I think the idea is that when the interface changes, even if someone else comes in and makes some naive updates later, it should still continue running.
I like the idea of being able to address content based on it's actual content. Perhaps I don't have a very good imagination, but if all you have is a hash of the content, how to you know where to find it?
From within a single app it's easy, but what about in other apps or other machines. Would there be a (possibly distributed/voluntary) lookup service? Could comments or lookup "hints" be added to the spec?
I completely agree. I interviewed with a company, and did some whiteboard coding. Most of it was simple, but whenever I would stop for a moment to think about what I was doing, they would prompt me to find out "what are you thinking"?
Even when I'm working very closely with colleagues, we often spend long moments of silence thinking and working through issues. It's a part of the process.
"Rapid learning" and troubleshooting methods. The process for both of these is nearly identical, although some details differ. There are several books by Steve Litt that go over these and I found helped me troubleshoot problems faster than most of my co-workers, but the same principles helped me to understand a new code base much faster.
Just a nitpick: Why don't you stay consistent and use Open Sans for all the main text and the logotype at the top. Having "Haskell" in Ubuntu when the rest of the site is not stylized like that looks a little silly.
I didn't like the new iOS7 icons and I categorically dismissed the Yosemite icons as well. In light of this article, I realize, these icons /make sense/. More than that, it forced me to actually look closely at them. And I also realized that I don't like the icons in Mavericks either, I was just used to it already.
The consistency and pattern behind the new icons is well thought out, and the use of subtle lighting effects (the blue and orange undertones) is great art direction and seems to pull things together in a great way.
What I don't like is the bright colors and the undertone of a "default" feeling -- like how many of the icons feel like generic dingbats. But this also seems consistent with Apple's use of Helvetica, which gives me the same feeling. Which is somewhere between totally not noticing it's there, and feeling like it's an evil faceless government/corporation.