Monday Links - Week 242

Ruby Rogues Book Club: Understanding Computation with Tom Stuart

I haven’t had a chance to listen to this yet, but it’s sure to be excellent. Also if you’re near London, why not attend the next meeting of the Understanding Computation Book Club hosted at GFRHQ. — JM

Assume Good Faith

Unless there is clear evidence to the contrary, assume that people who work on the project are trying to help it, not hurt it.

Whenever I feel someone is doing something I don’t agree with, I try to bear this idea in mind. I find it very helpful. — JM

The Neglected Practice of Iteration

This is an old article, but it’s my favourite explanation of the important difference between “iteratively” and “incrementally”. Even if you haven’t got time to read the whole article, please look at the two figures – they’re worth more than a thousand words. — JM

A List Apart: Getting Real About Agile Design

How best to integrate visual design into the agile process is a subject close to our hearts. I found this (somewhat old) article written from a designer’s perspective particularly illuminating.

Agile is deliberately light on documentation. Great – more time to spend on thinking and designing. Given this bias, static page comps and wireframes are a dead end. They’re simply too rigid for Agile, particularly now that the page is no longer the atomic unit of the web.

I’ve often read about sketching, paper-prototyping & HTML-prototyping as good ways for designers to integrate with an agile workflow, but it still seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

Designers must let go of perfection to produce rapid, iterative work: “90% right” solutions are par for the course for Agile. This can be counterintuitive, but for better or worse, Agile prioritizes the timeline over virtuosity.

This is another area of potential conflict on an agile project. Personally I think it’s all about reaching a sensible compromise – it’s no good releasing a product that is unuseable or even visually unappealing, but equally it’s better to release something than spend forever trying to make it look “perfect”. — JM

Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet

It’s good to see the Indie Web movement getting some coverage in Wired magazine. It’s also worth mentioning that IndieWebCampUK is this coming weekend (7th and 8th September), although I don’t think I’m going to make it unfortunately. — CR

Feed reader developers – here’s an easy way to differentiate your service and have your users love you even more

You all read and write OPML subscription lists, right?

Let’s go one step further, and let users subscribe to OPML subscription lists.

I’ve never quite understood why feed readers (well, the ones I’ve used at least) haven’t done this to date. It seems like such an obvious feature to me. Maybe I should have a go at adding it to Stringer. — CR