Several years ago, one of my hard disks failed. Being the cautious type, I already had a backup routine in place, and therefore only had to suffer the small inconvenience of restoring from a recent backup rather than losing anything important.
At the time, I was looking up some instructions on the web and ended up reading several stories from people who’d been carefully making backups, thinking they were doing the right thing, only to find out at the worst possible time that their backups were incomplete, or couldn’t be recovered at all.
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Apple already have computers, smart-phones, tablets, and a living room media player on the market. If the media player grows more interactive features, and if a wearable device (a watch, perhaps?) is thrown in to the mix, then it beomes even more important that all these devices interact well with each other. And by “well”, I mean in the Apple of old “It just works” way.
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I’ve been working on a Django application lately, hosted on Red Hat’s PaaS, OpenShift. While getting started, I made notes about some areas that I thought weren’t well documented, or just weren’t obvious to a beginner. Below is an expanded version of those notes. Hopefully they’ll be of use to someone.
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Your manager breaks the news to you - there’s been a change of direction. You and the rest of your team are needed for a great new project. Unfortunately, that means the current product you’ve been pouring so much effort into is going to be shelved. The product will still be available to customers, and existing support plans will continue, but starting next month all development work will be frozen. You have one month left to add new features, fix annoying bugs, or find some other way to add value. After that, you won’t ever be allowed to touch the code again. What are you going to spend that last month working on?
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Google is retiring Google Reader. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of alternative feed readers: Desktop and mobile applications, cloud-based and self hosted browser-based solutions. But when Google Reader shuts down on July 1st, we won’t just be losing a feed reader, we’ll also be losing a synchronisation API.
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On Don’t Make Crap, Chris Truman wrote:
Each micro-interaction increases or decreases the chance of faithful users. Make every interaction great from the button press to the backend reliability and you will have users who love your product. Don’t ever underestimate the benefit of paying attention to the micro-interactions.
Sounds like good advice, but to what stages of software development does it apply?
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