Refresh Austin ringleader, speaker, fire starter, UX manager, community catalyst, Web technologist, barbecue acolyte & information junkie
We can both be connected and be fulfilled. We can stop, disconnect, read a book, make love without checking our devices for updates. And we can also be connected, while still being human. In fact, being human is being connected.
John Battelle in response to Only Disconnect
The idea that there are three simple levers that define a feature or a product is passive-aggressive professional absurdity. There are myriad levers the team can adjust, but to understand them you need to understand the people who are actually building the software.
Michael Lopp a.k.a. Rands from Bits, Features, and Truth
If you haven’t picked up his book Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager yet, you should.
If I had 20 days to solve a problem , I would take 19 days to define it.
Albert Einstein
Solving a problem is easy.
Solving a problem well requires time to understand it.
Solving a problem after defining it leads to a downright sexy solution.
When the business model doesn’t match the user experience or… when nobody seems to understand what the business model is, the designer can’t know if they are helping or hurting the company by creating a better experience for the user.
Jared Spool, Why Understanding Business Models is Important to Ix Designers
My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.
People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
“The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our own history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthty’s methods to keep silent. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.”
Important words no matter the decade.
“If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it’s another nonconformist who doesn’t conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.”
Bill Vaughan
“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”
Robert Heinlein
“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”
Susan Ertz
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.”
Thomas H. Huxley
“In a Democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve.”
Winston Churchill
“To be pleased with one’s limits is a wretched state.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”
Isaac Asimov
“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.”
Thomas A. Edison
“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
H. L. Mencken
“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”
Sir Francis Bacon
“We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.”
Sir Arthur Eddington
“Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”
G. M. Trevelyan
Welcome to my site, I'm Alex Jones, Refresh Austin ringleader, speaker, fire starter, UX manager, community catalyst, Web technologist, barbecue acolyte & information junkie