jevnin.com

Category: professional

  • Agile Design, a response to my friend’s quandary

    This evening Kynthia‘s thoughts got me thinking. Among other things, she said: “[W]e design heads get in this place where, just because we wouldn’t be caught dead releasing something into the wild, we think there is nothing to learn from it.” My brain took her thoughts on a tangent and went this way: So since…

  • Agile anti-pattern: Developer-focused retrospectives

    On most software projects, there is a far higher percentage of developers on a team than any other role. In general, this works to the team’s advantage. The developers, after all, are the ones who make what everybody else works for come alive. In a retrospective, however, it is important that no one group of…

  • It’s Gotta Start with Imagination

    It’s true, there’s definitely a time and a place for getting one’s hands dirty. Sometimes there’s just no way around digging into the details and making things right. Sometimes, even as a designer, you’re going to have to play with the CSS to get the alignment right, because if not you, who will? Still, it’s…

  • CSS Testing

    The last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of CSS writing. While this doesn’t necessarily fall under my job role, on many projects I end up doing it because I’m the “designer”…therefore I am put in charge of implementing style. Whatever. Turns out I kind of like it, so I let it pass, but…

  • Banana = Design = Innovation = Vision

    Banana = Vision Love it or hate it, Bruce Nussbaum makes some great points in Are Designers the Enemy of Design? I think I buy most of it. Is Design a specialist activity? If it’s done well, generally yes. Is that likely to change? For the most part, I don’t think so. Will ‘the everyman’…

  • Hanging Blockquotes: Implemented

    If you’re not looking at this entry on my site, it’s not gonna look quite right. For the best view, look here. Just wanted to let y’all know that I’ve fixed my blockquotes so that they’re hanging. You’ll notice that I not only hang my blockquotes, but list items as well. Check it out: This…

  • The Design of CruiseControl.rb

    If you’ve heard me talk about work lately, you have probably heard me talk about an Open Source project I’ve been working on with a handful of other folks at ThoughtWorks. Previous to now, it’s been “privately public,” existing on servers where people could get to it, but not so public that we were letting…

  • On Iteration

    “It’s not an iteration if you only do it once!” – Fred Sampson, in the UPA Voice Developers & designers: Please, please don’t just implement your first idea. Think about it for a few minutes. Sketch it on paper a few times a few different ways. Nine times out of ten you’ll find that your…

  • Some advice from Don Norman

    Just when you’re looking for some inspiration, a quote from someone famous is bound to help: The most important consulting rule that I follow is: “Never solve the problem as stated.” Why? because it is invariably the wrong problem, usually being the symptom rather than the cause. Find the root cause and solve that, and…

  • Screen-placement testing tool

    All sorts of automated tests happen on projects at ThoughtWorks. There are Unit Tests, Functional tests, GUI tests, and others that make sure the software we’re building runs well from the most back-end function all the way to the user’s interface. One thing we don’t test, however, is where particular elements land on a screen.…