Programming
🙂
I planned out this month’s software development project. I’m feeling pretty good about its modest goals. At the end of the month I want to end up with a basic procedure for my programming projects, along with a framework to fill in with details over time. This week’s goal is to finish the bibliography I was supposed to post last week and then post a broad outline of the topics I want to cover.
I finished listening to About Face, a very detailed and thorough guide to creating user interfaces. It walks you through gathering the requirements for your software and then discusses aspects of UI from general principles down to specific controls. 6/5. I highly recommend it.
Next is Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. An earlier edition of this was one of the first software development books I read years ago. It’s good to come back to it.
TV
😎
I took a couple of days to watch a special episode of Black Mirror called “Bandersnatch.” It’s a branching plot story in Netflix form, where the viewer chooses what happens next. It was very well done.
It took me back to my days of reading Choose Your Own Adventure books and playing text adventures. One of my earliest programming books was Christopher Lampton’s How to Create Adventure Games. I’m sure I knew about interactive stories already, but there was something magical about creating a world inside the computer that someone could explore.
People
🙂
On Friday and Saturday I helped my coworker Matt move into his new house. It kinda wore me out for the rest of the weekend. But it ended what I assume was the most stressful period of their move, so I’m glad I could help get it done.
What did you think of the Black Mirror episode? I saw on the internet that the publisher of the Choose Your Own Adventures books is suing Netflix for trademark infringement.
It was an interesting use of a branching plot story to explore its own genre. It got very meta, which is my thing, so I liked it.