30% Turtleneck, 70% Hoodie
My home country is not by itself an earthquake-prone region but we did get jolted ever once in a while with an echo of a truly damaging quake in the neighborhood. People who experienced earthquakes know that after the main event, a series of progressively smaller tremors are normal, indicating the plates settling into a... Continue Reading →
Many years ago when I moved to Canada, my father-in-law came to visit. He was showing interest in what I did for living and I tried to explain to the best of my abilities. I failed miserably, leaving him befuddled that people are actually paying me money for lining up the bytes 'just so'. For... Continue Reading →
It seems that every couple of years we feel a collective urge to give a technique a catchy acronym in order to speed up conversation about UI design. Last couple of years, we grew accustomed to throwing around the term Responsive Design casually, probably because it rolls off the tongue easier then "we need to... Continue Reading →
In my introductory post The Turtleneck and the Hoodie I kind of lied a bit that I stopped doing everything I did in my youth. In fact, I am playing music, recording and producing more than I did in a while. I realized I can do things in the comfort of my home that I... Continue Reading →
I owe the idea for my Orwellian title to a well known engineer Robert W. Lucky who came into my life through a ritual of cracking open a brand new and shiny IEEE Spectrum magazine and immediately going for his column "Lucky Strikes" (this awesome name acquired a whole new meaning after I started watching Mad... Continue Reading →
One of the key roles of the Jazz Platform I am working on right now is that of integration. From the early days of the Eclipse Platform, I was fascinated with composable systems, and how this composition manifests itself in the user interface. Integration on the Web is simultaneously natural and frustrating. It is natural because the... Continue Reading →
Today's topic is penguins, how they feed their young and how to apply that to Web development. Now watch my improbable feat of connecting these two topics. Come for the penguins, stay for the Web UI! I am a father and as all parents know, part of the job description when your kids reach certain age includes... Continue Reading →
'Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler' is the user-friendly paraphrase of a quote from a lecture Albert Einstein delivered at Oxford in 1933. It is a wonderful irony that Einstein was proven wrong (by the composer Roger Sessions) in that he didn't make the quote itself 'as simple as possible', necessitating subsequent... Continue Reading →
I have just returned from a month-long vacation, enjoying an overdue change of context. Among other things, it helped me free up enough brain cycles to play one of my favorite games - 'look for a pattern'. It appears (as my Jazz Platform colleagues tell me) that I have a giant database for a brain.... Continue Reading →
A while ago I had lunch with my wife in a Toronto midtown restaurant called "Grazie". As I was perusing the menu, a small rectangle at the bottom attracted my attention. It read: We strongly discourage substitutions. The various ingredients have been selected to complement each other. Substitutions will undermine the desired effect of the... Continue Reading →
