company Beatnik Inc. which became a big player in the polyphonic ringtone market by getting its player embedded in millions on Nokia phones. He's recently released a memoir about that whole period of the 90s called "The Speed of Sound" which looks a really interesting read. Rather than the obvious selections of "Hyperactive!" or "She blinded me with science" I decided to go with my personal favourite from his breakthrough album "The Golden Age of Wireless", which is "Europa and the Pirate Twins".