Really excellent technical article on the development of Novation's Launchpad S. It's not that remarkable a product in many ways, but this is a super-detailed post about some of the thought and improvements that have gone into what looks, on the surface, like a most incremental upgrade - but is in fact surprisingly comprehensive and affects many things at low levels. Really clear, well explained - as is the rest of Focusrite's engineering blog.

Newspaper Club is a great product - but I'm really glad Tom's written about the technical underpinnings of the latest version of the code, because it's super impressive. They threw out InDesign and replaced it with their own renderer, written in Cocoa; they have a gorgeous, rich Javascript client that's a joy to use; and they have a development team of 2. TWO. Brilliant work, folks.

"Though adept at mathematics and engineering science, his inventions were all human-centred and focused on the experience and enjoyment of the user. He abandoned his design of a steam motorboat engine, for example, because once he had developed it to rival diesel power it lost its suppleness and "was not a nice thing any more". His car suspensions and the cycle developments were entirely aimed at providing a superior experience for the user. He was very taken, through his association with Bridgestone, with the Japanese sense of the "spirit" of an artefact, reflecting its origins and the care with which it was made. He liked the idea that by seeing and using something one can detect this "spirit", which fitted his own conviction that manufacture and industry are morally rewarding. "Man should make things … Make a profit, of course, but don't take the money gain as the prime judgment."" Great paragraph from this obituary of Alex Moulton.

Excellent, thoughtful article from John Allspaw on what experience in software engineering really looks like. Valuable reading both for software engineers, and also for the people who work with them.

"I think one of the most gut-wrenching realizations that small companies have to make is that they aren’t Apple. Apple spends over a billion dollars a year on tooling. An injection molding tool may cost around $40k and 2-3 months to make; Apple is known to build five or six simultaneously and then scrap all but one so they can evaluate multiple design approaches. But for them, tossing $200k in tooling to save 2 months time to market is peanuts. But for a startup that raised a million bucks, it’s unthinkable. Apple also has hundreds of staff; a startup has just a few members to do everything. The precision and refinement of Apple’s products come at an enormous cost that is just out of the reach of startups.

I don’t mean to say that design isn’t important — it still is an absolutely critical element to a product, and good design and attention to detail will enable a startup to charge more for a product and differentiate themselves from competitors. Apple has raised the bar very high for design and user experience, and users will judge your product accordingly. But it’s important to keep in mind that your true bar for comparison is other startups, and not Apple; and if your chief competitor is Apple, you either need your own billion dollars of cash to invest in product design, or you need to rethink your strategy."

"Where you see gadget, I see process. Moreover, where you see prose, I see poetry: for the UK will continue to have no manufacturing all the while it has lost its collective sense of the poetry of production. The ignominious application of production line metaphors to (the actually very creative) industrial life has helped alienate people from the process of making: whereas Lean Manufacturing instead helps to reconnect workers with the project as a whole, by seeing waste as a thing that erodes value, and that corrodes the relationship between customer and producer by making it unnecessarily fragile and contingent." There's lots to recommend in this piece. I'm not sure I agree about software, even ignoring my vested interested and perspective, but there's so much else of value in here. I think this paragraph spoke most to me, though.

Lovely, just-right blog from Foursquare's engineering team; a nice mix of clarity and detail. They've got some smart folks there.

"The craftsman as hero is a consistent motif in Ruskin’s artistic and social theories. To him, mechanisation and division of labour dehumanise workers, enslaving them to execute exactly the specifications of others. The only way to recapture the humanity in labour is to put the designer back in touch with the tools of the craft and to unleash the creativity of the maker." A lovely metaphorical piece from Matt Edgar, reminding me of how much I need to brush up on my knowledge of the Arts and Crafts movement, if only because of how much I appreciate their sentiments.

"Thunderbirds is Rescue Fiction. All kids respond to rescue scenarios. Rescue Fiction is emotionally maturing - it removes the wish for magic, religion or flying people to zoom in to save the day; it confirms that it is a far more glorious and dazzling thing to invent ways to rescue ourselves."

"An obsessive meeting schedule is an investment in the boring, but by defining a specific place for the boring to exist, you’re allowing every other moment to have creative potential. You’re encouraging the random and random is how you’re going to win. Random is how you’re going to discover a path through a problem that one else has found and that starts with breathing deeply." Oh. That's an interesting way of looking at it.

"Introducing the Dice-O-Matic mark II, now generating the dice rolls on GamesByEmail.com. It is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day." They roll real dice. They roll lots, and lots, of real dice.

"With limited influence, unlimited hands in the pie, a low barrier to critique, and the perception of triviality, frontend engineers are the janitors of software development. Rather than cleaning up trash, the boulder they toil beneath is skew: the distance between team member's conceptions of a project." This really feels very familiar: it's the most under-appreciated art in the stack of software development, and the one that takes the brunt of the crap.

"We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act." This is good.

"It is a commonplace that if it weren’t for computers we couldn’t fly to the moon, or even keep an accurate record of the national debt. On the question of how it does what it does, however, the computer has always remained essentially mysterious—unfathomable to all but a small handful of initiates. An officer of one major computer concern guessed recently that not more than 2% of his employees really know how it works." 2% seems awfully high these days. Detailed, technical article from Life in 1967.

"1352 components driven by a 450 link chain and nickel silver drums, prices range from $275k–$400k." Ignoring the price: do want very much.

"the brains behind the siduhe bridge decided to ignore all those options and break another record instead. they attached the 3200ft cables to rockets and accurately fired them over the valley, becoming the first people to do so." Woah. The photographs are awesome.

Just so beautiful. Now: I just need a video of it rotating on loop, please.

"Ladies and gentleman, Hello World 2.0 uses no fewer than 7 messages queues, three command line applications (which can be executed on physically separate machines), and two Inversion of Control frameworks (but I’m fixing that tomorrow)." Huddle look at moving towards message queues.

"Introduced by Dr John C.Taylor, Invenit et Fecit" - or, to translate, he invented it, and he built it. Video explaining some of the finer points of the chronophage. Stunningly beautiful.

"He calls the new version of the escapement a 'Chronophage' (time-eater) - "a fearsome beast which drives the clock, literally "eating away time". It is the largest Grasshopper escapement of any clock in the world." Stunning new timepiece for the Corpus library. Breathtakingly beautiful.

Brilliant, brilliant little advert.

"The idea of there being these two separate things has to be forced away from our thinking. They are one team, which produce one product. Stick their desks together and see what happens." Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Awesome stuff. This, really, is one of my core backgrounds: not so much being an "HTML monkey" but performing genuine front-end engineering. It's such a shame so many places don't see it as a true skill.

"If you are going to build a RESTful API, do it right. Your developers will thank you for it." Dare is right; the Newsgator REST API is very lacking, to say the least. When I used it, it even missed documented functionality.

"What I want to argue is that humans are uniquely talented at ‘thinking with our hands’, and its wrong to discard ‘intuitive’ engineering as a historical curiosity." Tim Hunkin, on fire, about the importance of making.

Not quite sure what point Poynor's trying to make; in many ways, his list of examples at the end really is a list of design thinking examples - architecture, engineering, etc, seen with a design hat on. Lots of statements I'm uncomfortable with in this.

Exciting-looking new title from O'Reilly, being developed and written via a wiki. Interesting seeing the emergence of several titles on software engineering as craft rather than science at the moment.

"For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers"... pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s." Awesome

"Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against". Sounds awesome!

A nicely-written guide to the way engineers classify problems - and a reminder to us of how other people hear the words we use.

Wonderful talk from Doug Crockford. Must download.

Entertaining parable of the ways computer scientists and electrical engineers differ.

"This page features a paintball minigun that I am developing..." Wow.

Yes yes yes. Walking, tracked, other weird model toys - all powered by real live steam. Beautiful model engineering at work.