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Here’s the feeds I follow: https://www.unindented.org/follows/

(It’s my OPML file translated to HTML via Hugo.)

As to why, they generally post original and insightful stuff on topics I care about, like web dev, security, Ruby, Rust, etc.


Hey, I work on Yammer, and I'm one of the contributors to this project. YamUI is a cross-team effort between our Design and Frontend teams to create drop-in components for Yammer.com that have strictly-enforced style and behavior. As @gregod said, it is based on Office's awesome Fabric project: https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-ui-fabric-react/

The project is just us working in the open. We're not trying to push this as a new component framework for others to use, and we probably don't have the bandwidth to support external consumers, but we're happy if people can learn from it.


fantastic work, man. great to see this out in the light of day :)


Yup, that's because those hovercards render on `componentDidMount`, and the styleguide renders all components on page load. It's a bit janky, but it only affects the styleguide, so it's low priority.

Disclaimer: I work on Yammer, and I've contributed to this project.


A few years ago I created a Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/palette-creator/oo...) to do exactly this. You right-click on an image, select Palette Creator, and you get a palette with the number of colors you requested. I recently ported it to Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/palette-creat...) and Opera (https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/palette-creat...) too.

It clusters the colors using Kohonen neural networks (which always makes me giggle, because "Kohonen" sounds like a Spanish swear word). The source for it all is here: https://github.com/unindented/palette-creator

Unrelated: Every week I receive an offer to "monetize" my extension from the shadiest companies all over the world. I'm guessing they'd add all kinds of tracking to it, make it inject ads and fake results into the pages the user is viewing, etc. So yeah, be careful who you trust when it comes to browser extensions!


Cool extension. Is the palette extraction available as a standalone package?


Yup, I published it as an npm module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/neuquant-js


Right now I am using the RgbQuant library (https://www.npmjs.com/package/rgbquant), but I've been experimenting with neuqant-js as well. The Chrome extension you've mentioned before is really great!


These are totally useless for people relying on assistive technologies, right? Tried VoiceOver and got absolutely nothing.


Thank you for contribution. This definitely a good idea which I will take into account for next releases.



The avatars come from UI Faces: http://uifaces.com/

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It looks like blaming the software and its developers is becoming an easy way of evading responsibilities for those in charge.

Volkswagen did a similar thing a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710354


Actually, it's been an "intentional problem" in companies for years. "Oh, we can't account for that $200,000 discrepancy? Must be that terrible IT Dept! Nobody else understands how the computers around here work!"

I'm oversimplifying, and exaggerating, but I've seen this play out many times: Companies intentionally cripple the IT/Software stack, making them known to be a terrible dept due to lack of resources. Then, when a problem hits "oh we're working on cleaning up the dept responsible".

And it's one that people buy, because everyone has experienced computer frustration.


I imagine we'll see more of it as time goes on. Management without a technical background depend on the expertise of their workers to get things right. They can only manage work so far but if there's bugs they can't understand or don't know how to find root cause of they'll have to point the finger eventually.

Besides, if a whole industry of software devs are going to insist on calling themselves engineers I hope they adopt the ethics and responsibility other engineers are required to undertake.


> if a whole industry of software devs are going to insist on calling themselves engineers

It's hard to see around this enormous straw man. Starting with the poor applicability of engineering-oriented project management systems to software creation, there are many reasons not to call it "engineering" even when practiced at the highest levels.


> Besides, if a whole industry of software devs are going to insist on calling themselves engineers I hope they adopt the ethics and responsibility other engineers are required to undertake.

What ethics and responsibilities do non-software engineers have that software engineers don't have?


In many countries, certain kinds of engineering are licensed and regulated professions. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...

It's officially a Big Deal in some branches of engineering- structural, mechanical, and civil come to mind. My city just built a new bridge over our river, and the engineers who signed off on its design and construction were doing so under a certain legal framework that is designed to ensure that the design was done using proper methodologies, appropriate tests were conducted, etc. If the bridge fails due to shoddy design, those engineers will personally face certain professional and legal consequences. That same legal and regulatory framework gives the engineers certain protections should management try and make them cut corners on the design or testing (in theory, anyway).

People have been debating for years about whether there ought to be a similar legal framework for software engineering. There are plenty of good arguments on both sides of that discussion, IMHO, but the sorts of situation described by the original article would fall squarely under the "pro" side of the equation. I can easily envision a world in which, for software that is critical to a public safety function of government, states had to buy software written by bonded and licensed engineers. Presumably, under such a framework, a licensed software engineering company would have to have a system in place such that their "hit by a bus factor" would be >1- i.e., they'd need to have sufficient documentation or process in place to enable any single engineer to go on extended leave without preventing critical bug-fixes from taking place.

This is obviously something that any developer would recognize as a "best practice", but that in practice is often infeasible due to organizational constraints. The advantage to a system of regulation and licensure would (in theory) be that it would empower engineers to demand such practices be in place in their organizations, and would incentivize companies to set themselves up to enable such practices. In theory. As the saying goes, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice." Hence why this has been an ongoing debate in the software world for decades.


Reminds me of how nobody was punished for the complete lack of security that allowed Private Manning to copy files off classified systems (open access to a CD burner). Defense contractors face heavy fines for such breaches and have their systems properly locked down but the military itself just does what it pleases and looks the other way when dumb decisions bite them.


I've used it to prototype APIs during development, like this one: http://fort.herokuapp.com/api

The code for that one lives here: https://github.com/unindented/fortune-example


I found it interesting that the project's only dependencies are also written by the author: https://github.com/bevacqua/woofmark/blob/1ffb31db3008c3c018...

Is it a case of NIH, or is it justified?


This is something I built in house for Stompflow.com and I work in small modules, which is why you see a bunch of modules in there. They're all quite smallish and reusable, which is kind of the point.

Most people wouldn't have bothered and they would've just created a single module with everything clumped together. By writing smaller pieces I get to reuse them across other stuff that I write, open-source or not

Edit for context: this wasn't originally going to be open source


I'd suspect, just going with what's more known. In addition, you can remove any limitations you encounter a lot easier.

it is partially NIH, but that doesn't mean its unjustified.


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