Pinboard (earth2marsh)
https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/public/
recent bookmarks from earth2marshShow your hands honor for the strange power they bring you – Aresluna2026-06-22T06:23:10+00:00
https://aresluna.org/show-your-hands-honor/
earth2marshcomputer history typing keyboards interface designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:2da5501b5cee/Hope vs. Leverage2026-04-05T19:42:21+00:00
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hope-vs-leverage-travis-isaacs-j0ugc
earth2marshCreating leverage
I'm rebooting how my org operates around a simple idea: every investment of design effort should connect to how we actually grow: attracting new customers, expanding usage, or retaining core customers. That's it. The default answer for everything else is "not now."
Backing this operating model are three important behaviors:
Stop starting without evidence. Every bet should improve a defined adoption signal or remove a measured retention blocker.
Concentrate on fewer, bigger bets. I'm asking that we align with the business on two or three big cross-functional bets and disproportionately invest in those—not design's big bets, the business's big bets.
Think platform-first. We can't create leverage if we're designing the same capability three or four times across different products.
New grammar
Behaviors set direction, but the real leverage is in daily decisions—and for that my team needs shared language. Not a checklist, but a grammar. Five principles, each framed as a question to ask your work:
Performance — Does this enable speed and accuracy without causing burnout?
Understanding — Does this reduce friction in how people collaborate?
Discovery — Does this help someone adopt adjacent capabilities?
Zero Waste — Is this worth the compute it consumes?
Love — Does this make someone feel something?]]>design productmanagementhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:612bd26e4edc/From HTTP to Consciousness: The Evolution of "For Humans" - Kenneth Reitz2026-03-27T15:04:23+00:00
https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2025-08-27-from_http_to_consciousness
earth2marshI was trying to solve a simple problem: urllib2 was technically correct but humanly wrong. It forced developers to think like protocols instead of thinking like humans.
# The "correct" way in 2011
import urllib2
req = urllib2.Request('http://example.com')
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
data = response.read()
# The human way
import requests
response = requests.get('http://example.com')
data = response.text
Copy
The difference isn't just syntactic sugar. It's a philosophical commitment: design from human mental models outward, not from technical constraints inward.]]>human design affordanceshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:f70aa03d16a4/Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people2026-03-24T05:17:33+00:00
https://ashley.rolfmore.com/stop-trying-to-engineer-your-way-out-of-listening-to-people/
earth2marshif you're wondering why this happens, it's normally because:
people aren't talking to people
people aren't listening
So lots of designers and product people have leapt onto 1, basically trying to turn talking to people into terms engineering people find more cuddly. Like "framework". Or "system". Or even that term that's in vogue, socio-technical system.
Stop. The problem isn't that you need a better system. The problem is you're avoiding doing the work.]]>design listening people relationships bias talking productmanagementhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:8486edb8da05/Service Design and Social Complexity2026-03-24T05:15:00+00:00
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/service-design-social-complexity-cameron-tonkinwise-h8tzc
earth2marshThe challenge of Service Design is to try to ameliorate these complexities. To do so requires deciding:
> what in the service interaction to design, to give more or less permanent form to, to regularise
> what to make space for in the service so that it can be (re)negotiated in a situated (particular each time) way As indicated before, the second depends on the first; some aspects of the service are regulated or even automated so that other aspects of the service can be bespoke.]]>design serviceshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:7476add4d752/The curse of the cursor – Unsung2026-03-21T18:45:51+00:00
https://unsung.aresluna.org/the-curse-of-the-cursor/
earth2marshI had no idea it was Alan Kay himself who was responsible for the mouse pointer’s distinctive shape. In 2020, James Hill-Khurana emailed him and got this answer:
The Parc mouse cursor appearance was done (actually by me) because in a 16x16 grid of one-bit pixels (what the Alto at Parc used for a cursor) this gives you a nice arrowhead if you have one side of the arrow vertical and the other angled (along with other things there, I designed and made many of the initial bitmap fonts).
Then it stuck, as so many things in computing do.]]>computer history mouse cursor designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:a763aa73216f/Unsung heroes: Flickr’s URLs scheme – Unsung2026-03-17T21:28:48+00:00
https://unsung.aresluna.org/unsung-heroes-flickrs-urls-scheme/?ref=netapinotes.com
earth2marshThis was incredible and a breath of fresh air. No redundant www. in front or awkward .php at the end. No parameters with their unpleasant ?&= syntax. No % signs partying with hex codes. When you shared these URLs with others, you didn’t have to retouch or delete anything. When Chrome’s address bar started autocompleting them, you knew exactly where you were going.
This might seem silly. The user interface of URLs? Who types in or edits URLs by hand? But keyboards are still the most efficient entry device. If a place you’re going is where you’ve already been, typing a few letters might get you there much faster than waiting for pages to load, clicking, and so on. It might get you there even faster than sifting through bookmarks.]]>urls design interface apis usability Flickrhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:6baf24abc9de/Interface Craft: a working library for those committed to designing with uncommon care.2026-03-15T20:01:02+00:00
https://www.interfacecraft.dev/
earth2marshLibrary
Whether you are a designer, engineer, or founder you will find value here. My intent is to create a space that can serve as a container for me to share what I continue to create and learn.
At launch, there will be five collections. They will contain articles, videos, interactive playgrounds, examples, and a curated set of references for further study. More collections will come.]]>interfaces gui design library patternshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:6bd7fcff050e/Chess can be made fairer by rearranging the pieces | New Scientist2026-01-04T23:10:13+00:00
https://archive.ph/2026.01.03-083430/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509800-chess-can-be-made-fairer-by-rearranging-the-pieces/
earth2marshChess960 involves shuffling the pieces at the back of the board, and an analysis suggests doing so can increase the complexity of the game to favour white, black or neither player]]>chess games design modifications alternativeshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:5e3b3f51d061/Ethical regulator theorem - Wikipedia2025-11-05T21:42:43+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_regulator_theorem
earth2marshThe ethical regulator theorem claims that the following nine requisites are necessary and sufficient for a cybernetic regulator to be both effective and ethical:[3]
Purpose expressed as unambiguously prioritized goals.
Truth about the past and present.
Variety of possible actions.
Predictability of the future effects of actions.
Intelligence to choose the best actions.
Influence on the regulated system.
Ethics expressed as unambiguously prioritized rules.
Integrity of all subsystems.
Transparency of ethical behavior.
Of these requisites, only the first six are necessary for a regulator to be effective. The three requisites of ethics, integrity, and transparency are optional if a system only needs to be effective. This gives rise to the Law of Inevitable Ethical Inadequacy, which states "If you do not specify that you require a secure ethical system, what you get is an insecure unethical system."]]>automation regulation governance theory systems design incentives importanthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:dc9fba39484e/Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes: ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction: Vol 7, No 12025-11-05T16:17:58+00:00
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/344949.345004
earth2marshWe call such systems “socially translucent systems” and suggest that they have three characteristics—visibility, awareness, and accountability—which enable people to draw upon their experience and expertise to structure their interactions with one another.]]>cognition design social systems transparency psychologyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:a45da92ee42b/Adactio: Journal—Style your underlines2025-08-14T01:15:24+00:00
https://adactio.com/journal/22084
earth2marshThat’s quite a difference with just a few CSS declarations:
text-underline-offset: 0.2em;
text-decoration-thickness: 1px;
text-decoration-color: oklch(from currentColor l c h / 50%);]]>webdev webdesign design links html css styleshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:88772f73f3cc/Appendix - System prompt snippet | Kong Inc.2025-08-02T01:55:02+00:00
https://konghq.com/blog/engineering/appendix-system-prompt-snippet
earth2marshCore Instructions
You are an expert API designer specializing in creating OpenAPI 3.1 specifications. Your task is to generate complete, valid, and well-structured OpenAPI 3.1 documents that follow industry best practices.]]>prompts apis openapi kong designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:031d12548a9a/Endless possibilities (a socio-technical API pattern) — Sebastian's blog2025-07-20T06:33:32+00:00
https://sebastian-hans.de/blog/endless-possibilities/
earth2marshThe evolution from a clean, well-designed API to an API of Endless Possibilities is a slow one. There is no clear inflection point, no moment in time you could point to and say, “This is where it went wrong.” Because of this, this pattern is difficult to avoid, but you can watch for warning signs such as:
The API has multiple options that interact in non-obvious ways.
The API has options that are incompatible for non-obvious reasons.
Options that make sense together from a business perspective are only partially implemented (some combinations are missing).
The API has multiple functions (methods, endpoints, …) that need to be invoked in a certain order – and the order depends on some option(s).
When adding a new option, it is difficult to decide how it should interact with existing options.
Certain aspects of the behaviour depend on both options sent by the consumer and configuration on the provider side.
The team cannot answer a question about API behaviour without research.
The team cannot answer a question about API behaviour without knowing which customer the question is about.]]>APIs patterns designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:3af825d4faa1/Go is 80/20 language2025-06-30T23:04:08+00:00
https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/d-2025-06-26/go-is-8020-language.html
earth2marshIf 80⁄20 is good, wouldn’t 70⁄15 be even better? No, it wouldn’t. Go has shown that you can have a popular language without enums. I don’t think you could have a popular language without structs. There’s a line below which the language is just not useful enough.
Finally, what does “work” mean?
There’s work by the users of the language. Every additional feature of the language requires the programmer to learn about it. It’s more work than it seems. If you make functions as first class concepts, the work is not just learning the syntax and functionality. You need to learn new patterns of coding, like functions that return functions. You need to learn about currying, passing functions as arguments. You need to learn not only how but also when: when you should use that powerful functionality and when you shouldn’t.
You can’t skip that complexity. Even if you decide to not learn how to use functions as first class concepts, your co-worker might and you have to be able to understand his code. Or a useful library uses it or a tutorial talks about it]]>language programming complexity designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:2ff7689a0c7f/Pete Koomen2025-05-20T04:29:25+00:00
https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages/
earth2marshThis could not be further from the truth: Gemini is an astonishingly powerful model that is more than capable of writing good emails. Unfortunately, the Gmail team designed an app that prevents it from doing so.]]>prompts ai llms design gmailhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:b5225624adb2/Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? - by Rory Sutherland - Behavioral Scientist2025-05-17T23:11:11+00:00
https://behavioralscientist.org/are-we-too-impatient-to-be-intelligent/
earth2marshThere are brilliant examples all over the place of people tweaking time subjectively. One of my favorites is the Uber map. It doesn’t change how long you wait for the taxi. It changes the quality of the waiting time by reducing uncertainty. If you look at human emotions, although humans might say, “I don’t like waiting for a taxi,” what makes them uneasy is the uncertainty of the arrival. It’s not actually the duration. Too often, we optimize for the numerical thing, time and speed. We’re not optimizing for the emotional state, which is disquiet or anxiety.
With advertising, you can rebrand time: “Good things come to those who wait.”
Most of you, if you were students, wrote essays or something like that as undergraduates, right? Fairly confident to say that nobody’s actually kept them? Nobody re-reads them. In fact, the essays you wrote are totally worthless.
But the value wasn’t in the essay. What’s valuable is the effort you had to put in to produce the essay. Now, what AI essays do is they shortcut from the request to the delivery of the finished good and bypass the very part of the journey which is actually valuable—the time and effort you invest in constructing the essay in the first place.
This basically explains the whole world since about 1920. Manufactured goods, where you can enjoy extraordinary efficiencies of production—you can compress the time and effort required to make something—have massively reduced in cost. Services, which are time-dependent, have become more and more expensive. If you think there’s a hell of a lot weird with the world that was completely different when you were a kid, this is why. Like the fact that a television is almost an impulse buy, but you agonize about getting childcare. In 1920, it was the other way around. Agatha Christie had three servants in her early life but couldn’t dream of being able to afford a car.
]]>economics value time design progress services costshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:f56b1b0d4059/Table of contents — Good Services2025-05-07T23:04:23+00:00
https://good.services/new-page
earth2marsh1. Good services are easy to find
In order for a user to use your service they first need to find it. This chapter covers how to make sure your users can find your service without any previous knowledge of it.
2. Good services explain their purpose
Once your user has found your service, they need to know what it’s for and whether it’s the thing they’re looking for. This chapter explains how to make sure that the purpose of the service is clear to users at the start of using it.
3. Good services set expectations
To help users plan and take control of their lives, they need to know what to expect from your service. This chapter describes how to make sure your service clearly explains what is needed from the user to complete it, and what they can expect your service.
4. Good services enable users to complete the outcome they set out to do
Possibly the most fundamental principle of all - for your service to work it has to enable them to achieve the goal they set out to achieve. This chapter explains how to make sure that a user can achieve the thing they set out to do - from the moment they consider doing something to the moment they have achieved their goal, including any steps needed to support the user after they have reached their goal.
5. Good services work in a way that is familiar
People base their understanding of the world on previous experiences. Services are no different. It’s important to understand established customs for your service, and when to conform or not conform to those customs so that your users can understand and navigate your service. This chapter shows you how to identify the types of experiences users bring to services, how they affect their experience of your service and what to do about them.
6. Good services require no prior knowledge to use
All too often we expect users to know how something works because we assume they’ve done it before. Good services are usable by everyone - including people who’ve never used them before. This chapter shows you how to make sure your service is usable by new and experienced users alike.
7. Good services are agnostic of organisational structures
Users shouldn’t need to understand how your organisation works in order to use your service, but this can sometimes be extremely difficult to achieve. This chapter explains how to minimise the effect of your organisation’s structure on your service.
8. Good services require the minimum possible steps to complete
Whether booking an expensive holiday or getting a passport - users want to get to their goal as efficiently as possible. This chapter explains how to make sure your service has the right amount of steps to help users get to that goal.
9. Good services are consistent throughout
Good services are consistent, but they’re not uniform. They should look and feel like one service throughout, but they should respond to an individual user’s needs and situation. This chapter shows how to balance the needs of users in order to be both consistent and responsive.
10. Good services have no dead ends
A service should direct all users to a clear outcome, regardless of whether the user is eligible or suitable to use the service. No user should be left behind or stranded within a service without knowing how to continue. This chapter explains how users get stuck in services, and how to avoid this happening.
11. Good services should usable by everyone, equally
All services must be usable by everyone who needs to use them, regardless of their circumstances or abilities. No one should be less able to use the service than anyone else. This chapter shows some of the major barriers to inclusion within services and how to avoid them.
12. Good services encourage the right behaviours from users and service providers
How you incentive, or disincentivise your users, staff and broader organisation can have a huge effect on how your service works.This chapter helps you to understand all of the things that can affect the behaviour of your users and staff, and how to make sure your service is encouraging the right behaviours.
13. Good services respond to change quickly
Good services respond quickly and adaptively to a change in a user’s circumstance and make this change consistently throughout the service. This chapter will help you to understand, plan for and handle changes in a users circumstance in the right way.
14. Good Services clearly explain why a decision has been made
When a decision is made within a service, it should be obvious to a user why this decision has been made and clearly communicated at the point at which it’s made. This chapter explains the common pitfalls in making and communicating decisions and how to avoid them.
15. Good services make it easy to get human assistance
Services should always provide an easy route for users to speak to a human if they need to. This chapter explains how to make sure your service uses human decisionmaking and contact in the right way for both your users, and the sustainability of your service]]>services design principles books apishttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:8ba0191117ce/How a UX Team Discovered an Underserved Audience and Made Millions for Their Organization — UX Articles by Center Centre2025-04-21T05:32:33+00:00
https://articles.centercentre.com/how-a-ux-team-discovered-an-underserved-audience-and-made-millions-for-their-organization/
earth2marshThe idea: Build a ‘Pause’ capability
If the UX team could reduce the hassle of the current cancelling and reinstating process, they could see these restricted budget subscribers treating themselves to one or two more months each year. Reducing the hassle could result in tens of millions in additional revenue.
One of the senior executives encouraged the UX team to explore how they could change the service to reduce this hassle. This project was the first time the UX team undertook a design improvement that wasn’t already in the Product team’s roadmap. ]]>design ux research streaming pausehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:e563308cd14f/Web Platform Design Principles2025-03-29T18:25:22+00:00
https://www.w3.org/TR/design-principles/
earth2marshUser needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.
Like all principles, this isn’t absolute. Ease of authoring affects how content reaches users. User agents have to prioritize finite engineering resources, which affects how features reach authors. Specification writers also have finite resources, and theoretical concerns reflect underlying needs of all of these groups.]]>apis design users needs w3c software development principles webhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:955c019d6c02/If you don’t know where to start research, start with PACT | by Pavel Samsonov | Bootcamp | Medium2025-03-17T02:29:50+00:00
https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/if-you-dont-know-where-to-start-research-start-with-pact-1ae4b6802134
earth2marshIn my design career, new roles have always started with the same challenge: getting accustomed to a new domain. I had to build up a mental model of an entirely new context to make sense of the problems that the company wanted me to solve. Usually I would end up reframing those problems, once my research revealed assumptions and gaps in understanding, but to figure out the right questions to ask, I first had to take a lay of the land.
Fortunately, most companies already have some people who understand the context. Various subject matter experts — typically found in Product, Support, or Sales — are happy to answer any questions. Unfortunately, unless the company they work for has a mature design research practice (and in my experience, few do) the knowledge of these experts is not cataloged in any effective way, and no one person or source has a complete mental model of the problem.
This means that the job is actually twofold: gathering the necessary information, and then documenting it in an effective way so that the rest of the product team can be aligned on one shared mental model. I have found the PACT Analysis method to be invaluable for both of these tasks.]]>design research mental models productmanagement questionshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:881abbf0415e/Thinking in Triplicate — Mule Design2025-02-03T06:40:04+00:00
https://www.muledesign.com/blog/triple-storyline-for-ethical-design
earth2marshThe propensity to fold all interactive digital design under the heading of UXD rests on three convenient lies. Call them myths if it feels better.
Myth #1: A good experience is good for the user.
As design ethicist Tristan Harris has pointed out, if you control the menu, you control the choices. Pleasant to use doesn’t equal healthful any more than pleasant to eat does. And while Turbo-Tax may be said to be delightful, Intuit, its creator (and a past client) lobbies against free government-prepared returns, which would arguably be far better.]]>design uxhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:df49bc1952ff/Raw Materials | An Unusual Design Company2025-01-09T01:22:10+00:00
https://www.therawmaterials.com/
earth2marshdesign company inspirationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:9ef13759e473/John Schrag - trainer, coach & facilitator - Whose Opinion Matters?2025-01-03T17:22:49+00:00
https://sites.google.com/schrag.ca/consulting/home/whose-opinion-matters
earth2marsh
Teams that don’t value design and content opinion can create software that demos well, but that is error-prone (due to inconsistency), too hard to learn or use, or that doesn’t solve the user’s problem in a useful way.
Teams that don't value product management opinion can squander resources building things that won’t help move the business forward with its strategic objectives, or that won’t create competitive separation, or that people just don’t want to buy.
Teams that don't value developer opinion can end up with a precarious, fragile code-base with features tacked on all over and no firm foundation. The cost of this grows and grows over time as the codebase becomes more and more brittle.
Teams that don’t value customer-facing staff opinion (sales, support) can miss key opportunities for improvement and risk to customer retention and competition.
If you have a HiPPO at the top, a boss who imagines that they are smarter than all their staff, you can end up with all of the above happening simultaneously]]>design development culture programminghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:26f5cf28fd12/Context Chips in Survey Design: “Okay, but how does it feel?” • Lea Verou2024-12-29T21:27:55+00:00
https://lea.verou.me/blog/2024/context-chips/
earth2marshThe Problem
Ideation
Idea 1: Quick context
Ideas 2 & 3: Followups and sentiment radios
Idea 4: Context chips
Mini-feature questions: Context Chips + Checkboxes?
Idea 5: Existing 5-point question template
Usability Testing to the Rescue!
What worked well: Context Chips
What worked okay: Mini-feature Questions
What did not work: Context Chips on Mobile
Aftermath: Context Chips in the Wild
Results Visualization
Generalizability
Lessons Learned
Never skimp on articulating the north star UI
User testing is also a consensus-building tool
Heuristic evaluations are not a substitute for usability testing
The story of how a weird little UI to collect sentiment alongside survey responses defied constraints and triumphed over skepticism through usability testing.]]>surveys design ui ux context formshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:3306c7feb7ba/api-guidelines/azure/Guidelines.md at vNext · microsoft/api-guidelines2024-12-27T01:09:51+00:00
https://github.com/microsoft/api-guidelines/blob/vNext/azure/Guidelines.md
earth2marshThese guidelines apply to Azure service teams implementing data plane APIs. They offer prescriptive guidance that Azure service teams MUST follow ensuring that customers have a great experience by designing APIs meeting these goals:
Developer friendly via consistent patterns & web standards (HTTP, REST, JSON)
Efficient & cost-effective
Work well with SDKs in many programming languages
Customers can create fault-tolerant apps by supporting retries/idempotency/optimistic concurrency
Sustainable & versionable via clear API contracts with 2 requirements:
Customer workloads must never break due to a service change
Customers can adopt a version without requiring code changes
Technology and software is constantly changing and evolving, and as such, this is intended to be a living document. Open an issue to suggest a change or propose a new idea. Please read the Considerations for Service Design for an introduction to the topic of API design for Azure services. For an existing GA'd service, don't change/break its existing API; instead, leverage these concepts for future APIs while prioritizing consistency within your existing service.]]>apis design standards azure microsofthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:922c6dc52506/The elements of product design2024-12-03T22:12:00+00:00
https://jamiemill.com/blog/elements-of-product-design/
earth2marshBeing a designer means making or facilitating design decisions. Your skills are your abilities to do that soundly. But design decisions can be aesthetic, structural, conceptual, strategic and anything in between. And these layers require different approaches and skills.]]>design product diagrams modelhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:ebf8a08db2e7/Andy Budd: "Most designers think they're playing chess, where the best, most considered player usually wins. In reality they're actually playing poker, where speed of play is the most important thing, and the lost hands are already factored in. It's about2024-11-19T18:04:39+00:00
https://bsky.app/profile/andybudd.bsky.social/post/3lbcyzmr3pk2v
earth2marshMost designers think they're playing chess, where the best, most considered player usually wins. In reality they're actually playing poker, where speed of play is the most important thing, and the lost hands are already factored in. It's about maximising the upside rather than minimising loss.
Andy Budd @andybudd.bsky.social
·
12m
However most execs are playing poker. They know (deep down) that they'll probably lose most hands. Their focus therefor isn't avoiding loss, but massively increasing play speed, in order to get more good hands. They win by finding a good hand and then playing it well.]]>bluesky posts chess poker design executives strategy productmanagementhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:a0bce1de9a98/Designing For Gen Z: Expectations And UX Guidelines — Smashing Magazine2024-11-11T05:38:15+00:00
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2024/10/designing-for-gen-z/
earth2marshdesign ux research genzhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:4d9663b76619/Tog's paradox2024-11-05T06:16:25+00:00
https://www.votito.com/methods/togs-paradox/
earth2marshTog’s Paradox (also known as The Complexity Paradox or Tog’s Complexity Paradox) is an observation that products aiming to simplify a task for users tend to inspire new, more complex tasks. It’s one of the key reasons for the symptom of requirements changing after delivery in enterprise software products, and for feature creep in consumer products. Tog’s Paradox also explains why it’s futile to try to completely nail down requirements for a software product, as the product itself will have an impact on the users, causing them to demand new functions.]]>complexity design usability psychology lawshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:5132f7b61db7/Paul Frazee's Monster: "If you're curious why everybody's username is a domain, it's because every user is essentially a website" — Bluesky2024-10-21T05:02:48+00:00
https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y
earth2marshIf you're curious why everybody's username is a domain, it's because every user is essentially a website]]>bluesky design architecturehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:d414730ce8c2/“The Door Problem” – Liz England2024-09-22T01:42:11+00:00
https://lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/
earth2marshThe Door Problem
I like to describe my job in terms of “The Door Problem”.
Premise: You are making a game.
Are there doors in your game?
Can the player open them?
Can the player open every door in the game?
Or are some doors for decoration?
How does the player know the difference?
Are doors you can open green and ones you can’t red? Is there trash piled up in front of doors you can’t use? Did you just remove the doorknobs and call it a day?
Can doors be locked and unlocked?
What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open?]]>design development games designerhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:d449132298d1/LOOPY (v1.1)2024-09-17T03:17:05+00:00
https://ncase.me/loopy/v1.1/
earth2marshdesign tools systems diagrams causes CDLhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:72970fbdf9e0/Fake Door Testing: What Is It and How to Make An Effective Test2024-09-13T19:13:34+00:00
https://userpilot.com/blog/fake-door-testing/
earth2marshFake door testing is a technique used to validate demand for a product before investing in its development.
It involves inviting customers to use a feature that is not ready (but that may be in development) to see how many of them will be interested.
Key benefits of running fake door tests include validating your product or new feature idea before committing to its development, refining your pricing strategy before the launch, and enlisting beta testers
Careless use of fake door tests can create disappointed and disgruntled users, and damage your credibility.
To avoid alienating your users, be transparent and honest. Show users the potential value of the new features/products, and try to engage them in the development process (e.g. by participating in beta testing).
Limit the segment size for your tests to minimize the fallout.
You can run fake door tests for potential customers (via your website) or existing users (via in-app messaging)
Fake door testing steps: segment your audience, decide on which landing page your fake test should trigger, create the fake door test content, build the follow-up, and track the success of the test.]]>ux research techniques productmanagement design demand testinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:df6f3efe0a60/Affordances Explained | Andrea Scarantino - Academia.edu2024-09-03T22:01:23+00:00
https://www.academia.edu/62870915/Affordances_Explained
earth2marshI examine the central theoretical construct of ecological psychology, the concept of an affordance. In the first part of the paper, I illustrate the role affordances play in Gibson's theory of perception. In the second part, I argue that affordances are to be understood as dispositional properties, and explain what I take to be their characteristic background circumstances, triggering circumstances and manifestations. The main purpose of my analysis is to give affordances a theoretical identity enriched by Gibson's visionary insight, but independent of the most controversial claims of the Gibsonian movement.]]>affordances design papershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:1273845a89bb/Image to Mesh Gradient2024-09-02T23:33:11+00:00
https://photogradient.com/
earth2marshdesign tools gradients colors fieldshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:034d1397c7a1/Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process2024-09-02T00:17:20+00:00
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/unfolding
earth2marshyou say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.
The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.
If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is
If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.
The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy: if you could just make it into another context your problems will go away
]]>design process vision unfolding inspiration rereadhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:89bec9ea47b2/A Big Little Idea Called Legibility2024-09-01T03:58:32+00:00
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/
earth2marshCentral to Scott’s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or “sedentarize” nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives:
The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people
Along with books like Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we Live By, William Whyte’s The Organization Man and Keith Johnstone’s Impro, this book is one of the anchor texts for this blog. If I ever teach a course on ‘Ribbonfarmesque Thinking,’ all these books would be required reading.
]]>culture design legibility politics governance systemshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:ab8513eb7a28/weather glossary2024-08-30T18:22:20+00:00
https://api.weather.gov/glossary
earth2marsh]]>apis glossary weather patterns designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:bd2640c39ca7/command center: Simplicity2024-08-30T05:00:04+00:00
https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2023/12/simplicity.html
earth2marshSimplicity
In May 2009, Google hosted an internal "Design Wizardry" panel, with talks by Jeff Dean, Mike Burrows, Paul Haahr, Alfred Spector, Bill Coughran, and myself. Here is a lightly edited transcript of my talk. Some of the details have aged out, but the themes live on, now perhaps more than ever.]]>simplicity systems design architecture Google engineeringhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:3d48fb334657/Don't trust the (design) process - by Jenny Wen2024-08-20T06:00:06+00:00
https://jennywen.substack.com/p/dont-trust-the-design-process
earth2marshThe way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s changing things after we’ve handed off the design. It’s starting from the solution first. It’s operating on vibes and intuition. It’s making something just for the sake of making people smile. It’s a feeling that we nailed it.]]>process design productmanagementhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:d05469bf1c65/Forget “show, don’t tell”. Engage, don’t show! • Lea Verou2024-07-03T23:33:29+00:00
https://lea.verou.me/blog/2024/engage-dont-show/
earth2marshgood UIs (and thus, good APIs) have a smooth UI complexity to Use case complexity curve. This means that incremental user effort results in incremental value; at no point going just a little bit further requires a disproportionately big chunk of upfront work]]>apis design feedback learning usabilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:a2bb19b31b4a/gameuidatabase2024-06-01T21:03:52+00:00
https://gameuidatabase.com/
earth2marshui design exampleshttps://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:8582124a48cf/Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO) - Craft, Beauty, & The Future of Payments2024-05-29T18:00:37+00:00
https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/patrick-collison?open=false
earth2marshGetting back to what we were discussing previously, in as much as the sociology and "cultural" explanations of defensibility are real, the best people consider themselves crafts people in their domain and they really, above almost all else, want to work with the best other people. It may almost be true, that even if from a customer-facing standpoint, craft was not valued by the market, you might still want to build an organization that indexes very heavily on this, because you just want the best people for other reasons. Now, as it happens, I think customers do, in fact, value it. The evidence is broadly consistent with that. It's very hard to assemble groups of the best people, if you don't take the practice of the work super seriously
…
it's interesting that API design in general doesn't get more study as a discipline and as a practice. It plays or can play a significant role in the fate of platforms. Not saying it is always the determinative thing. But if you get it right, there can be compounding positive benefits and the converse.
…
No one else seems to agree with me, but I often think of Stripe as similar to Mathematica, where we're selling a self-contained universe to model whatever it is of interest to you. We're providing some primitives, interfaces and tools and so forth, to enable your modeling. But fundamentally, we're helping you do something on your own terms. In that sense, I don't think the architecture and the interface are necessarily that separable.
]]>apis design craft stripehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:cd68034e9efc/How Blinkist Increased Trial Conversions by 23% (Ethically)2024-05-28T19:07:03+00:00
https://growth.design/case-studies/trial-paywall-challenge
earth2marshconversion trials freemium design ux productmanagement growthhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:d0921d191d7e/Introduction | Patterns - Production, Innersource2024-05-27T22:31:36+00:00
https://patterns.innersourcecommons.org/
earth2marshWhat is InnerSource?
We define InnerSource as:
The use of open source principles and practices for software development within the confines of an organization.]]>source Innersource opensource words patterns designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:6b4f82c4e3e2/List of Patterns - A Pattern Language2024-05-17T01:36:06+00:00
https://patternlanguage.cc/
earth2marsharchitecture books patterns design referencehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:fa630a4b1471/v0 by Vercel2024-05-14T22:46:57+00:00
https://v0.dev/
earth2marshGenerate UI with shadcn/ui from simple text prompts and images]]>ai code design generation uihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:234f8d42914c/Maintenance and Care2024-04-27T20:48:20+00:00
https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/
earth2marshIn 2017 the United States earned a disappointing-but-not-surprising D+ overall. 11 Water systems scored a D (six billion gallons of treated water are lost every day); dams, a D (seventeen percent are highly hazardous); and roads, a D (one out of every five miles is in poor condition). Transit earned a D- (in part, for the $90 billion backlog of maintenance projects). Why such neglect? At a forum hosted by the Brookings Institution (naturally!), economist Larry Summers gave the usual explanation: “All of the incentives for all the actors are against maintenance. Nobody ever named a maintenance project, nobody ever got recognized for a maintenance project, nobody ever much got blamed for deferring maintenance during the time while they were in office.” His interlocutor, Edward Glaeser (see, it’s always the economists!), agreed: “you get a lot of press for a new project. … You don’t get a lot of press for maintaining the HVAC system in the school, even though that’s more socially valuable.” 12]]>architecture infrastructure design maintenance repairhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:d717c378f812/Maintenance and Care2024-04-27T20:27:21+00:00
https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/?cn-reloaded=1
earth2marshIn 2017 the United States earned a disappointing-but-not-surprising D+ overall. 11 Water systems scored a D (six billion gallons of treated water are lost every day); dams, a D (seventeen percent are highly hazardous); and roads, a D (one out of every five miles is in poor condition). Transit earned a D- (in part, for the $90 billion backlog of maintenance projects). Why such neglect? At a forum hosted by the Brookings Institution (naturally!), economist Larry Summers gave the usual explanation: “All of the incentives for all the actors are against maintenance. Nobody ever named a maintenance project, nobody ever got recognized for a maintenance project, nobody ever much got blamed for deferring maintenance during the time while they were in office.” His interlocutor, Edward Glaeser (see, it’s always the economists!), agreed: “you get a lot of press for a new project. … You don’t get a lot of press for maintaining the HVAC system in the school, even though that’s more socially valuable.” 12
Outsiders mistakenly focus on the rusty bridges and broken pipes — the ‘defective objects’ — whereas local fixers are more concerned with social and political relationships.]]>architecture infrastructure design maintenance repairhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:f0e42b5e1f72/Amundsen’s Maxim2024-03-05T22:38:24+00:00
https://www.amundsens-maxim.com/
earth2marsh"Remember, when designing your Web API, your data model is not your object model is not your resource model is not your message model." — Mike Amundsen]]>apis design mistakes ruleshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:ae1250546453/blogorrhea: API-First Design2024-02-29T02:50:38+00:00
https://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2009/04/api-first-design.html
earth2marshAPI-first design means identifying and/or defining key actors and personas, determining what those actors and personas expect to be able to do with APIs (i.e., what are the possible use-cases, user narratives, or stories that encapsulate the business problems these people need to solve), and -- very important -- trying to understand the mental model each actor brings to the problem space. The mental model will drive architectural and design decisions at various levels (for example, it will suggest what kinds of business objects each user thinks in terms of) and will keep the overall process on a track toward good usability.]]>apis design history languagehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:98f3e55d3443/Okay, Color Spaces — ericportis.com2024-02-22T04:49:48+00:00
https://ericportis.com/posts/2024/okay-color-spaces/
earth2marshcolor design theory webdesign colors systemshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:08b228aede18/Derek Powazek - On Blocking2024-02-03T02:32:01+00:00
https://powazek.com/posts/3591
earth2marshmaybe they’re getting dogpiled. Maybe they need a timeout, or maybe they need a moderator to reach out and see if they’re okay. This is where good old fashioned human community management comes in.
But either way, you have to watch who is getting blocked and take action when needed. I’m amazed that more sites don’t do this.]]>social design blocking tools relationshipshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:4f524ba9edcc/Kissing gate - Wikipedia2024-01-28T01:44:36+00:00
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kissing_gate
earth2marshA kissing gate is a gate that allows people, but not livestock, to pass through.]]>livestock cows gates design solutions cleverhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:619e8a3b28a4/The Design Of Everyday Things By Don Norman : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive2024-01-27T16:23:35+00:00
https://archive.org/details/thedesignofeverydaythingsbydonnorman
earth2marshdesign ux books essentialshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:1f39d793c8e5/Mens graphic Shirts – Custom T Shirts | Hoodie Lab2024-01-27T01:05:09+00:00
https://hoodielab.com/product-category/tshirt/?orderby=popularity&paged=1&yith_wcan=1&product_cat=tshirt&product_tag=vhs
earth2marshshirts shopping vhs designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:79c025d0b37a/Command Line Interface Guidelines2023-12-19T16:23:31+00:00
https://clig.dev/
earth2marshAn open-source guide to help you write better command-line programs, taking traditional UNIX principles and updating them for the modern day.]]>programming cli guide designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:a267ce39ceac/Open design systems from the Figma Community2023-12-13T22:13:30+00:00
https://www.designsystems.com/open-design-systems/
earth2marshDiscover all open design systems on the Figma Community]]>design system figma examples webdesignhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:c0790d643f27/Examples of Great URL Design - Jim Nielsen’s Blog2023-11-28T19:28:46+00:00
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/examples-of-great-urls/
earth2marshI love this reminder of the ubiquity of URLs. They’re not just for typing into browser bars. They’re used in a plethora of ways:
As targets for scripting and scraping and other programmatic data retrieval.
As references, printed in the footnotes and appendixes of physical books.
As actionable triggers accessible via physical mediums, e.g. scannable QR codes or IoT device buttons.
And more!
When I reflect on examples of great URL design[1] I’ve encountered through the years — URLs that, when I saw them, I paused and thought “Wow, that’s really neat!” — these are a few that come to mind.]]>url design urls web exampleshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:2ad5fe6ec4bf/Web Design Museum2023-10-26T21:15:22+00:00
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/?mc_cid=cd310c6d87&mc_eid=e2369a22fa
earth2marshWeb Design Museum exhibits thousands of websites that chronicle forgotten trends in web design from its beginnings in the 1990s to the mid-00s.]]>design web museum collections patterns historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:cb265d0ef31a/Wicked problem - Wikipedia2023-09-30T00:24:41+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
earth2marshRittel and Webber's 1973 formulation of wicked problems in social policy planning specified ten characteristics:[5][6]
There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
The social planner has no right to be wrong (i.e., planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).
Conklin later generalized the concept of problem wickedness to areas other than planning and policy; Conklin's defining characteristics are:[7]
The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one shot operation".
Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.
]]>complexity design problems wild tame wickedhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:21bfa7685d17/The Most Advanced Yet Acceptable Products Win - Every2023-09-29T04:39:56+00:00
https://every.to/p/the-most-advanced-yet-acceptable-products-win
earth2marsh“To sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising.”]]>design productmanagement familiar surprisinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:2d5b7a8e3bb4/The Tyranny of the Marginal User - by Ivan Vendrov2023-09-15T20:33:27+00:00
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user
earth2marshIn my six years at Google, I got to observe this force up close, relentlessly killing features users loved and eroding the last vestiges of creativity and agency from our products. I know this force well, and I hate it, but I do not yet know how to fight it. I call this force the Tyranny of the Marginal User.
Simply put, companies building apps have strong incentives to gain more users, even users that derive very little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize low value users by selling them ads. Often, it’s because your business relies on network effects and even low value users can help you build a moat. So the north star metric for designers and engineers is typically something like Daily Active Users, or DAUs for short: the number of users who log into your app in a 24 hour period.
What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted.
By contrast, consumer software tools that enhance human agency, that serve us when we are most creative and intentional, are often built by hobbyists and used by a handful of nerds. If such a tool ever gets too successful one of the Marl-serving companies, flush with cash from advertising or growth-hungry venture capital, will acquire it and kill it. So it goes.
]]>productmanagement culture purpose software development designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:cc48b558c271/Multi-layered calendars « julian.digital2023-08-11T22:37:57+00:00
https://julian.digital/2023/07/06/multi-layered-calendars/
earth2marshcalendars design time toolshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:2f59df735927/〽️ax krieger's paradigm shift on Twitter: "If you want a fully immersive "postmodern design hellscape" themed dining experience I highly recommend dinner at The Cheesecake Factory from a design perspective that place is fuckin wild and I'll talk a lit2023-08-08T01:37:40+00:00
https://twitter.com/MaxKriegerVG/status/931373170791198720
earth2marsh
Nov 16, 2017
To conclude:
There is nothing more quintessentially "American capitalism" in flavor than The Cheesecake Factory
Wealth run wild. Chaotic visual fantasies realized w no aesthetic discipline. An obsession with appearance of luxury. Gross excess that excels at feigning its quality]]>architecture luxury design appearances restaurants america cheescake TCFhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:7393ca4041dd/API redesign: shopping cart and Stripe payment - by Alex Xu2023-05-25T02:00:48+00:00
https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/api-redesign-shopping-cart-and-stripe?publication_id=817132&post_id=123437639&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true
earth2marshIn this issue, we continue with our hands-on exploration of the two remaining API design examples. We’ll explore how to build a shopping cart API and study the Stripe payment API redesign.]]>apis design stripehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:d0661ba39904/sbensu: APIs as ladders2023-05-24T15:47:19+00:00
https://blog.sbensu.com/posts/apis-as-ladders/
earth2marshapis design tips learning curves principles bestofhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:2bee162fd46d/REST and Hypermedia in 2019 | APIs You Won't Hate2023-03-13T21:03:50+00:00
https://apisyouwonthate.com/blog/rest-and-richardson-maturity-model
earth2marshThere are a few common concerns with this diagram, mainly with "Glory of REST" at the top, and the "Swamp" at the bottom. For the same reason I have concerns about the word "maturity" being used. This has the unfortunate effect of making it seem like REST APIs are amazeballs and everything else is stupid. That's not what anyone was trying to say, but it's the conclusion a lot of people draw.
When talking about this diagram I usually explain that an RPC API doing a job that a REST API would be better suited at is gonna suck. I wouldn't take my mountain bike on a 200mi ride and I wouldn't take my carbon road racer on a downhill mountain bike course. A good thing used for the wrong task very quickly starts to look like a bad choice, without the thing being inherently bad.]]>maturity model rest apis designhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:c8257baace69/To infinity and beyond: enabling the future of GitHub's REST API with API versioning | The GitHub Blog2023-02-08T17:20:02+00:00
https://github.blog/2022-11-28-to-infinity-and-beyond-enabling-the-future-of-githubs-rest-api-with-api-versioning/
earth2marshWe know that it’s absolutely crucial to provide a stable, consistent API experience. We can’t—and don’t—expect integrators to constantly update their integrations as we tweak our API.
At the same time, it’s crucial that we’re able to evolve the API over time. If the API had to stay the same forever, then we couldn’t bring the latest and greatest product features to API users, fix bugs, or improve the developer experience.
We can make most changes (for example, introduce a new endpoint) without having a negative impact on existing integrations. We call these non-breaking changes, and we make them every single day.
But sometimes, we need to make breaking changes, like deleting a response field, making an optional parameter required, or deleting an endpoint entirely.
We launched version 3 (“V3”) of our API more than a decade ago. It has served us well, but we haven’t had the right tools and processes in place to make occasional breaking changes AND give existing users a smooth migration path and plenty of time to upgrade their integrations.
To enable us to continue evolving the API for the next decade (and beyond!), we’re introducing calendar-based versioning for the REST API.]]>apis design versioning githubhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:earth2marsh/b:2b8fedcc2fa8/