Traditional media is no longer the only source of news. Internet and social media have become the main platform for news sharing.
According to Pew Research Center 62% of Americans get their news from social media. This means anyone can create and share news stories, regardless of their truthiness.
3D printing is the process of creating a three-dimensional object by adding many layers of material together. This process is performed by a computer controlled machine commonly called a 3D printer. This article will primarily be discussing the Fused Deposition Modeling(FDM) method of 3D printing. Most FDM printers will heat up plastic and push it out from a nozzle. This process is called extruding.
Data visualization projects are probably what first drew me to software. I loved the idea of creating tools with beautiful interfaces that allowed people to see, interact, and play with big systems and concepts that are ordinarily hidden from view. Our lives are shaped and shaken by complex forces; making them tangible is a potent challenge, and one that really speaks to me.
In this post, I’d like to talk about some of the ways data visualization holds utility as a means of democratizing systems thinking, some considerations for how this can be effectively achieved, and how we might think of data visualization as a tool in our kit when approaching Big Serious Complex Problems.
Open Source software is ubiquitous today as a popular way to distribute software freely within the community. However, software licensing that is built on top of intellectual property laws is easy to overlook. Github shows that the percentage of their licensed public repositories has never passed 25% since 2009. Understanding these licenses and making the correct decision for a program can transform them into tools that can help creators’ intentions and goals for a project.
Game Theory is a field shared by math and economics that aims to describe strategies and outcomes of games. A game is simply a set of possible decisions and their outcomes. While Game Theory is immediately applicable to certain board games (Tic-Tac-Toe and Chess among others), its usefulness goes far beyond into areas such as public policy and business strategy.
Over the past year, I’ve been working as the solo designer embedded in a team of mostly developers and one project manager designing web experiences and publishing software for one of our clients, Rivals.com. We follow an agile methodology and work hard to effectively and efficiently integrate design. This blog post breaks down the major phases of our process and illustrates, at a high level, the role of design throughout.
Have you ever heard the term “esoteric programming language” and not known exactly what it was referring to? If so, this blog is for you, and hopefully an entertaining jaunt if not.
Esoteric programming languages are a unique class of programming languages that are generally NOT designed for everyday use on projects such as a website or phone app. Instead,
they are designed with a goal in mind, such as being a difficult as possible to program in, or to layout the code into a physical space that has meaning. Amusingly enough, even though they are often rather crazy, they also tend to be Turing complete which is quite impressive considering they weren’t necessarily designed with that goal in mind.
Kotlin is a JVM language that hit version 1.0 about a year ago (February 2016).
It is developed by JetBrains, the same people who make my favorite suite of
IDEs. The language itself is open-source under the Apache License 2.0 and is
developed as a community project over at kotlinlang.org. Kotlin is something
that I have become rather excited about over the past year. This post’s goal is
not to teach you Kotlin but to get you excited about it!
Machine learning (a field of artificial intelligence) is a rapidly expanding technology that we see in use more and more in our daily lives. It is used to give us more accurate results when we do an internet search, suggest products to us when we are shopping, and offer diagnoses to our maladies.
When developing websites it is important to consider your audience and how they interact with your application. This can be even more significant for a person with disabilities. Even the most stunning visual presentation can lose its value when the content cannot be interpreted by an individual due to, for example, a learning disability or difficulty seeing. Therefore, it is important, when doing any development or design, we do not dismiss the 1 in 5 people that would benefit on an accessible web.