Marques Brownlee published a video commenting on YouTube’s just announced A:B testing feature. In short, for some creators, it will be possible to publish a slightly different version of the video on launch to part of their audience, if that version is deemed “close enough” to the original. Brownlee digs into how...

1. One day, as I was reading an essay on Medium, I saw an automatically inserted subscribe block: But as I was exactly on top of it, a new thing popped in my view, an interruption on top of interruption, both saying the exact same thing: 2. For a while now, whenever I try to follow a link to a site that no longer...

Continuing the theme of software fixes for hardware problems, here’s an essay I wrote in 2016 about a broken computer display that I “fixed” as a teenager, just because I wanted to play Civilization. It remains one of my favourite things I’ve ever written.#hacks #marcin wichary

In my recent visits to German and Polish museums, I noticed a recurring theme: modular industrial dashboards, which I imagine have by now been all replaced by software. I don’t know much about these – please write me if you do – but I wanted to share them anyway, perhaps for context, or amusement, or inspiration....

★★★★☆ A new confession: I struggle with a lot of accessibility writing. I am not necessarily saying this to blame people writing in this space, whose work I respect even if it’s not resonating with me. I think it’s more of a recognition of how difficult it is to talk about accessibility and disability. Advocacy is...

As someone who’s been a keyboard shortcut tzar at a few companies, I developed a certain kinship with the unknown and unnamed others who have the same job elsewhere. It’s a fun but weird challenge, rewarding and unrewarding at the same time, a job of maneuvering a little dinghy between the winds of Motor Memory, the...

1. One of the classic parables about loading goes as follows. A building manager had a problem: people were complaining about the elevator being too slow. But upgrading the elevator was an enormous expense, so the manager came with an alternative solution: they put a mirror next to the elevator call buttons. Even...

I liked this post by Roel Nieskens, about ten lines of code that, one way or another, mean something to me. Either because I wrote them, or I extensively copied them, or they made me laugh. Or cry. It’s perhaps a different take on cursed knowledge, and made me wonder what those would be for me, or for other people...

In response to a previous post, one of the readers wrote this: I would phrase this as the fault of the animation having violated the Hippocratic oath for animations, which is “first, do no harm” a.k.a. “first, don’t interfere with user input”. Yes, one has to be afraid of hyperbole – was there ever an onscreen...

I wrote recently, about macOS, “it’s hard when the operating system cedes its responsibilities to provide good design patterns,” and Mac developer Brent Simmons in a recent essay shares a parallel line of thinking about how unreliable and untenable designing with the basic macOS UI components has become: But there’s...

On his fascinating and long-running Windows dev blog The Old New Thing, Raymond Chen writes about the story of scrollbar right-click menus: Windows 2000 added a right-click menu to the scroll bar. This menu gave you four options that matched existing mouse operations, two operations that matched existing keyboard...

À propos the previous post, wanted to share a 2019 article by Gregory Travis about the two Boeing 737 Max disasters that shook the world in late 2018 and early 2019. It’s titled How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer, and I found it fascinating, well-written, and filled with great details. The...