What's Up Wednesday #27 - Natural Head Stabilization, User Interface, Measuring the Progress of Work
What’s Up Wednesday #27 - Natural Head Stabilization, User Interface, Measuring the Progress of Work
Hey all!
Here is what I found this week:
🦅 Natural selection builds mechanisms that human engineers still struggle to match. Check out how stabilized the head of a hawk is. Head stabilization has the same function as image stabilization in cameras: to maintain a steady view despite motion.
🖼 Someone wondered if it’s possible to use some kind of stochastic algorithm that gives you an initial state which forms legible text after many cycles in the game of life. The results are really interesting! Check out the article finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life
👻 If you are creating new products you think about how to design your user interface. With now many years of the internet, there have been advances in the average usability of websites. Still, the article fuckin’ user interface design, I swear makes some valid points and shows how big companies like Google still fail to place their buttons at the proper locations… People on Hackernews discussed why this happens.
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„As organizational complexity increases, design debt and responsibility become diffused among larger and larger groups of people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual has power or responsibility for anything specifically.“
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„There are designers who love to create beautiful designs, and we love that, but beauty is the end of it for them. They don’t care about the problem that the program (website, app, whatever) is supposed to solve.“
💼 Measuring the progress of work is hard. Still, some managers just like to create arbitrary metrics, that just confuse top performers and create completely off results. Peter Drucker explained this with the sentence „What’s measured gets managed“. So if you want to measure the effectiveness of a programmer lines of code is not a good way to do it.
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. - Bill Gates