design

What Clients Don't Know (and Why It's Your Fault)

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“Whether you work with outside clients or whether you’re part of an internal team your job is always, always going to include having to convince someone of something. Because your job isn’t just making things. Believe it or not, that’s the easy part. You’re going to spend 90% of your time convincing people that shit you thought up in the shower this morning is right. Your job is to figure out whether something should be made, how it’s made, and always, always, always work to convince someone that you’ve made the right choices.” That’s a quote from Mike Monteiro’s presentation at the Event Apart Austin 2013 conference, a presentation that seems suited to system administrators, IT consultants, and IT professionals …

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Bleeding Seven Colors

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My first meaningful computing experience was on an Apple IIe in grade school. From the moment I first used the machine I was hooked. I’d find ways to stay in from recess, and stay after school, to play the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium’s “Oregon Trail” or “Number Munchers.” I even had a subscription to ENTER Magazine, for as long as it ran. Friends and I, on their IIgs’ and IIcs, would dutifully type in the BASIC programs that they printed, just to see a moire pattern or explore a very limited dungeon. And oh. my. god. Print Shop. I would have borne Brøderbund’s children, if I’d only known where babies came from. The summer before my seventh grade year my …

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