Good point. I just checked our company's web analytics and IE makes up about 2% of web traffic. So it's not dead yet, but I guess you can make a case for not supporting it.
I thought CSS variables were still not fully supported enough to use in production. I know you can use a polyfill, but that seems to detract from the minimalist approach of these basic CSS frameworks: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-variables
Hey very cool! I work as a contractor within the NASA Earthdata team and I'm always finding interesting things like this as I learn more about the program. NASA is a great steward of what I think is some of the most important data we have about our planet. Much of it is publicly available, but not many people know about it.
I'm sitting here reading this after spending the last two days at Goddard Space Flight Center in MD and I can pretty much assure you that the engineering talent there would run circles around the folks building social apps in the Bay Area. Have to agree with @drpancake here, this attitude is the primary reason I stay away from SF.
Tables are for tabular data--designing with HTML/CSS isn't perfect, but using tables for layout is an even less-elegant solution. It leads to a markup soup of nested tags and tables and difficult-to-maintain codebase. Good design and good markup go hand-in-hand and often you need to strike a balance between flashy visual design and solid underlying structure. This is also why visual designers should understand how their designs get implemented in HTML and CSS--it will create a restraint and limit the amount of "hacks" you have to do to make a design work.
Also remember that not everyone views the web in a browser. Having well structured markup helps those that use screen readers or alternate methods of browsing the web.
This. If your company clears one million in yearly sales and spends $980,000 to make that happen--you are running a $20,000 per year company. There is nothing wrong with this, but I hate when these metrics get thrown around without context. There are $1M companies that make less profit than a hot dog cart (which subsequently, in the right location is a damn good business).
I agree completely, but I also teach non-CS students mostly in design. If version control is a foreign concept to some CS students, it's not even on the radar of most of my design group.
This is the case in the classes I teach. We use Git as the primary vehicle for submitting assignments and tracking work. I usually spend the first week introducing students to the Linux shell and interacting with Git and Github.
I agree that there are more important concepts that need to be covered in freshman/intro level CS courses, but some of the graduates I was meeting and interviewing had not even heard of version control or source code management, let alone spent any time collaborating with a team of developers. They were not getting any exposure to it at any level within their program. It didn't even seem like something they had been introduced to. IMO, source control management should be as essential as ssh-ing into a remote server or running/compiling a program in the shell.
In the US -- there is no "minimum amount when authorities check bank accounts" -- they can't legally do that. You are required to report all income to the IRS regardless of source and it's generally not a good idea to mix personal and business accounts. An LLC, EIN and bank account take about 1 hours worth of paperwork and you're generally set to start exploring the business side of an idea.
Former student pilot here: you literally spend countless hours on "coordinated turns" which involve proper use of both roll and yaw controls (ailerons and rudder). It's much more difficult to do it properly than most people think.
Also, I would describe landing a small plane--and I've heard others describe it this way--as a "controlled crash." You are basically stalling the thing on top of the runway.
"But wait until you see the light! Software today is intelligent! Asynchronous front ends generated from esoteric scripting languages running on clusters of distributed virtual machines around the globe! Death to repetition! It’s more productive! It’s scalable! It’s fault tolerant! I followed the light and it only ended in darkness."
I also don't understand comments like "we can make drastic changes in the UI without any change on the backend"
In Wordpress or a Rails App, I can change the entire UI without having to touch any "backend" code (controllers, models, functions, etc). Am I missing something here?
This. I just started contracting with a company full of Rails developers. They expect me to be able to implement my designs within the Rails ecosystem and also expect that I generally understand how to function within a Rails development group.
I also teach this to my web design students. We start every semester learning basics in the command line and how to use Git/Github to collaborate with other people in a dev team. They are required to turn in all their assignments via Git pushes. You will never be designing in a vacuum and the ability to seamlessly integrate into whatever dev environment is already established at a company is a huge selling point for new grads looking for a job.
This again? This debate surfaces every other month and the arguments are always the same. Basically, it all comes down to the job and the person. In big organizations, sometimes designers can get away with only being Photoshop people. In smaller firms, designers have to be more flexible and should be expected to implement their own designs.
Also, when did HTML and CSS become "code?" These are markup and style languages and are the very basic building block of the web. If you design for the web, you should be able to implement those designs in HTML and CSS. I wouldn't, however, expect that same designer to build out the Rails backend.
I live in Michigan and wife's cousin's husband (still with me here?) was the first in Michigan to get a Model S. I've had the privilege to ride in it and it's an amazing piece of engineering. No detail was overlooked and I truly felt like I was riding in the future.
Everything from the LCD center panel to the door handles popping out when you get close to them--just fucking amazing. I'm a huge supporter of Tesla and everything Musk is doing--crossing my fingers that they can stay viable.
Completely agree--we always start our analysis with basic questions the client wants answered. I also appreciate how in-depth your piece was--we need more research and case studies like this. If I have to listen to one more social monitoring tool salesperson tell me how amazing their sentiment analysis is without ever showing concrete examples and results...
This is a very interesting study--nice work! Our company does social research for all types of companies and we've found most automated sentiment analysis to be subpar (at best, 60% accurate). The problem with just looking at words is that there is no context of the whole Tweet and computers are generally bad at picking up sarcasm, innuendo and turns of phrase that may contain negative words in a positive manner (toward the brand or company).
I realize that this isn't the key focus of your paper, but we've found that sampling and human analysis/tagging is far more accurate at judging the sentiment around a brand, company or topic.