You do not have to follow these rules every time. If you have a good reason to break any of them, do. But they are safe to follow every time.
Designing for Colour-Blindness
As always, I’ve been tinkering with the site over the last few weeks. One of the adjustments I made was to remove the underlines from links, which I felt mad...
This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby
The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech.”
The virtuous circle
The virtuous circle is the most powerful pattern in developer tooling. And it's the myth of the 10x developer that makes it hard to see.
Making the Case for Actionable Prosocial Design Research
Regulating harmful design is only half the equation — attention must also go toward how platforms can build prosocial design, and toward the research that shows them how.
Laws of Software Engineering
A collection of principles and patterns that shape software systems, teams, and decisions.
Anti-patterns: things to avoid - Agentic Engineering Patterns
Anti-patterns: things to avoid - Agentic Engineering Patterns
How To Write With An LLM
Two rules keep an LLM from pasteurizing your writing: never take a word it suggests, and never let it encourage you. Then hand it all the tedious work.
Our CSS isn't opinionated enough - Craig Abbott
Why styling on semantics and roles could make accessibility harder to skip
Our CSS isn't opinionated enough - Craig Abbott
Why styling on semantics and roles could make accessibility harder to skip
A Grammar of Institutions
The institutional grammar introduced here is based on a view that institutions are enduring regularities of human action in situations structured by rules, norms, and shared strategies, as well as by the physical world. The rules, norms, and shared strategies are constituted and reconstituted by human interaction in frequently occurring or repetitive situations. The syntax of the grammar identifies components of institutions and sorts them into three types of institutional statements: rules, norms, and shared strategies. We introduce the grammar, outline methods for operationalizing the syntax, apply the syntax to an analysis of cooperation in collective dilemma situations, and discuss the pragmatics of the grammar for analyses of behavior within complex institutional settings.
Conway's Law | Laws of Software Engineering
Organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure.
Microsoft says Copilot is for entertainment purposes only, not serious use — firm pushing AI hard to consumers and businesses tells users not to rely on it for important advice
These might be boilerplate disclaimers, but they kind of contradict the company's ads and marketing.
Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Used To Instantly Dox Strangers In Public, Thanks To AI And Facial Recognition
Harvard students hack together a system to gather intel on strangers to build their trust, then share steps for the public to protect themselves from such technology.
