My favorite links

Some things that make the web great (a work in progress).

Art

  • Cities & Memory: Cities and Memory is one of the world’s largest sound projects, with more than 1,800 artists foming a global community with the aim of remixing the world, one sound at a time.
  • Index of Aesthetics: CARI, or Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, is an online community dedicated to developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera from the 1970s until now.
  • Public Domain Review: Dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions.
  • Net Art Anthology: Net Art Anthology aims to address the shortage of historical perspectives on a field in which even the most prominent artworks are often inaccessible.
  • UbuWeb: Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. By the letter of the law, the site is questionable; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission.

Software

  • A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden: A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.
  • No Silver Bullet: Not only are there no silver bullets now in view, the very nature of software makes it unlikely that there will be any - no inventions that will do for software productivity, reliability, and simplicity what electronics, transistors, large-scale integration did for computer hardware. We cannot expect ever to see two-fold gains every two years.
  • How do committees invent?: The basic thesis of this article is that organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
  • How complex systems fail: Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety
  • Big ball of mud: This paper examines this most frequently deployed of software architectures: the BIG BALL OF MUD. A BIG BALL OF MUD is a casually, even haphazardly, structured system. Its organization, if one can call it that, is dictated more by expediency than design. Yet, its enduring popularity cannot merely be indicative of a general disregard for architecture.
  • Software Architecture Guide: Like many in the software world, I’ve long been wary of the term “architecture” as it often suggests a separation from programming and an unhealthy dose of pomposity. But I resolve my concern by emphasizing that good architecture is something that supports its own evolution, and is deeply intertwined with programming.

    • Talks

  • A Few Observations on the Marvelous Resilience of Bone & Resilience Engineering: The possibility of deliberately exploiting or enhancing resilience is tantalizing. But what exactly is resilience engineering? There are at least two possible forms: first, engineering that exploits what we know about resilient systems and, second, engineering that shapes resilience itself. Bone is useful example of resilience and both types of resilience engineering.
  • On the Spectrum of Abstraction: This talk goes over the tools we've come to recognize, from Angular, Ember and Grunt, all the way go Gulp, Webpack, React and beyond, and captures all these in a unifying mental framework for reasoning in terms of abstraction levels, in an attempt to make sense of what is and might be happening.
  • Promoting Civil Discourse with Software: Jeff Atwood compares the design of Stack Overflow to his new project, Discourse, and discusses how designing to promote useful answers is different from designing to promote civil discourse and empathy.

— Ben Judson