Jeremy Keith About Resilience In Web Applications @ beyond tellerrand 2016

At this year's beyond tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf web developer Jeremy Keith gave a talk on resilience in web applications: Resilience - Jeremy Keith - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. The World Wide Web - or the Internet for that matter - since its inception always was designed as a resilient, fault-tolerant medium. This not just applies in a technical sense but in a social or even political way, too. As John Gilmore is famously quoted: "The Net interprets censorship as ... Read more

TED Talk – Peter Singer: The Why And How of Effective Altruism

In 2013 philosopher Peter Singer held a TED talk on the intriguing idea of effective altruism. The simple premise of this idea is that with altruism both the heart and the head need to be involved in order to truly make a difference and make the world a better place. While empathy and compassion for other people's suffering is a prerequisite for altruism, if altruistic action isn't undertaken in a purposeful, effective manner it does little more than placate your conscience, in other ... Read more

BedquiltDB – A JSON document store for PostgreSQL

BedquiltDB is a recently released PostgreSQL extension (written mostly in PL/pgSQL) that leverages PostgreSQL's relatively new jsonb column type (available since version 9.4) to provide a MongoDB-like NoSQL document store and API on top of a PostgreSQL database. There are a few benefits to this approach. First, this allows you to start a project with a comparatively simple document-oriented API that lends itself to many use cases in terms of modern web applications. While you get this with your usual NoSQL, document-oriented databases ... Read more

Why motion matters in UI design

UI designer Craig Dehner wrote this interesting article about why he thinks motion design is the future. I wouldn't necessarily use such grandiose terms but essentially I agree: Motion design might not be THE future but it'll certainly play a vital role in current and future user interfaces. It took operating systems and browsers some time to be able to display smooth, seemingly natural animation (using CSS3 animations in the latter case). Now that animation is a staple of modern UI frameworks and ... Read more

A design rationale for Tube stations

In December 2015, Transport for London published the London Underground Station Design Idiom - design and user experience guidelines for London Underground stations, if you will. Ranging from their consistent usage of the Johnston typeface, to the iconic roundel and - of course - the equally iconic Tube map, which constitutes a design feat in its own right, TfL always had a strong foundation in design thinking. London Underground stations from very different eras and styles - Victorian, Art Deco, as well as ... Read more