Interfaces for representing uncertainty — Digital Seams
How can software more honestly and helpfully represent the unknown?| Digital Seams
Recognizing the impact of Xerox PARC's Gypsy editor.| Digital Seams
Art, history, and the agent experience.| Digital Seams
How can software more honestly and helpfully represent the unknown?| Digital Seams
Who said you had to be reasonable?| Digital Seams
These influential editors don't use the common Ctrl-K shortcut. Why?| Digital Seams
I used to feel guilty about not running A/B tests, but not anymore. At my first job, I worked on internal tools for managing cloud infrastructure. They were used regularly, but infrequently - it would’ve taken months-to-never to get enough data for an A/B test. Ah, maybe someday I’d be able to run experiments like they do at BigTechCo, calculate statistical significance, and make data-driven decisions. But instead, I had to go schlep around different Slack channels and talk to our users 1...|
Remember the AOL dial-up sound? In case you forgot, here’s Bernz shredding it on Guitar Hero :| Digital Seams
Encryption underpins the security of every software system with more than one user. Modern cryptography enables us to send and receive messages over the literal air, processed by who-knows-how-many-people’s hardware, with confidence that no one can listen in or tamper with those messages. So, security is solved, right? Obviously not. Here’s a quick outline on why, exactly: The cryptography threats people talk about The big problem, a.k.a. Waltz’s folly Kissner’s law: key management ...|
Links around the web: few-shot prompting in 1993, the history of "So-and-so is typing", automation pitfalls, and business hours.| Digital Seams
Writing a new API? Have you considered your version compatibility guarantees? It’s harder than you might expect. API compatibility is pervasive. In the web, the misspelling of the HTTP “Referer” header has persisted since 1995, and every browser today pretends to be Netscape Navigator just in case some webserver still cares. With all this effort, it’s worth asking: is it even possible to have a truly backward-compatible API? (If you’re new to APIs, you can substitute “menus”...|
Every application will be used for messaging. What do spreadsheets, email drafts, and system notifications have in common? Inventive people use them in creative ways to send and receive messages. People love to talk to each other, and it’s incredibly hard to stop them. Here are a few examples. Real| Digital Seams
Many companies have lived and died trying to offer a product with infinite flexibility. Actually, it’s not just a product - it’s an extensible platform with huge customizability. It integrates with, well, everything! If there’s something it doesn’t do yet, you can even write some custom code for an extension, or a scripting feature, or plug-in, or a webhook, or… And the only problem is that people don’t want everything. You need to solve a specific problem As Gordon Brander writ...|
Have you ever noticed a correlation between a running microwave and your internet connection stuttering? In my childhood home, I have a Pavlovian response to the sound of someone opening the microwave; deep down, I know that I'm getting disconnected from the wi-fi. My wife sighs when I tell her our video call might disconnect. Back in high school, my gaming friends called it “Bobbie got ganked by microwave”: it was like getting ambushed by the enemy team, except more embarrassing. Just th...|
A few months ago, I heard of a work acquaintance's death via his company's social media. Shocking and abrupt - I had just met up with him (let’s call him George) for the first time. We joked over beers in a cozy little alleyway cafe, me and a coworker and George. It made me queasy to see George’s smiling LinkedIn profile photo, oblivious to the realities of flesh-and-blood. If you hadn’t seen the company announcement (which didn’t tag him), you might even still message him. LinkedIn h...|
In 2011, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote "Software is eating the world", describing how software companies had begun to dominate even physical, real-world industries. Software is characterized as a looming behemoth, ready to crush the unprepared. But software is not a monolith; it’s a mosaic. If you examine the patchwork, you’ll find seams between each piece; APIs and specifications and protocols; connections between different software components and libraries and systems and mor...|
I recently read Pick, Click, Flick!: The Story of Interaction Techniques, the 800-page tome on computer interaction techniques by Professor Brad A. Myers of Carnegie Mellon University. When I was a student at CMU, I took Professor Myers’ course on interaction techniques and even contributed some content that made it to the book; so I didn’t exactly go in blind. Reading the book made me think of an entirely different text: an 18th-century Polish encyclopedia. Nowe Ateny starts its entry fo...|
Google's Gmail is one of the world's most popular email hosts. But two of their best features don’t send emails at all. In fact, they actively prevent emails from being sent. — The “Undo Send” feature does exactly what it says - it gives you the opportunity to hit undo and unsend an email - as i| Digital Seams
In my last post (spoilers!), I wrote: Your [do-what-I-want] DWIW API invocation should be shorter and more precise than describing what you want done in natural language. Can you do it? Digital Seams: “The ideal API is not RESTful, gRPC, or GraphQL” Notice the implication here for chat-based interfaces: if all you have is a textbox to talk to your AI chatbot, it’s impossible to use it in a do-what-I-want way. If the provider really had a reliable and precise way to do something, they wo...|
How this alphabet soup plus JTBD leads us to the DWIW API.| Digital Seams
Intro series: these posts are intended for newcomers who don’t have a background in digital technology, to help understand common jargon. I’ll try to cut through the noise and get to the core ideas and build intuition rather than being precise.| Digital Seams
A blog about the connections in our often-online existence, written by Bobbie Chen.| Digital Seams
A blog about the connections in our often-online existence, written by Bobbie Chen.| Digital Seams
Or, why your digital experiences are about to get worse.| Digital Seams
