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Random links for the week of April 10 - Web Directions

Random links for the week of April 10

John Allsopp

11th April, 2022

@johnallsopp

some weeks I write a thematic weekly email/post. Others I just throw together a bunch of links to things I’ve found interesting recently.

This week, the latter! Or is it?

Ways of Being, a new book by James Bridle

James Bridle is one of the most popular speakers we’ve ever had at our conferences. His 11 year old presentation, “waving at the machines” (the first ever presentation at one of our events we recorded on camera, a you can ad should watch it here) still shows up in search results in our analytics more or less every day.

In the decade or more since, James has developed an extensive and challenging body of work–from the powerful public art piece Drone Shadow, to the BBC radio series New Ways of Seeing (which references John Berger’s transformative series Ways of Seeing from the early 1970s).

This week he published “Ways of Being, a new book about AI, non-human intelligence, ecology, biological computing, more-than-human relations, and much else”. With blurbs by Dr. Jane Goodall, and Brian Eno, among others, well, to say it comes highly recommended would be a considerable understatement.

Agile and the Long Crisis of Software

I have a confession to make. As someone who has thought about and done software engineering for a long time (a final year unit of my computer science degree was in the new discipline of Software Engineering, where we methodically studied the novel Waterfall approach to software engineering–look it was 1988) I have always been a bit skeptical about the Agile methodology. Especially as it seems in many cases to have increasingly become a “capital A Agile” set of rituals (and I’ve spoken and written a fair number of times about ritual, what the Dao De Ching refers to a ‘the husk of true faith’).

Now, the older I get, the the more I try to pay attention to confirmation bias, but this piece on the history of (and challenges with) Agile I found very readable and largely in line with my biases. Whether you are an adherent, opponent or skeptic, it’s a very worthwhile essay that grounds Agile in the history of Software Crises (the term was originally coined in 1968 at the first NATO Software Engineering Conference) and considers some subtle implications and consequences of the adoption of this methodology.

100 Cool Web Moments

Chrome has just turned 100 (well, has had its 100th release–which as I mentioned a couple of weeks back might just break a bunch of version checks that developers use on UA Strings).

To celebrate the Chromium Dev team published a list of 100 cool moments in the Web over the last 13 years, since Chrome launched. My favourite? Wired’s “The Web is Dead” cover article from August 2010. Right up there with their Apple “Pray” cover of 1997, predicting the end of Apple.

When it comes to predictions, go hard or go home I always say.

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