Welcome to my weblog about sustainability, art and culture.
Imprint: Responsible for the content:
Ingo Steinke, Neunzigstraße 6a, 40625 Düsseldorf. I maintain this blog for the main purpose of running a WordPress installation, publishing occasional posts with notes, reports and opinions. The English translation of older posts will be completed step by step, using the plugin Polylang.
Seriously: why are so many large and successful websites so user-unfriendly? Is it only me, or is it bad UX design? Am I just getting old?
A gallery of websites, an elaboration on what makes them hard to use, and an analysis how we got there.
A pile of unread books is great, if it contains entertaining fiction. But a pile of unread textbooks about web development, even on a lightweight ebook reader, will become a challenge when technological change and design trends overtakes outpaces our reading speed.
Most of the information can be consumed more easily by the way in blogs and podcasts, and much can be learned during a project or a meetup. But it doesn’t hurt to take your time, if possible, to process backgrounds, history, and fundamental knowledge helping you better understand and evaluate the latest trends in technology.
Some of the intuitive gut feeling that might come quickly after working for many years, are hard to justify at first, but knowing your history can help, like: what is robustness and resilience, why are HTML and CSS more fault tolerating than JavaScript, and why is Postel’s Law still important today?
Looking outside of the box can prevent to implement requirements without questioning them, thus producing another website that only works in the typical customer’s “happy path” on a quick computer. Design for Real Life is one of those books, that will still be up to date many years after they were written.
In this post I want to keep hold of some books, blogs and podcasts that I found valuable recently. Some authors provide their content for free, they will be happy about donations or regular funding on Patreon, Steady etc.
Finally some time to read! Professional development often comes short in day-to-day work.