Design - Coffee on the Keyboard

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Design

A collection of 18 posts

Photo of a path to an ocean beach with a temporary barrier that says "beach closed"

Introducing API Boundaries to Prepare for Bigger Changes

Alternatively: API Boundaries for Fun and Profit I routinely misquote Kent Beck, who said "for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change." He said this on Twitter (RIP) so I won't be linking to it, but

A zoomed out photo of a dictionary open to a random page. The text is mostly blurred.

Changing the Meaning: Breaking Semantic Changes

The subtlest kind of breaking change is the kind that doesn't affect a value's type but instead affects what that value means. These changes can be hard to notice when you're making them, and even harder to debug when they happen. They can lead

A graph in the positive quadrant showing y=x, y=x^p where p>1, and y=x^p where p<1.

Three Models of Value

In product development, we often think of "value" in large, discrete units: the value of project A vs project B; the value of a feature; the value of a refactor or architecture change. When we're deploying continuously, we have an opportunity to replace this mental model

A photo of railway tracks.

Constrain Your Data Access for Fun and Scale

ActiveRecord-style ORMs can be huge time-savers, but also blur boundaries within a system, which leads to bad assumptions and habits

A finger pointing to one of several empty boxes in a diagram on a chalk board.

Conceptual, Logical and Physical Data Models

Conceptual, logical, and physical data models has proven to be one of the most valuable things I've learned recently

A close up of wires plugged into a sound board.

Building Extensibility into APIs from the Start

Making the right design decisions early in a project can have a huge impact on the ability to safely improve and evolve it over time.

The Problem with TodaysMeet

TodaysMeet [http://todaysmeet.com/] is a project I started in 2008 to help my father [http://speedchange.blogspot.com] solve a problem in one of his classes. The fact that it’s as popular as it is—mostly in education—never ceases to amaze me. Unfortunately, I don’t give

Stop Supporting IE6

As a community, as a whole, web designers and developers need to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6. Now. Completely. I’ve been thinking a lot about browser compatibility as I’ve been working on Today’s Meet [http://todaysmeet.com/]. My CSS is valid, but it doesn’t work quite

User Interface: Be Nice!

A short post for a busy week. I just downloaded the Spore Creature Creator [http://www.spore.com/trial], and this file showed up on my desktop: 792248d6ad421d577132c2b648bbed45_scc_trial_na.exe. Why not “Spore Creature Creator Trial Install.exe”, or, if spaces aren’t your thing, “SporeCreatureCreatorTrialInstall.exe”? Either

Organizing CSS

Looking at WordPress themes usually makes me cringe. It’s as if there was a memo on semantic markup and the community of WP developers didn’t get it. Some themes [http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/2-columns/2991/autumn-concept-10/] waste kilobytes of HTML source on something that could be achieved

Do You "Designed By"?

A debate has cropped up over “designed by” links, those (hopefully) little links a designer puts on a page to take credit and get themselves some traffic and customers. On the one side, Pat Dryburgh argues [http://www.atrickdesign.com/blog/you-will-never-see-designed-by-atrick-design/] word-of-mouth is superior to self-advertising: “If the design

Work Pattern: Designing Web Sites

The premise of Design Patterns [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_(computer_science)] is that similar problems have similar solutions. In the same vein, I propose this Work Pattern a set of common steps I use when I create a web site, and maybe you can use, too. Elements

The W3C Sucks

“If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.” If you want to remain the standard-setting body for the web, promise new recommendations, never deliver. ![CSS 2.1 is not even a published recommendation. Off with their (the W3C) heads.](http://coffeeonthekeyboard.com/wp-content/uploads/

The New Blog

I made myself sit down today and finish work on the blog design. I am very happy with how it came out. This design is a hybrid, pulling elements from some of better-looking sites and blogs. The three-column layout was inspired by Felicia Day’s “Flog [http://feliciaday.net/blog/

Skinning(/Leatherworking)

I’m (finally) working on the new theme. It’s obviously a work-in-progress, so just appreciate the effort for now. I’m starting with the default WordPress theme by Michael Heilemann. I’m not going to lie: I really dislike this particular theme. The look, though bland, is fine. What

Microsoft Listened

We all complained [https://www.coffeeonthekeyboard.com/ie8-and-version-targeting-70/], and Microsoft listened to the community: IE8 will now render in IE8-mode by default [http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx] , and “developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request

There's a special place...

…in hell for designers and business-types who feel the need to put full-screen advertisements before the website. The same goes to those who put random ads in the way while navigating between two pages, though perhaps these do not end up quite as deep. I understand the motivation: full-screen advertisements