#i just need to. fix it. which will require iterative practice. i think

[as-kieran-does]

failed to really dig into drawing fundamentals because it sucks and it's slow and boring

let my art skills depreciate by accident by just not drawing this summer

great, if i have to relearn anyway, that's going to be frustrating, so now is a great time to actually learn the fundamentals...

GOT MAD BECAUSE ITS SLOW AND BORING

[design303reflections]

Week 9 Reflection – DES303

Theme: Accessibility, Feedback, and Iterative Redesign

What I Did This Week

Analysing user feedback and turning it into useful design enhancements for Pulse: Freedom in Motion was the focus of this week. Earlier, I held a targeted user feedback session where participants provided input on four main areas: content, navigation, accessibility, and visual design. I started redesigning the app's main features based on their feedback, giving accessibility and clarity top priority. My objective was to make the app more inclusive and user-friendly while improving the user experience based on practical insights.

Feelings: From Uncertainty to Confidence

At first, I experienced a mixture of curiosity and anxiety. There was a subdued fear of how people would react to something I had spent so much time creating. But after I started reading their thoughts and recommendations, I felt inspired and reassured. Not only was the feedback critical, but it was also involved and constructive. The process felt collaborative because it was clear that people were interested in the app and wanted it to be successful. My perspective changed as a result of the experience from supporting design decisions to supporting iterative growth.

Evaluation: What Feedback Revealed

The comments pointed out both areas that needed improvement and areas that were strong. The idea of integrating progress tracking, mental health, and movement was well received by users. The general idea and variety of dance content were well received. But there were three main areas of worry:

The homepage's visual clutter made it difficult to concentrate.

For mobile-first interaction, sidebar navigation felt strange.

The sense of ownership was lowered by the lack of personalisation options.

More importantly, several users brought up accessibility issues, confirming the importance of going beyond superficial inclusion. More careful design was required in the areas of button sizes, colour contrast, screen reader support, and visual hierarchy.

Analysis: Insights from Redesigning with Empathy

Replacing the sidebar menu with a bottom navigation bar was one of the best ideas. This design decision is supported by research, as bottom navigation is more frequently utilised in mobile UX patterns and is simpler to reach with the thumbs (Babich, 2017). User interaction may significantly improve as a result of this minor change.

The desire for content personalisation was another significant realisation. Users desired the flexibility to change the tempo, tone, and level of difficulty. As a result, I started creating a special settings page that enables users to alter content based on their mood, energy level, and ability. Adaptive design theory, which supports a variety of users by providing flexible pathways instead of fixed tracks, is the direct inspiration for this (Clarkson et al., 2013).

The comments regarding colour schemes also caused me to reevaluate how inclusivity is impacted by visual tone. Despite its popularity, palette 4 was overly feminine and saturated. In order to achieve wider appeal while preserving visual character, I'm moving towards a neutral base with subdued accent colours going forward.

Examining the WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines was the most revolutionary element (World Wide Web Consortium, 2018). I started using best practices, such as clear text hierarchy, adequate contrast ratios, and larger tappable targets. I now view usability as a lens for moral, human-centered design rather than as a checklist after designing with universal access in mind.

Conclusion: Designing with Empathy and Openness

I've learned this week that conversation, not just inspiration, is the source of good design. The app has become more inclusive, targeted, and based on actual needs as a result of hearing user feedback and acting upon it. Pulse is developing into a genuinely human-centered tool, not just an expressive idea. Accessibility is a way of thinking, not a feature. This redesign process reaffirmed how design that is considerate, flexible, and sympathetic can reach a larger audience and foster greater interaction.

Plan of Action: Next Steps

My next actions to build on this week's progress are:

Complete the redesign of the home/dashboard and the updated bottom navigation bar.

Create a working settings page to customise the content.

Use the updated colour scheme for all user interface components.

Use WCAG tools to perform initial accessibility audits.

To get feedback on the redesign and find any lingering issues, conduct a brief usability test.

References

Babich, N. (2017). Bottom navigation: What it is and why it's useful. UX Planet. https://uxplanet.org/bottom-navigation-what-it-is-and-why-its-useful-d1f06f9a7ca0

Clarkson, J., Coleman, R., Hosking, I., & Waller, S. (2013). Inclusive design: Design for the whole population. Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4471-0001-0

World Wide Web Consortium. (2018). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

[andatsea]

XP-Pen Artist Pro 24 Review

I drew this with an XP-Pen Artist Pro 24, which the team at XP-Pen kindly sent to me for review. I’ve had to opportunity to use this tablet on-and-off over the course of the past several weeks, and while there were a few issues my overall impression is positive.

Unboxing / Contents

Apart from the 24” display tablet itself, the package comes with the usual cabling peripherals, plus some bonus extras. If your machine supports a USB-C connection for display, you’ll only need the one cable (plus the power connection). Otherwise, there’s a HDMI and a USB-C to USB converter included as well.

The extras include: an additional stylus, a one-size-fits-all artist’s glove, and a microfiber cloth.

The container for the stylus twists open to reveal 8 extra stylus nibs. Its cap can also be removed to use as a stylus holder.

Driver (Installation & General Use)

There were a few issues with installation, mostly tied to interactions between the driver, Windows 10 and Windows Ink.

Initially, brush strokes were offset from the stylus’ point of contact with the screen by about 3-4 centimetres when attempting to draw in Photoshop CS6. Random straight strokes also occurred frequently. This same problem did not occur in MS Paint or Photoshop CC 2019. This was fixed by changing the UI scaling setting for the monitor in Windows settings from 125% (which was apparently the default) to 100%.

Initially, brush strokes had no pen pressure in Photoshop CC 2019. Photoshop CS6, on the other hand, did (but suffered from the previous offset problem). This was fixed by turning on the Windows Ink setting in the XP-Pen driver menu. So in other words: CC 2019 needs Windows Ink on to recognise pen pressure, while CS6 didn’t, but was affected by UI scaling.

Interestingly, if Windows Task Manager was in focus and Windows Ink was not enabled in driver settings, stylus input was not recognised at all. There may be other programs that have this issue, but this was the only one I encountered so far.

I will say that I’ve had many problems with Wacom drivers interacting badly with Windows Ink and other things in the past before, so these types of issues are not exclusive to the XP-Pen drivers.

I’m currently using driver version 3.0.5, a beta build that has a lovely UI; it’s clear and laid out well. I did also try version 1.6.4 initially, which was fine — the UI for that version was similar to the layout you find with Wacom drivers.

Apart from the issues during installation that required troubleshooting, I haven’t had many major complaints with the driver in day-to-day use, I do think that there are a few areas for improvement, however.

The driver stops working correctly each time the computer is set to sleep and woken up again. To fix this the driver must be exited from the system tray and then relaunched.

There also doesn’t seem to be a way to bind WIN+SHIFT+ARROW to any of the express keys. WIN+SHIFT+ARROW (left or right arrow) is the Windows shortcut to quickly move a focused window to another monitor, so it’s something I use a lot if I’m on a multi-monitor setup. Unfortunately, attempting to set this shortcut in the express keys menu will simply move the actual driver window over to the other monitor while the custom input is not properly recognised in the text field.

The driver does offer a “switch monitor” option for the express keys that when clicked will transfer your stylus input to another monitor, which is extremely useful.

Screen

At 24” with a 2560x1440p QHD resolution, images are sharp and crisp even when viewed from a close range while drawing. Genuinely, it feels great to paint on based off this aspect alone.

The colour temperature is set to 6500K by default in the the driver settings. I think initially it felt just a touch too saturated, but overall I’m fairly happy with the colour display.

The monitor has touch-sensitive inputs on the top right corner: a -/+ for quickly adjusting the brightness, a menu for further settings, and power. I found myself using these to adjust the brightness throughout the day frequently. The power input requires a few seconds of continued contact from your finger to react, which prevents you from accidentally brushing it and turning the monitor on/off.

The monitor comes with a built-in stand. I found it easy to adjust to different viewing angles and also incredibly sturdy. I had no problems leaning on the monitor while drawing.

The monitor also comes with a pre-applied anti-glare screen protector. I wasn’t bothered by it and it seems to be holding out well after several weeks of use. I think the screen itself definitely needs the additional anti-glare, as being a display tablet means that it’s significantly more reflective than my main display.

Stylus

My first impression of the stylus was that it’s lighter in comparison to the Wacom styluses that I’m used to — there is very little to no weighting on the back end of the stylus, which makes it feel noticeably different when gripped. To be honest, though, I forgot about it when I was actually painting. Still, I would prefer a bit more weighting because I do think it makes the stylus more comfortable to hold overall for long periods of time.

There’s also no eraser nib, but I’ve personally never used those on Wacom tablets (I always use shortcuts to switch between brush and eraser instead) so this was a non-issue for me.

The two shortcut buttons on the side of the stylus sit quite flat to the surface, so I think they would be less likely to bother people who don’t use them. I use them a lot, however, and found that they were still easy to click despite being quite flat.

Unfortunately however I ran into a curious issue with using one of the stylus buttons to activate the eyedropper tool. When the “alt” key is mapped to one of the triggers on the stylus, activation of the eyedropper function in Photoshop (tested in both CS6 and CC 2019) is somewhat unreliable. That is, when the “alt” key is held down, the expected result is that once you tap the stylus on the canvas, a “mouse-click” will be triggered and the eyedropper will activate. While this works perfectly fine if you hold down “alt” from the keyboard (or hold down an “alt” that’s bound to one of the 20 express keys), when you hold “alt” from a stylus trigger I found that tapping quickly with the stylus only seemed to activate the eyedropper about 50% of the time. In order to activate it more reliably, I had to press harder and longer with the stylus, which can become tiring and slowed down my painting process. I also found that frequently, pressing down longer would lock me into the eyedropping function until I clicked the trigger key again.

After submitting feedback about this XP-Pen’s R&D department, I was informed that this issue occurs because the stylus is only able to send one message to the tablet at a time. Pressing “alt” on the stylus and trying to “click” at the same time counts as two messages, which may interact with each other unexpectedly. This is why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

The buttons seem to otherwise work completely fine for any other functions that don’t require the stylus to send two simultaneous messages, so unless you’re like me and like to bind “alt” to a stylus trigger, this won’t affect you.

Pen Pressure & Activation Force

Most current-gen tablets flash a big number for the pen pressure levels as a selling point. Having used tablets with 512, 2k, 4k and 8k levels of pressure sensitivity, I’d say I noticed the biggest difference when switching from 512 to 2k, but in my opinion beyond 2k the change is minimal and has no real impact on the way I draw. The XP-Pen Artist Pro 24 comes with 8192 levels of sensitivty, which is a very big number, but in practical application all I can say is that it works the way I expect it to and I don’t have any complaints regarding the transition between pressure levels on the default linear pressure curve.

More importantly I did notice that the IAF (initial activation force) was not as low as I would have liked. Very light input is not recognised, or only partially recognised before dropping off and on again. In a practical sense this doesn’t actually impact me through most of (perhaps 97%) of the painting process, but it did give me pause once in a while when I wanted to make a really light stroke and had to adjust my method. The drivers for this tablet do come with a pressure curve you can adjust to your preferences, so this can help a little, although after some tests I preferred to leave mine on the default setting.

Summary of Drawing Experience (tl;dr)

I think the mark of a good tool or piece of hardware is that it does not draw attention to itself during the course of its use. An ideal drawing experience allows me to be fully immersed in the act of drawing without having my focus shifted to dealing with the tool. With this in mind the XP-Pen Artist Pro performed very well for the most part, but was held back by a couple of issues.

Pros:

The monitor resolution honestly feels great to look at; the pixel density means that I can basically forget about pixels even with my face positioned closer to the screen.

The parallax between the tip of the stylus and the actual position of input was very minimal and basically not noticeable for me, especially after the simple calibration process offered by the driver.

At normal room temperature (say up to about mid-20’s celsius) the monitor screen stays impressively cool to the touch and I was never bothered by resting my drawing hand on its surface even when painting for long sessions.

The 20 express keys and 2 roller rings are extremely helpful and I actually found myself using all of them, despite initially thinking that I’d only need half of them. The keys are also comfortable and responsive to click (which sounds like it should obviously be so, but having used some Intuos iterations in the past which had some very annoying-to-click express keys, I don’t take this feature for granted anymore).

Cons:

The driver needs to be restarted everytime the computer wakes from sleep in order to work.

Higher IAF was noticeable when very light strokes were desirable. Also, the input will on rare occasions glitch by performing a completely straight max opacity + max brush size stroke. This seemed to happen primarily when I was trying to get light strokes to register. (It didn’t happen often enough to bother me much since it’s just a quick undo, but it did happen enough times that I noticed it.)

The issue with eyedropping using “alt” mapped to a stylus trigger as detailed above. Quite unlucky for someone like me who has over a decade of muscle memory for this particular mapping.

Overall, as I said at the beginning, my impression of the tablet is positive. While I think it has room for improvement when it comes to driver performance and the initial activation force especially, it also has a lot to offer at a highly competitive price point ($900USD at retail), and it would’ve been amazing if something like this had been available to me back when I first started digital painting. As I do enjoy using it for the most part I’ll probably continue to use it on-and-off in future.

[spectrumed]

4. body

Do I have body issues? Well... yeah. Who doesn’t? I absolutely do not like being fat, that’s something I’d change about me. And I probably should bulk up a little, go to the gym. My diet isn’t terrible, I don’t eat any fast food, but I could still always eat healthier. More greens, less beans. But most of all, my biggest body issue is that I don’t really associate myself with my body. My mind feels disconnected from my body. The day scientists invent a way for us all to live as brains in jars on wheels, I’m there standing in line for a chance to become all cerebral. Being physical, it’s just so messy, so awkward, so uncomfortable. You feel pain, you feel embarrassment, you feel horny. Nothing good comes from having a body. If you were just a brain, you could go on thinking and calculating and just generally having a good mental time. Or you’d start feeling suffocated and trapped trying to move your limbs and realising that they have been all chopped off. Hmm… Maybe it’s more complicated than I initially thought.

I don’t understand people who enjoy physical activities. Let it be clear before we delve into this long rant of mine complaining about all things gymnastic, this is not particularly an autistic trait. In fact, there are plenty of autistic people who may excel as athletes, their drive and obsessive personality traits becoming quite useful in developing that discipline that is required to fully commit to becoming an all-star jock. Not all autistic people are reprehensible nerds. Some autistic people are actually quite sexy. Some even have abs. But that’s not me. That’s not my clan of autistic people. I like drawing maps. I like thinking about things. I like making cocktails. The only part of my physical body that I like to put strain on is my liver. Don’t make me go on a run. There isn’t an armchair in this world that I wouldn’t want to sit down in, even the ones that used to be owned by old chain-smokers that have that awful aroma that sneaks into your nostrils and makes you worry about second-hand lung cancer. Sitting is great. I like sitting. Also lying down. Lying down is good.

Am I lazy? No, I don’t think so. Maybe a little, but here’s the thing. I can’t control the things I obsess over. There’s a great deal of overlap between autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit disorder. If you’re reading this and you’re a fellow friend on the spectrum, you may have gotten diagnosed with both. One of those rare times in my life I have attended group therapy, more than half the group were diagnosed with both. I, however, am not. But seeing as the two conditions are so intertwined, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a facet of autism involves difficulties in trying to focus on something, or even trying not to focus on something too hard. If you were to judge my tenacity, my ability to keep going, based solely on how I perform during physical tasks, you’d think I was the least resolute person on the planet. But then you’ll find me, some time later, staying up until four in the morning drawing another map. A map that’s really just a different take on another map that I drew earlier, that itself was a reworked version of a previous map that I drew but didn’t like, that actually began as a second iteration of one map I drew that was actually wholly different, that was based on a map of Europe but if Denmark never existed. How many maps have you drawn Fred? Why don’t you go mind your own business, you nosy ferret.

The DSM-5 (the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. You can think of it as something akin to a bible of psychology, which is definitely an inflammatory way to refer to it, but I’m gonna go with it! Because I’m a wildcard, and that’s just how I roll,) includes this section as part of its diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder.

Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (e.g., strong attachment to or preoccupation with unusual objects, excessively circumscribed or perseverative interests).

Now, I personally don’t relate to that at all. There’s nothing abnormal in my intense love for maps. The fact that maps aren’t as widely cherished as they ought to be is a fault of others, and I refuse to acknowledge that this may be a part of my character that could be perceived as quirky, or out of the ordinary. But, still, for the sake of argument, let’s presume that I can get, at times, excessively circumscribed. I’d like to say that I’ve only ever engaged in excessive circumscribing in my privacy away from onlookers, but I am afraid that I may have allowed some of my excessive circumscribing to happen in public. I definitely do apologise for that. I will try to do better in the future. But you never know when you’re about to experience some excessive circumscribing. The best you can do is keep it limited.

I don’t know how neurotypicals work. So, you don’t feel these kinds of obsessions? These moments of intense focus? These fixations? Then, you lack passion? Are you heartless? Soulless? Or are you just weak? Are you too feeble to hold steadfast working on a project all night long? To lose touch with your sense of hunger, your need for sleep, and all contact with any other human person? My fixations may come across as strange, but to me, your lack of fixations come across as bizarre. The world is endlessly fascinating. Have you never felt that compulsion to just fully immerse yourself in a topic that allows you to forget about your physical body for just that moment in time? The body cannot hold me. I wish to absorb as much information as I can. If I could astral project, by gods, I would astral project. To decouple your consciousness from your mushy brain for just that little bit, to go soaring across the landscapes, to explore the cosmos, just free of all things corporeal, that would be swell. How terrible isn’t it, when you’re deep in research, learning all about the mystical religious practices of the long-dead hierophants of the ancient world, to be drawn back into the present by the sudden need to urinate? There is something so dreadfully mundane about possessing a human body. If only we could all be celestial beings allowed to just be without the biological needs associated with having flesh and blood and bone and bladders.

I am not religious, nor am I spiritual. I do not believe that there is an immaterial world that lies above the material. I do not believe there is an astral plane. I think that one of the terrifying things about living is knowing that we do not possess such a thing as an eternal soul, that all things are temporal, and that ultimately, we have to come to terms with that. It’s not so terrible. In some ways, the temporal nature of life can be its biggest blessing. All things must pass. Sure, that does include the good times, like that vacation you spent as a child wishing that it would never end. But it also includes the bad times. The heartbreak you feel from a failed relationship. The grief you feel after the passing of a parent. The depression some of us are burdened with. Some days are worse than others. But they too will pass. One of the remarkable things about the human body is its ability to bounce back from injury. To change and evolve in ways we sometimes find unthinkable. The brain, likewise, is transformational, capable of incredible developments. We’re not fixed in stone. We’re not eternal. Which is a good thing. It is what allows recuperation and progress. I should be thankful to my body for being there, even when I’m not. After all, isn’t your body your temple?

I am able-bodied. Am I disabled? There’s naturally a lot of questions that surround how we ought to understand mental illness or neurodiversity in regards to disability. Does autism spectrum disorder count as a disability? Well, yes, it can be considered a learning disability. It is certainly something of a handicap, you are experiencing struggles that most people don’t experience. But to your average layperson, your typical dullard who spends their time watching reality TV, drinking beer, and being happy, what counts as a disability to them? Would they see me and think I was disabled? I’m not in a wheelchair. I don’t walk with a cane. Though I will occasionally “stim,” make small repetitive moments with my hands or legs, I do not exhibit any kind of physical symptoms. If I told them that I was disabled, they’d scoff and tell me that I’m just making it up for attention. They’d say I’m probably just trying to mooch off the government, scoring welfare checks while doing nothing to contribute to society. I’ve got all my limbs. I am not sickly. I am actually quite strong, due to being a big and tall man, I am able to carry quite the load. So, I have no reason to not be a fully productive member of society, right? And yet, here I am, feeling at most times utterly perplexed by anything physical. Probably because I am just lazy, right?

I don’t think laziness is a thing. What is laziness supposed to actually be? Tiredness? If a person is perpetually tired, then they’ve likely got a sleep disorder. To call them lazy would be callous. There are plenty of overworked people that get called lazy, especially by tyrannical overseers who think of their charges as mere workhorses whose only purpose in life is to toil away in the factory until the day they die. Intolerable parents who see their terminally sullen child and instead of wondering what is making them so upset decide to deride them for their lack of ambition. Are you lazy when you are procrastinating? No you are just being a tad irresponsible, maybe, deciding to skip out on chores in order to play video games or masturbate. But you’re not just doing nothing. People generally don’t enjoy doing nothing. We need something to occupy ourselves, to fill that vacuum we all feel whenever we’re just sitting still. I am someone who appears to be comfortable just sitting still, but that’s because I’ve learned, since a very young age, to entertain myself with my own thoughts. To fantasise, to daydream, to do anything I can to escape from the void that is doing absolutely nothing. Boredom, that’s terrible. Boredom is existential dread. Of all the motivations that drive humans, love, spite, jealousy, or pride, I think the need to evade boredom is one of the most prevalent. Humans would rather experience electric shocks than sit alone in a room being bored.

I am not lazy, I am merely… excessively circumscribed. For as much as this may be a specific diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder, I think it is also a common trait amongst all humans. There will always be within us a pull to do something other than the thing that we’re really supposed to be doing, that does not make us lazy, that just makes us terrified of boredom. Sure, you know that you’re supposed to mow the lawn, but that's just so dreadfully tedious, you just would rather be working on perfecting your new stand-up comedy routine. Thinking up jokes to tell on stage is so much more stimulating than cutting grass. And who cares if your lawn grows a little wild? Lawns are a scam, imposed by fascists to make us think grass in its natural state is ugly. All grass is beautiful, whether it is cut short or it is allowed to grow long. Do the thing that fulfils you. Allow yourself to become immersed in passion, to forget about those things that hold you back, the little silly things we’ve convinced ourselves is important. Stay up late, if you wish. You’re gonna kill it on open mic night, bud!

Yes, it is a problem when your obsessions grow so singular that you forget to feed yourself. When you forget personal hygiene, when you become trapped in your own apartment looking like some feral rodent caught in a cage. Like always, the key is moderation, and I know that from time to time, you may have to entertain a boring task or two. Clean your room, brush your teeth, trim your pubic hair, try to give an impression that you are taking care of yourself. If for anyone, do it for your mother. She will be happy seeing you looking like a civilised individual, wearing clean clothes and not looking malnourished. But don’t ever chastise yourself for being lazy. Laziness is a sin that we’re all guilty of, and if we’re all guilty of it, is it really a sin? Or is it just part of what it means to be a human? To be a messy creature made out of flesh and blood and bone and the occasional bladder. In the end, I’m more happy than displeased at having a body. It’d be much harder to type on a keyboard if I didn’t have fingers.

Still, I wish I wasn’t fat.

[noredinktech]

☄️ Pufferfish, please scale the site!

We created Team Pufferfish about a year ago with a specific goal: to avert the MySQL apocalypse! The MySQL apocalypse would occur when so many students would work on quizzes simultaneously that even the largest MySQL database AWS has on offer would not be able to cope with the load, bringing the site to a halt.

A little over a year ago, we forecasted our growth and load-tested MySQL to find out how much wiggle room we had. In the worst case (because we dislike apocalypses), or in the best case (because we like growing), we would have about a year’s time. This meant we needed to get going!

Looking back on our work now, the most important lesson we learned was the importance of timely and precise feedback at every step of the way. At times we built short-lived tooling and process to support a particular step forward. This made us so much faster in the long run.

🏔 Climbing the Legacy Code Mountain

Clear from the start, Team Pufferfish would need to make some pretty fundamental changes to the Quiz Engine, the component responsible for most of the MySQL load. Somehow the Quiz Engine would need to significantly reduce its load on MySQL.

Most of NoRedInk runs on a Rails monolith, including the Quiz Engine. The Quiz Engine is big! It’s got lots of features! It supports our teachers & students to do lots of great work together! Yay!

But the Quiz Engine has some problems, too. A mix of complexity and performance-sensitivity has made engineers afraid to touch it. Previous attempts at big structural change in the Quiz Engine failed and had to be rolled back. If Pufferfish was going make significant structural changes, we would need to ensure our ability to be productive in the Quiz Engine codebase. Thinking we could just do it without a new approach would be foolhardy.

⚡ The Vengeful God of Tests

We have mixed feelings about our test suite. It’s nice that it covers a lot of code. Less nice is that we don’t really know what each test is intended to check. These tests have evolved into complex bits of code by themselves with a lot of supporting logic, and in many cases, tight coupling to the implementation. Diving deep into some of these tests has uncovered tests no longer covering any production logic at all. The test suite is large and we didn’t have time to dive deep into each test, but we were also reluctant to delete test cases without being sure they weren’t adding value.

Our relationship with the Quiz Engine test suite was and still is a bit like one might have with an angry Greek god. We’re continuously investing effort to keep it happy (i.e. green), but we don’t always understand what we’re doing or why. Please don’t spoil our harvest and protect us from (production) fires, oh mighty RSpec!

The ultimate goal wasn’t to change Quiz Engine functionality, but rather to reduce its load on MySQL. This is the perfect scenario for tests to help us! The test suite we want is:

fast

comprehensive, and

not dependent on implementation

includes performance testing

Unfortunately, that’s not the hand we were given:

The suite takes about 30 minutes to run in CI and even longer locally.

Our QA team finds bugs that sneaked past CI in PRs with Quiz Engine changes relatively frequently.

Many tests ensure that specific queries are performed in a specific order. Considering we might replace MySQL wholesale, these tests provide little value.

And because a lot of Quiz Engine code is extremely performance-sensitive, there’s an increased risk of performance regressions only surfacing with real production load.

Fighting with our tests meant that even small changes would take hours to verify in tests, and then, because of unforeseen regressions not covered by the tests, take multiple attempts to fix, resulting in multiple-day roll-outs for small changes.

Our clock is ticking! We needed to iterate faster than that if we were going to avert the apocalypse.

🐶 I have no idea what I’m doing 🧪

Reading complicated legacy Rails code often raises questions that take surprising amounts of effort to answer.

Is this method dead code? If not, who is calling this?

Are we ever entering this conditional? When?

Is this function talking to the database?

Is this function intentionally talking to the database?

Is this function only reading from the database or also writing to it?

It isn’t even clear what code was running. There are a few features of Ruby (and Rails) which optimize for writing code over reading it. We did our best to unwrap this type of code:

Rails provides devs the ability to wrap functionality in hooks. before_ and after_ hooks let devs write setup and tear-down code once, then forget it. However, the existence of these hooks means calling a method might also evaluate code defined in a different file, and you won’t know about it unless you explicitly look for it. Hard to read!

Complicating things further is Ruby’s dynamic dispatch based on subclassing and polymorphic associations. Which load_students am I calling? The one for Quiz or the one for Practice? They each implement the Assignment interface but have pretty different behavior! And: they each have their own set of hooks🤦. Maybe it’s something completely different!

And then there’s ActiveRecord. ActiveRecord makes it easy to write queries — a little too easy. It doesn’t make it easy to know where queries are happening. It’s ergonomic that we can tell ActiveRecord what we need, and let it figure how to fetch the data. It’s less nice when you’re trying to find out where in the code your queries are happening and the answer to that question is, “absolutely anywhere”. We want to know exactly what queries are happening on these code paths. ActiveRecord doesn’t help.

🧵 A rich history

A final factor that makes working in Quiz Engine code daunting is the sheer size of the beast. The Quiz Engine has grown organically over many years, so there’s a lot of functionality to be aware of.

Because the Quiz Engine itself has been hard to change for a while, APIs defined between bits of Quiz Engine code often haven’t evolved to match our latest understanding. This means understanding the Quiz Engine code requires not just understanding what it does today, but also how we thought about it in the past, and what (partial) attempts were made to change it. This increases the sum of Quiz Engine knowledge even further.

For example, we might try to refactor a bit of code, leading to tests failing. But is this conditional branch ever reached in production? 🤷

Enough complaining. What did we do about it?

We knew this was going to be a huge project, and huge projects, in the best case, are shipped late, and in the average case don’t ever ship. The only way we were going to have confidence that our work would ever see the light of day was by doing the riskiest, hardest, scariest stuff first. That way, if one approach wasn’t going to work, we would find out about it sooner and could try something new before we’d over-invested in a direction.

So: where is the risk? What’s the scariest problem we have to solve? History dictates: The more we change the legacy system, the more likely we’re going to cause regressions.

So our first task: cut away the part of the Quiz Engine that performs database queries and port this logic to a separate service. Henceforth when Rails needs to read or change Quiz Engine data, it will talk to the new service instead of going to the database directly.

Once the legacy-code risk has been minimized, we would be able to focus on the (still challenging) task of changing where we store Quiz Engine data from single-database MySQL to something horizontally scalable.

⛏️ Phase 1: Extracting queries from Rails

🔪 Finding out where to cut

Before extracting Quiz Engine MySQL queries from our Rails service, we first needed to know where those queries were being made. As we discussed above this wasn’t obvious from reading the code.

To find the MySQL queries themself, we built some tooling: we monkey-patched ActiveRecord to warn whenever an unknown read or write was made against one of the tables containing Quiz Engine data. We ran our monkey-patched code first in CI and later in production, letting the warnings tell us where those queries were happening. Using this information we decorated our code by marking all the reads and writes. Once code was decorated, it would no longer emit warnings. As soon as all the writes & reads were decorated, we changed our monkey-patch to not just warn but fail when making a query against one of those tables, to ensure we wouldn’t accidentally introduce new queries touching Quiz Engine data.

🚛 Offloading logic: Our first approach

Now we knew where to cut, we decided our place of greatest risk was moving a single MySQL query out of our rails app. If we could move a single query, we could move all of them. There was one rub: if we did move all queries to our new app, we would add a lot of network latency. because of the number of round trips needed for a single request. Now we have a constraint: Move a single query into a new service, but with very little latency.

How did we reduce latency?

Get rid of network latency by getting rid of the network — we hosted the service in the same hardware as our Rails app.

Get rid of protocol latency by using a dead-simple protocol: socket communication.

We ended up building a socket server in Haskell that took data requests from Rails, and transformed them into a series of MySQL queries, which rails would use to fetch the data itself.

🛸 Leaving the Mothership: Fewer Round Trips

Although co-locating our service with rails got us off the ground, it required significant duct tape. We had invested a lot of work building nice deployment systems for HTTP services and we didn’t want to re-invent that tooling for socket-based side-car apps. The thing that was preventing the migration was having too many round-trip requests to the Rails app. How could we reduce the number of round trips?

As we moved MySQL query generation to our new service, we started to see this pattern in our routes:

MySQL Read some data ┐ Ruby Do some processing │ candidate 1 for MySQL Read some more data ┘ extraction Ruby More processing MySQL Write some data ┐ Ruby Processing again! │ candidate 2 for MySQL Write more data ┘ extraction

To reduce latency, we’d have to bundle reads and writes: In addition to porting reads & writes to the new service, we’d have to port the ruby logic between reads and writes, which would be a lot of work.

What if instead, we could change the order of operations and make it look like this?

MySQL Read some data ┐ candidate 1 for MySQL Read some more data ┘ extraction Ruby Do some processing Ruby More processing Ruby Processing again! MySQL Write some data ┐ candidate 2 for MySQL Write more data ┘ extraction

Then we’d be able to extract batches of queries to Haskell and leave the logic behind in Rails.

One concern we had with changing the order of operations like this was the possibility of a request handler first writing some data to the database, then reading it back again later. Changing the order of read and write queries would result in such code failing. However, since we now had a complete and accurate picture of all the queries the Rails code was making, we knew (luckily!) we didn’t need to worry about this.

Another concern was the risk of a large refactor like this resulting in regressions causing long feedback cycles and breaking the Quiz Engine. To avoid this we tried to keep our refactors as dumb as possible: Specifically: we mostly did a lot of inlining. We would start with something like this

class QuizzesControllller 9000 :super_saiyan else load_sub_syan_fun_type # TODO: inline me end end end end

These are refactors with a relatively small chance of changing behavior or causing regressions.

Once the query was at the top level of the code it became clear when we needed data, and that understanding allowed us to push those queries to happen first.

e.g. from above, we could easily push the previously obscured QuizForFun query to the beginning:

class QuizzesControllller 9000 :super_saiyan else load_sub_syan_fun_type # TODO: inline me end end end

You might expect our bout of inlining to introduce a ton of duplication in our code, but in practice, it surfaced a lot of dead code and made it clearer what the functions we left behind were doing. That wasn’t what we set out to do, but still, nice!

👛 Phase 2: Changing the Quiz Engine datastore

At this point all interactions with the Quiz Engine datastore were going through this new Quiz Engine service. Excellent! This means for the second part of this project, the part where we were actually going to avert the MySQL apocalypse, we wouldn’t need to worry about our legacy Rails code.

To facilitate easy refactoring, we built this new service in Haskell. The effect was immediately noticeable. Like an embargo had been lifted, from this point forward we saw a constant trickle of small productive refactors get mixed in the work we were doing, slowly reshaping types to reflect our latest understanding. Changes we wouldn’t have made on the Rails side unless we’d have set aside months of dedicated time. Haskell is a great tool to use to manage complexity!

The centerpiece of this phase was the architectural change we were planning to make: switching from MySQL to a horizontally scalable storage solution. But honestly, figuring the architecture details here wasn’t the most interesting or challenging portion of the work, so we’re just putting that aside for now. Maybe we’ll return to it in a future blog post (sneak peek: we ended up using Redis and Kafka). Like in step 1, the biggest question we had to solve was “how are we going to make it safe to move forward quickly?”

One challenge was that we had left most of our test suite behind in Rails in phase one, so we were not doing too well on that front. We added Haskell test coverage of course, including many golden result tests which are worth a post on their own. Together with our QA team we also invested in our Cypress integration test suite which runs tests from the browser, thus integration-testing the combination of our Rails and Haskell code.

Our most useful tool in making safe changes in this phase however was our production traffic. We started building up what was effectively a parallel Haskell service talking to Redis next to the existing one talking to MySQL. Both received production load from the start, but until the very end of the project only the MySQL code paths’ response values were used. When the Redis code path didn’t match the MySQL, we’d log a bug. Using these bug reports, we slowly massaged the Redis code path to return identical data to MySQL.

Because we weren’t relying on the output of the Redis code path in production, we could deploy changes to it many times a day, without fear of breaking the site for students or teachers. These deploys provided frequent and fast feedback. Deploying frequently was made possible by the Haskell Quiz Engine code living in its own service, which meant deploys contained only changes by our team, without work from other teams with a different risk profile.

🥁 So, did it work?

It’s been about a month since we’ve switched entirely to the new architecture and it’s been humming along happily. By the time we did the official switch-over to the new datastore it had been running at full-load (but with bugs) for a couple of months already. Still, we were standing ready with buckets of water in case we overlooked something. Our anxiety was in vain: the roll-out was a non-event.

Architecture, plans, goals, were all important to making this a success. Still, we think the thing most crucial to our success was continuously improving our feedback loops. Fast feedback (lots of deploys), accurate feedback (knowing all the MySQL queries Rails is making), detailed feedback (lots of context in error reports), high signal/noise ratio (removing errors we were not planning to act on), lots of coverage (many students doing quizzes). Getting this feedback required us to constantly tweak and create tooling and new processes. But even if these processes were sometimes short-lived, they've never been an overhead, allowing us to move so much faster.

[pahal-dehradun]

MUST READ FOR DESIGN ASPIRANTS

What is Design

Design is the practice of intentional creation to enhance the world. It is a field of doing and making, creating great products and services that fit human needs, that delight and inform. Design is exciting because it calls upon the arts and humanities, the social, physical, and biological sciences, engineering and business.

Design thinking comprises strategies for finding and solving problems by bringing an understanding of people and society to technology design, focusing upon finding the correct problem before rushing to a solution. We believe that design thinking skills will be a key success factor for a new generation of creative leaders in technology, business, and education.

Design's purview has widened from its historical focus on artifacts to its new, expanded role in developing services and experiences, and improving sustainability, health, and education. In earlier years, designers were trained in form, function, materials, and aesthetics. Today, culture and emotion are central, plus knowledge of societal issues, techniques for subtle persuasion, and the intricacies of complex, interdependent systems. Design education must change.

Design is a field of doers and makers. In the practical world, successful products and services require generalists who can cut horizontally across many of the deep, vertical specialties. Generalists cannot succeed without close collaboration with specialists, while the knowledge of a specialty is too limited to create an effective service or product for people without the aid of design generalists.

Is Design for Me ??

Weird is good :

Students are attracted to design in the first place because they see the world in a different way, slightly askew. They are weird. Most of them have heard this many times in their lives—and it was not intended as a compliment. But Weird is good; it’s an anomaly and it’s unique. If you look at any “successful” person, they are probably being paid to play out the goofiness or athleticism or nerdiness or curiosity they already possessed as a child. Unfortunately for most people, somewhere along the road their weirdness was taught out of them or, worse, shamed out of them. Crushed by the need to “fit in,” they left their quirks and special powers behind. But it is our flaws that make us interesting. We need to not only hang on to them, but hone them. I don’t try to make my students “Designers.” Weird is good, but only if we put it in your work.

Design is not math. This is what makes the work hard. There are no right answers and very few wrong answers. Design is more as an innate skill set that we are born with—a small ember waiting to be coaxed into a larger flame. If you know  how to use your  brains, to make your senses of association and imagery sharp and flexible and urge them to seek their own way and express their individuality and push yourself to think for self, form an opinion—and know that your opinions matter. Essentially, you have to “learn” to be yourself  and put it in your work.

DESIGN EDUCATION – A PARADAIGM SHIFT

“If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.”

In today’s dynamic world, it is imperative to monitor and map trends that have far-reaching impact on the larger society and the resulting implications on preparing design students. Definitely the future requires a different skill set. Employers are more and more looking towards hiring quick learners who can easily swing from one role to another and in the process be more productive for an organization; a definite shift from specialized subject skills that are the primary outcome of a design education, towards life skills.

With the ever changing job market and the industry, flexible ‘new age’ courses are gaining favour among learners as compared to traditional courses and skills. Learners of today are increasingly opting for non-mainstream new age alternate career options.

The role of design and of designers is increasingly shifting towards innova- tion, creative problem-solving, co-creation and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Designers are increasingly invited to the table to tackle complex business, social, and environmental problems that require much more than a visual solution. Design in these contexts is more complex than styling or making; it is an iterative process of redefinition that often produces products, services and experiences that continue to evolve over time.

Design is no longer an elite and exclusive language of luxury products, brands, and services. In this capacity, a designer is no longer viewed as privileged genius, but rather as a strategic partner in a range of contexts from startups to large corporations and governments.

Fortune 500 companies that are not design studios or digital products are creating new positions at the executive level that place emphasis on design. It is becoming common to see designers at the top with titles like Chief Design Officer, Chief Creative Officer or VP of Design at companies like Hyundai-Kia, PepsiCo, Capital One, Johnson & Johnson, and 3M

future needs are also an urgent need . This reiterates that there is a need to reconstruct the education model towards inter-disciplinary approach and revolutionize curriculum by merging and making them more progressive, responsive, real-time, and learner driven (what will industry offer and student readiness for it). A shift from:

·       Disciplinary to inter-disciplinary/ multi-disciplinary;

·       Specialized to holistic

·       Fixed path learning to flexi path approach

·       Product based to systems based

Employability trends: expectation from a young graduate

We are driven by economy of sales and economies of time, which are changing fast and so are the related needs and expectations. ‘Those whom the left-brain corporate masters tolerated as an interesting distraction but not really relevant to the main game, are now not only becoming the main game, they’re rewriting its rules. Designers who were once the barbarians at the gates now have the keys to the kingdom

In a qualitative study, over the last one-year, many design professionals and educators in India were spoken with through formal/ informal interactions in the form of focus group meetings and one on one discussion. These professionals were experts from various domains including product design, accessory design, fashion, visual and interactive communication, advertising, media and journalism, sports management, hotel management. Some important insights were brought forth.

When hiring a fresh graduate, design professionals look for relevant skills and capabilities over degrees. During interaction with industry experts, most of them stated that there is not much distinction in recruiting masters and bachelor level graduates. The preferred candidate should be well aware and be able to incorporate global as well as local factors while demonstrating responsibility towards ethical practices in design delivery.

With continuously changing scenario and the organization structure also altering from clear verticals to network based structure, there is a need for GENERALISTS rather than Specialists, who adapt from one role to another. There is a need for people who will solve BUSINESS PROBLEMS and not just design problems. Graduates should showcase the ability to develop new innovative ideas or improvement to products and processes. They should be able to develop and apply strategic thinking, critical analysis leading to innovative user centred responses.

Looking at the future trends, there is an increased demand for those who can effectively collaborate/connect and work in trans-disciplinary teams, while understanding the importance of individual role and responsiveness in an engaging and collaborative learning environment. There should be increased emphasis on research to generate wise designers who act more as consultants than as pure designers (as they are traditionally described)

Industry prefers to hire graduates with enthusiastic ‘ATTITUDE’ and appropriate ‘SKILLS.’ Experts further elaborate attitude as:

·       Risk taker, challenge the norms, entrepreneurial mindset, adaptability, embracing (open to change and ideas), bring passion to work, patience, multi-tasker, and partnership with technology.

·       Graduate should be passionate about the area of specialization, should show ownership of the creative idea and be excited by it. He/she should have the thinking acumen, should be good with people, should be creative, insightful and a planner. Passionate people with fresh ideas. People who love their work – be proud – be able to say ‘wow’

·       Person not desirous of being in their box

·       Awareness of the ecosystem - Curious about what’s happening in ‘design’. Understand what’s happening in the world

·       Exposure, Willingness & Adaptability: Ability to adapt and quickly pick up nuances of change

·       Wanting to integrate mediums

[uwsnewsfeed]

[ OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT -- FOR REFERENCE PURPOSES ONLY ] EXCERPT FROM WORLD SECURITY COUNCIL “NEW AVENGERS” PRESS CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 26 2020

PAGE 1 OF 214

LEX LUTHOR : Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very special afternoon and thank you all for being here with us as we set a new global precedent. From this day forward, the World Security Council will operate under a new prime directive : accountability. — Now, before we move on to the questions for our esteemed New Avengers, I believe our lovely moderator has some housekeeping to do. Meghan ?

MEGHAN MCCAIN : Thank you, Secretary Luthor. And may I just say what an honour it is to be a part of this incredible event. For those of you watching at home, the questions I’ll be asking select members of the New Avengers, Secretary Luthor, and the representatives from S.H.I.E.L.D., were chosen from anonymous submissions from the general public, along with ones submitted by the free press. Those in the studio audience, please keep your reactions to simple applause as we have a lot to get through today.

PAGE 17 OF 214

MCCAIN : This question is for Secretary Luthor, submitted by Lois Lane of the Daily Planet. Mr. Luthor, it's been over a year since the Met Gala attacks wherein an artifact was reported stolen despite, what I assume to be, your best security present. Is that the same level of care we should anticipate with this latest team of yours ?

LUTHOR : Ms. Lane, thank you. I’m discouraged that the best efforts of both the New York and Gotham Police Departments working in unison were apparently not to your high standards, but the truth of the matter is that mankind will always be fallible. We strive for a crime rate as close to zero percent as possible ; no nation has reached such a number, but that does not mean we stop trying our best.The Met Gala was attacked, an invaluable artifact was stolen. I mourn its loss even to this day, but I am confident the global law enforcement community will track the artifact down and bring its thieves to justice in due time.Moreover, the Avengers have never been, and will never be, tantamount to my own personal security force. They work for the people, as governed by the Accords. 

MCCAIN : Another here from the Daily Planet for you, Secretary Luthor. You're currently secretary of the World Security Council. What have you learned within this position that qualifies your opinion as the trusted one when putting together this team? What separates them from their previously disbanded namesake beyond knowing their identities ?

LUTHOR : I believe my track record as Secretary of the WSC speaks for itself. If you only knew how many insurgencies I, personally, stopped with these bare hands — [ crowd laughs ] Perhaps I should register myself after all. [ more laughter ] — Now, now, this is a valuable question. I’m a public servant, just as these brave men and women to my left, though I can’t say I’ve any super - human abilities. Where my experience is concerned, however, I can say with confidence that no one has launched a nuclear weapon at the City of Manhattan since I took on the role.Regarding the New Avengers, they are individuals filling a role. The public will get to know them as I have, and I can assure you : they are right for the job.

PAGE 55 OF 214

MCCAIN : A question from Mary - Jane Watson of the Weekly Review, Secretary Luthor.  Will the Accords remain a contract between vigilantism and registration, or is the eventual goal to have an ever - editing registry of metahumans available to the public ?

LUTHOR : The Accords themselves serve as a contract. In order to legally practice vigilantism, we expect full disclosure. When it comes to the question of metahuman registration as a whole, I expect you’ll be hearing more about this as the Democratic Primaries roar into full swing. Such a hot - button topic, isn’t it ? 

PAGE 73 OF 214

MCCAIN : Dr Strange, If a single member of the international community had a tool at its disposal that could deftly take out a target and potentially end a conflict but posed significant risk to the civilian population, when should it be deployed, and who should deploy it ?  

STEPHEN STRANGE : What do you mean ❛ if ❜ ? [ the crowd laughs. Stephen Strange does not appear to be joking ] — risk and reward are inexorably tied to one another. Our goal is to work as precisely as possible, but — I’m sorry, was that question meant for me, or the Supreme Leader of North Korea ? Tony Stark is right here, you may have us confused. [ more laughter ]

PAGE 80 OF 214

MCCAIN : An anonymous question for any one of the New Avengers. Is this not simply these governing bodies, historically without military power, enacting military force in the form of these individuals ? 

TONY STARK :  [ static as the podium’s mic is pulled toward himself ] — Yeah, I’ll take this : first, can I just say it’s so nice to see the public really digging in, here ?  That’s what we’re all here for, right, we’re all just trying to make our world safe by any means necessary — well, not any, we’ve been there, haven’t we ? [ chuckling ] — listen, peace in our time has been my life’s work for years.  The United Nations has always had some kind of historical peacekeeping force, those good old blue helmets have been overseeing ceasefires since what, ‘48 ? [ inaudible, as mic is covered, Mister Stark receives a nod from an aide sitting just offstage ]  Yeah, 1948, hey, they’ve even got a collective Nobel Peace Prize, so really, between me — us — and the WSC you’ve already cornered the market on people who’ve made world peace their full - time jobs, people who are damned good at it, force or no.  So to answer your question, yes, it is, if you consider active - duty peacekeeping by knowledgable, intelligent, experienced, and empowered individuals that has saved before and will continue to save countless civilian lives, including some of those blue - helmeted ones, [ he gestures in air quotes ] military force.  And does that really sound like a bad thing to you ?

MCCAIN : Another anonymous question, this time specifically for Mr. Stark. What makes you think any of this is going to work when it clearly didn’t work before ?

STARK : [ it should be noted that Mister Stark has loosened his tie since his last answered question ] The Avengers have worked and worked well since they were founded, not to toot my own horn — really, I’m trying to cut back, that’s what I get for doing that Mean Tweets segment, thanks Jimmy [ smattering of laughter ] — without an iteration of this team we wouldn’t have an island to host this press conference on, so let’s walk it back : it’s Occam’s razor, simple.  Why fix what isn’t broken when you can just adjust what needs adjusting, clarify what needs clarifying, moderate what needs moderating … you get it, right ?  We learn, we try our best, we pretend like we don’t have Steve Jobs quotes pinned up on our fridges and we fail — I’ve got Mark 83 valeted outside, you think all 82 of them before that were perfect from jump ?  I— [ microphone static as Doctor Stephen Strange leans forward ]

STRANGE : —Yes, we’ve all seen your bright red flying Lamborghini. Are you planning on actually answering the question ? [ smattering of laughter from the crowd ] I think what my colleague is trying to articulate is that the Avengers will keep right on getting better and better and better. Indefinitely. Next question.

PAGE 104 OF 214

MCCAIN : A question for S.H.I.E.L.D. from the public: What steps are being taken to further regulate these enhanced individuals ? Like any weapon, how can the public be assured that background checks are being conducted on these so-called superheroes ? 

DIRECTOR SHARON CARTER : [ momentarily inaudible, due to the adjustment of her chair ] — S.H.I.E.L.D. employees are held to the highest extragovernmental hiring standard, and these assets are no exception.  Any Agent under my purview undergoes rigorous testing and investigation in order to quality for their elevated security clearance because global safety and security is our number one goal, and such a position requires the implicit trust of the public.  As part of our continued enforcement of the Sokovia Accords, details and records of each Avengers Initiative asset will be made public as a means of accountability, something they have each submitted to voluntarily as a condition of their registration and enlistment.

MCCAIN : And a follow - up question, Director Carter. What policies will be put in place to protect the individuals who are in compliance with the Accords? Will their families and loved ones be granted some kind of protective detail? What sort of compensation might they face for such a line of work ? 

CARTER : Each member of the reformed Avengers Team is being compensated as an active - duty Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. ; while I’m afraid that the details of our internal benefits and pay calibrations are classified, which I’m sure you can understand, I can assure you that they’re being fairly and adequately paid in direct correlation to the danger and visibility of their new positions.  While these people have bravely made the choice to register themselves, they have not and wouldn’t be asked to make the same choice for their loved ones, who will of course be treated with the same dignity, respect, and care that all families of active - duty Agents receive, including increased personal security upon request, yes.

PAGE 133 OF 214 

MCCAIN : Director Carter, who decides when or where the Avengers are allowed to intervene ? Will there be a public-facing representative ? Will their name be made public ? Without this enacted, how do we know the Avengers wouldn’t be treated like a super elite killing squad ? 

CARTER : [ with visible annoyance ] The rapid spread of misinformation regarding the purpose of this team has been challenging, and I can assure you that no assemblage of superheroes stands here today prepared to act as … just as the United Nations’ Security Council has retained the ability to create and enforce sanctions of all types, including military action, for decades, so will the World Security Council oversee the deployment and management of this iteration of the Avengers, and both Secretary Luthor and myself will continue to act as liaisons.

PAGE 197 OF 214

MCCAIN : From the Daily Planet, and this is for Mister Raymond, why did you agree to try and reclaim the moniker of Captain America instead of making a path of your own ? What improvements or changes are we expected to see ? 

THOMAS RAYMOND ( CAPTAIN AMERICA ) :  [ faintly ]  Well, ma’am, I … [ inaudible as he’s addressed by Mister Stark, static as his mic is pulled closer ]  Sorry, what I said was — [ a ring of feedback, during which he can be seen visibly wincing ]  Anyways [ sic ] the world needs Captain America, ma’am, and when they call you askin’ [ sic ] you to put on that suit, I reckon you got to be crazy sayin’ [ sic ] no.  [ prolonged silence as he sits back again ]

MCCAIN : Again, for Mister Raymond. Do you have any loved ones ? Anyone who isn’t a registered metahuman or capable of protecting themselves outside of your immediate intervention from retaliatory measures ? The FBI and various police enforcement agencies, at their minimum, scrub public record of location, vehicles, and family members for these very same reasons. Is that what’s being provided for you and those on your team as well ? 

RAYMOND ( CAPTAIN AMERICA ) : [ magnified rustling as he seems to test the microphone with his palm ]  I think … sorry, ma’am, but I think if I told you all that, it might defeat the purpose of them doin’ [ sic ] it, don’t you think ?  [ a laugh from the crowd ]  But I can tell you yes, and yes.  [ he nods, then nods again ]  Yes.     

MCCAIN : Last one for Mister Raymond. Did you join this team of your own volition, or under threat of arrest ?

RAYMOND ( CAPTAIN AMERICA ) : [ quickly ]  I’m honored to be here. 

[thweaty]

I think when you break down what the traditional democratic party actually is you realize that bernie isn't at all a democrat. Like on social equality issues such as LGTBQ rights everyone is on the same page but when it comes to prison reform, student loan debt, universal health care and education it is SO different. I took the WaPo which candidate aligns with your views quiz and was low key shocked about how many dem candidates didn't believe in/comment on things that I saw as basic issues

i think we have also kind of entered a time where parties tend to be associated with only their buzz topics... like the left w/ social equality, essentially different iterations of that see thru fence/shorter people on crates analogy, the right w/ uh.. economy? personal rights (kinda)? less of a government role? so it also presents this sort of barrier where people have a very black and white understanding of platforms that aren’t very black and white at all. do i think that putting more money into education and erasing student loan debt is a great idea? hell yeah. do i think that everyone should be able to have access to healthcare? heeeeeeeeell yeah. am i well-versed enough on the social, legislative, and economic implications of those policies to be able to say “well plan A and plan B are, in general, trying to say the same thing, but the nuances of X, Y, and Z make some important destinctions”? admittedly, no. do i think that a lot of voters share a fairly similar level of comprehension? yeah, probably. but humans are inherently emotional people, so when some people see that a candidate doesn’t, for example, support a universal basic income, they kind of blanket it with “well this person doesn’t care about this issue, so i can’t support them.” then, there are other things to consider like cost, feasability of these platforms actually making it through the house and the senate, what these things would require in terms of restructuring what we currently have, and then, if passed, how long it would take to implement. if we simplify dem vs repub to simply left and right, if someone is too far left, are they not still considered left? i think it’s important to recognize that we need to move away from the two party system, but is it truly practical to do so with how our goverment is structured? should a party that only 30% of the country supports be able to be elected? i think that there is a bigger, more fundamental problem that bernie is trying to fix (in terms of our election just boiling down to option A vs option B)-- but even with the most egregiously vile and unqualified president we have, it doesn’t look like this reform is something feasible. especially when, since he’s running as a dem, instead of it making it A vs B vs C, he’s making it A1 vs A2 vs B. what we also need is someone on the other side willing to say “i share a lot of these views, but i either differ on X views or the way to implement them” in order for this to become something more realistic. that, or something needs to happen in less of a high stakes election that can show voters that there are legitimately viable reasons to vote for outside of the typical dem vs repub. splitting the vote within one “party” that’s already wrought with mistrust is not a good idea when the other party is unified enough for such a thing to do nothing but ultimately benefit them.

[momentofmemory]

fictober - day five

Prompt #5: “I might just kiss you.”

Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe (All Media Types/Iron Man Films)

Warnings: Canonical Major Character Death (referenced)

Rating: G

Characters: Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, Howard Stark (mentioned), Peter Parker (mentioned), Steve Rogers (mentioned)

Words: 2397

Author’s Note: taking a short break from the may & peter series bc the prompt didn’t fit, so instead we have a tony-centric character study. cap is referenced but the primary relationship is between tony and howard. i have mixed feelings about this one, honestly, but it’s done before midnight at least, so, ~le shrug~

>>Sins of the Father

Tony had never understood his father’s obsession with Captain America.

If he was being perfectly honest (which he wasn’t), part of that was because he’d never really tried—had actively avoided trying, actually, because Howard had never bothered trying to understand him. It seemed fitting to return the favour. So, when Steven Perfect-Posture Grant Rogers popped out of the ice, God, did it feel like a punch in the teeth.

(Teeth that weren’t as perfect as Captain America’s.)

There’d been one night three weeks before Tony was supposed to move out for college when Howard had announced he’d be going on a month-long expedition to try to find the almighty Captain America, yet again. Tony didn’t remember much after that except a lot of yelling and a lot of hurt, because how dare his father leave them to search for someone whose body had probably decomposed five times over by now.

(Steve popping up thirty years later, obnoxiously alive and younger than he was, would prove this argument to be factually wrong, but Tony still stood by his conclusion.)

He’d wanted nothing to do with Steve at first, furious at his father for being right about the man surviving more than anything. But fate and Nick Fury refused to let him have his peace, and he found that getting to know Steve—and maybe not hating him—had been an even stranger thing than discovering he was alive.

Then Sokovia and the Winter Soldier and Siberia and a grainy video tape from 1991 happened, and all he wanted was to hate Steve. And he did, because god if he doesn’t know how to hold a grudge—Howard taught him a lot about never letting go when it comes to Captain America. But he also didn’t, because he wasn’t Howard, and Steve… Steve wasn’t just Captain America.

Tony spent the next two years doing everything in his power to forget Steve ever existed, which included ignoring calls from Ross about the man’s whereabouts. After one such call that ended spectacularly badly after Ross hinted he wanted information on Spider-Man, Tony found himself sitting in his father’s office, staring at the mockup of the city. It seemed his life had boiled down to the same thing as his father’s: a consultant on the neverending search for Captain America.

Tony flicked up the schematics for a new iteration of Peter’s suit—the upgrades he’d made to his own nanotech needed to be incorporated, just in case Peter ever changed his mind about it. He tapped his fingers on the armrest and stared at the shield hanging on the wall. 

He didn’t understand Ross’s obsession, just like he didn’t understand his father’s. He still didn’t care to try.

One man isn’t important enough to waste all of that time on finding.

Tony maintained this perspective until one moment Peter was standing in front of him, whole and alive and so, so young, and then the next he found himself falling through dust and air because Peter was gone.

He stared at the ash clotting the blood on his hands, and all he could think was, Oh.

This was how one life could be important enough.

An alien flew him across the galaxy and then another one carried him home, and when he saw Steve had survived he couldn’t help the bitter thought that at least his father’s life work wasn’t lost again.

Just his.

After Dr. Cho allowed him out of the infirmary, Tony hid in the penthouse with Pepper and filled every waking moment reading up on the latest time travel theories. The EPR Paradox in particular kept him up for three days straight, until he rejected it on the basis that quantum travel was too theoretical—not to mention risky, even for him.

Then Pepper told him she was pregnant, and Tony's heart lurched out of his chest because he was going to be a father, and seeing Morgan for the first time seven months later awakened something that felt like hope inside of him.

Three months into the kind of sleep deprivation only a newborn baby can provide, Tony snuck down to the lab he’d installed in the garage for the first time since Thanos.

_________________________

The hologram’s failure message projected blood-red light over his hands.

God damn it.

Tony dropped onto the bench and ran his hands through his hair, trying to get rid of the feel of dust and ash. He didn’t know why it wouldn’t work.

“Tony?”

He jerked his head out of his hands and saw Pepper, whose lips pulled thin as she took in the sight of Friday’s projection. “What is this?”

Shame curled in his stomach.

“Just, you know,” Tony slid to his feet and hid his pen behind his back. “Stuff.”

Pepper pulled up the list of iterations Tony had run through the simulation, and Tony winced at the sheer number of decimal places in Friday’s report.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time down here lately,” Pepper said, too casually for it to actually be.

“Gotta keep the old mind busy,” Tony said, closing the charts before Pepper could comment on the hours logged. “Wouldn’t want Morgan thinking her old man was slipping.”

Pepper looked at the physics papers on the desk. “And is he?”

“...Maybe. I just…” Tony paused, and then turned to gesture at the hologram. “What if there was a way to... fix all of this? I feel like I owe it to at least try.”

“I’m not going to stop you, Tony.”

Tony froze. He tore his eyes away from the hologram to look at Pepper, who stood with her arms crossed in front of her. “Hang on, sorry, I think I just had an auditory hallucination. Wanna repeat that?”

Pepper’s mouth twitched. “Tony,” she said, coming over to sit on the workbench. “If you really can do something about this, I can’t stand in the way of that.”

Tony stared at her, and then sat down as well, cautiously—unsure if it was a trap.

“But.”

There it was.

“I am going to request boundaries,” Pepper said. “One of which is that you can’t hole up in here for more than three hours at a time.”

“I feel like we could make allowances, maybe like an every other Tuesday thing, but continue.”

“And secondly, don’t beat yourself up over something you know won’t work.”

“…What?”

“I know you, Tony.” Pepper poked his chest. “You don’t like admitting when you can’t do something. So tell me: is this really possible?”

The Mobius strip rotated languidly behind him, the TEST FAILED alert blinking in rhythm with his heart.

“…No,” he admitted. “Or at least, not any more. The only thing that seems like it could work requires Pym particles, which we don’t have. Even with them, I can’t get the simulation to work.”

Pepper nodded, a mixture of relief and disappointment on her face. Tony wondered if this was how Howard felt: living in a world that couldn’t keep up with his ideas, knowing Cap was out there but not having the tools to do anything about it.

“Okay,” Pepper said. “Then three hours it is. And you have to read to Morgan every night before bed, when she’s old enough.”

“You strike a mean bargain.”

He looked at the simulation again. Pepper was right: there was nothing he could do. Howard had wasted years of his life chasing after Cap, and even though he’d been right about him being out there, that didn’t change the fact that there was nothing Howard could have done to save him, anyway.

“Okay, Pep.”

Tony stood and walked over to the projector, and turned it off. Pepper’s eyes softened.

“Don’t get too excited, I’m sure I’ll find something else to wreck the household with,” Tony said, shutting down the rest of the system. Pepper arched an eyebrow at him and he sighed. “Fine. You got me. I’m sorry I’ve been… Distracted.”

“Mm. That does seem like a problem,” Pepper said. She stood and came up behind him, wrapping her arms around him to trace her fingers along his collarbone. “I can think of a few other ways to distract you, though.”

Tony spun in her grasp and wrapped his hand around her waist. “Oh really? You got something in mind?”

“As a matter of fact, I was thinking I might take you upstairs—”

The baby monitor’s light blinked on and Pepper’s thought was interrupted by the sound of Morgan’s cries echoing through the garage. The six-month-old had apparently woken up from her nap.

Pepper winced.

“…Or I might just kiss you and leave it at that.” She disentangled herself from Tony’s embrace, and Tony whined in displeasure.

Pepper tapped him on the nose with her finger, but kept her promise by following it up with a quick kiss to his cheek. “And you can meet me in Morgan’s room in five minutes with a glass of iced tea and that book on caring for llamas.”

“You are no fun,” Tony said.

Pepper laughed and kissed him again, this time on the lips, which Tony enthusiastically returned.

“I believe Morgan requires your assistance sooner rather than later, Mr. and Mrs. Potts,” Friday said, with a practiced air of professionalism that still managed to sound incredibly pointed.

“Yeah, got that, thanks Fri,” Pepper said, pulling away from Tony with a final squeeze on his shoulder. “Don’t be late.”

Tony watched Pepper go, tapping his pen against his fingers. He looked at the projection table, and thought about all the lonely nights he’d had as a child, and how he’d wished Howard would’ve stayed home just once.

He turned the lights out, and went to be with his daughter.

______________________

Ant-Man was back, and Ant-Man had steam-rolled through all the theories Tony’d studied on and off over the last five years out of sheer dumb luck. And he had Pym particles, enough for a pretty decent sized team.

Tony couldn’t do this.

He’d never fully given up on bringing everyone back, toying with ideas on and off, but had never been able to figure out a solution to the forward progression of time. The Pym particles solved the issues with the Planck Scale, but as far as the Deutsch Proposition went… It’d been five years and he still hadn’t solved it.

When Cap asked him if he could do it, what he thought was I tried, and what he said was “I can’t.”

Tony felt Howard’s disapproval at his back as he watched their car drove off.

And yet he’d said I can’t, but when he stood in the middle of the kitchen and saw Peter Parker in that stupid picture that’s always been his favourite, with their smiles and upside-down certificate, everything clicked.

He asked Friday to pull up the schematics right there on the living room table, but this time, inverted: or, upside-down. 

Friday’s simulation worked, and Tony felt like he’d just found Captain America.

Then Morgan walked down the staircase, and Tony felt like he was six years old, watching his dad leave them again.

Tony coasted through the next half hour in a blur, getting juice pops for Morgan and tucking her in bed, and mostly thinking about how incredibly lucky he’s been. He went downstairs thinking only about three thousands, but the second he saw Pepper everything came tumbling out. She tilted her head and asked a question he didn’t see coming.

“But would you be able to rest?”

Tony looked away, placing the popsicle stick back in his mouth. He worried it between his teeth as he thought about how to put into words everything he’d been harboring over the past… forever, really.

“I’ve been thinking about my dad,” he said, finally. “Howard… never knew how to let go of his failures, and he hurt a lot of people because of it.”

Pepper pulled her knees up onto the couch and rested her chin on her hand. “Sounds like he might have had some problems with ego.”

Tony looked at her in surprise, and she sighed.

“Tony, your father’s obsession with finding Cap was a problem because it was never about Cap—it was about Howard. His own guilt at not being able to do something he felt like he could. That’s not what Peter is for you.”

Tony frowned. “I don’t think we’re on the same wavelength here.”

“You’re not trying to bring him—and everyone else—back because it’s something you need. You’re doing it because it’s something they need. If it was an obsession, you wouldn’t have been able to put it aside all those years ago when it wasn’t feasible.”

This was true—ever since his talk with Pepper, the urge to figure out time travel had become more of a hobby than anything, because it was, after all, strictly theoretical without the Pym Particles didn’t exist. As Morgan had gotten older, he’d learned how to appreciate what was in front of him instead of regretting what was behind. 

That didn’t mean he didn’t still want to make it right.

“This isn’t obsession, Tony. This is a desire,” Pepper said, and then hesitated. “...And it’s not just yours.”

Tony saw Pepper’s own grief over what had been lost flicker over her face, and took the stick out of his mouth and flicked it into the fire. She was right.

“You know there’s a good chance we won’t all make it back.”

Pepper pursed her lips and looked away, but her voice didn’t waver. “I know. But I also know you’ll make it worth it.”

They spent the rest of the night in companionable silence, and the next morning, Tony drove to the Avengers compound.

Tony had forgotten how good the rest of his team was, and it didn’t take long before they had drummed up a pretty solid plan, a full team, and enough time particles to make it work.

He went into the past with Pepper’s words ringing in his ears.

Tony ran into his father and finally said a thank you that he meant, and it was worth it. Tony hugged Peter, alive and whole and so, so young, and it was worth it. Tony caught a glimpse of Morgan, laughing and powerful and thirty-six, and it was worth it.

Tony closed his eyes and let Pepper’s voice wash over him, and drifted off into the black.

And it was worth it.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CONTRACTORS

In big companies software is often designed, implemented, and sold by three separate types of people. Tcl is the scripting language of Unix, and so its size is proportionate to its complexity, and a funnel for peers. By this point everyone knows you should release fast and iterate. Programming languages are for. They don't even know about the stuff they've invested in. But I think there's more going on than this. If you run out of money, you could say either was the cause. Nearly all programmers would rather spend their time writing code and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money from it. Every programmer must have seen code that some clever person has made marginally shorter by using dubious programming tricks. In one place I worked, we had a big board of dials showing what was happening to our web servers.1 Every designer's ears perk up at the office writes Tenisha Mercer of The Detroit News. There are borderline cases is-5 two elements or one?

I decided to ask the founders of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, will destroy you if you choose them. It's due to the shape of the problem here is social. In the arts it's obvious how: blow your own glass, edit your own films, stage your own plays. Only in the preceding couple years had the dramatic fall in the cost of customer acquisition. The organic growth guys, sitting in their garage, feel poor and unloved. So the first question to ask about a field is how honest its tests are, because this startup seems the most successful companies. A good deal of that spirit is, fortunately, preserved in macros. The second way to compete with focus is to see what you're making.

But more important, in a hits-driven business, is that source code will look unthreatening. In DC the message seems to be the new way of delivering applications. White. I'm going to risk making one. But looking through windows at dusk in Paris you can see that from the rush of work that's always involved in releasing anything, no matter how much skill and determination you have, the more you stay pointed in the same business. PR coup was a two-part one. It's conversational resourcefulness. We're more confident. That certainly accords with what I see out in the world.2 Treating indentation as significant would eliminate this common source of bugs as well as making programs shorter. Once you take several million dollars of my money, the investors get a great deal of control.

The dream language is beautiful, clean, and terse. It works.3 It could mean an operating system, or a framework built on top of a programming language as the throwaway programs people wrote in it grew larger. I'm not saying it's correct, incidentally, but it seems like a decent hypothesis. The most important kinds of learning happen one project at a time. Instead of starting from companies and working back to the 1960s and 1970s, when it was the scripting language of a popular system.4 Blogger got down to one person, and they have a board majority, they're literally your bosses.5 Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to fix upon a specific number.6 But as long as you seem to be advancing rapidly, most investors will leave you alone.7 What readability-per-line does mean, to the user encountering the language for others even to hear about it. Users have worried about that since the site was a few months old.8 If it's a subset, you'll have to write it anyway, so in the worst case you won't be wasting your time, but didn't.9

It's exacerbated by the fast pace of startups, which makes it seem like time slows down: I think you've left out just how fun it was: I think the main reason we take the trouble to develop high-level languages is to get leverage, so that we can say and more importantly, think in 10 lines of a high-level language what would require 1000 lines of machine language. Well, that may be fine advice for a bunch of declarations. Trying to make masterpieces in this medium must have seemed to Durer's contemporaries that way that, say, making masterpieces in comics might seem to the average person today. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York, I was very excited at first. Which was dictated largely by the hardware available in the late 1950s. This comforting illusion may have prevented us from seeing the real problem with Lisp, or at least Common Lisp, some delimiters are reserved for the language, suggesting that at least some of the least excited about it, including even its syntax, and anything you write has, as much as shoes have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and sitting in a cafe feels different from working. The Detroit News.10

Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day job, is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who do make it. But the clearest message is that you should be smarter. But hear all the cutting-edge tech and startup news, and run into useful people constantly.11 You won't get to, unless you fail. Running a startup is fun the way a survivalist training course would be fun, and a funnel for peers. It's since grown to around 22,000.12 You may save him from referring to variables in another package, but you need time to get any message through to people that it didn't have to be more readable than a line of Lisp. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it. I'm just stupid, or have worked on some limited subset of applications. This is supposed to be a lot simpler. Whatever a committee decides tends to stay that way, even if it is harder to get from zero to twenty than from twenty to a thousand.13

With two such random linkages in the path between startups and money, it shouldn't be surprising that luck is a big factor in deals. Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common problem: choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of unloading them before they tank. A programming language does need a good implementation, of course. Look at how much any popular language has changed during its life. With a startup, I had bought the hype of the startup world, startup founders get no respect. A real hacker's language will always have a slightly raffish character.14 The eminent feel like everyone wants to take a long detour to get where you wanted to go. But there is a trick you could use the two ideas interchangeably. Their reporters do go out and get users, though. A throwaway program is brevity. I do that the main purpose of a language is readability, not succinctness.15 You can't build things users like without understanding them.

At the moment I'd almost say that a language isn't judged on its own and b something that can be considered a complete application and ship it. They're so desperate for content that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you preferred, write code that was isomorphic to Pascal. When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. To avoid wasting his time, he waits till the third or fourth time he's asked to do something; by then, whoever's asking him may be fairly annoyed, but at the same time the veteran's skepticism. There are several local maxima.16 Defense contractors? When, if ever, is a watered-down Lisp with infix syntax and no macros. Hackers share the surgeon's secret pleasure in poking about in gross innards, the teenager's secret pleasure in poking about in gross innards, the teenager's secret pleasure in popping zits.

Notes

What happens in practice signalling hasn't been much of a long time in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings till the 1920s. Even Samuel Johnson seems to be a good idea to make money.

A related problem that they decided to skip raising an A round VCs put two partners on your own mind. That should probably question anything you believed as a cause as it might take an angel investment from a company's culture.

If you don't think they'll be able to formalize a small company that could be made. There was no more unlikely than it was putting local grocery stores out of business you should be.

If Congress passes the founder visa in a time machine, how can anything regressive be good employees either.

If big companies to acquire the startups, the light bulb, the initial investors' point of a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, but I think what they campaign for. When governments decide how to distinguish 1956 from 1957 Studebakers. How did individuals accumulate large fortunes in an absolute sense, if we think your idea is that parties shouldn't be that the Internet was as late as Newton's time it takes forever.

Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives would work to have this second self keep a journal. While the audience already has to be more at home at the start, e.

Some will say that it also worked for spam. The closest we got to the Internet worm of its identity. Icio.

Rice and Beans for 2n olive oil or butter n yellow onions other fresh vegetables; experiment 3n cloves garlic n 12-oz cans white, kidney, or black beans n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris says that a startup in the US, it would do it is genuine. Com in order to attract workers.

But the early adopters you evolve the idea that could start this way, except in the back of your last round of funding rounds are at some of these limits could be ignored. Comments at the mafia end of the latter without also slowing the former, and also really good at generating your own time in the computer world, write a new SEC rule issued in 1982 rule 415 that made steam engines dramatically more efficient: the attempt to discover the most promising opportunities, it is very vulnerable to gaming, because there's no center to walk to.

Though it looks like stuff they've seen in the first year or two make the kind that has become part of a large chunk of time, default to some abstract notion of fairness or randomly, in one where life was tougher, the television, the more subtle ways in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled. For these companies unless your last funding round usually reflects some other contribution by the high-minded Edwardian child-heroes of Edith Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods.

Mozilla is open-source browser. They may not be led by a big factor in high school kids arrive at college with a truly feudal economy, at least should make what they claim was the recipe: someone guessed that there are before the name implies, you don't, but that we didn't do. They overshot the available RAM somewhat, causing much inconvenient disk swapping, but they hate hypertension. Living on instant ramen, which are a hundred years ago.

I don't think you should probably question anything you believed as a rule, if you're measuring usage you need, you don't have one. Don't be fooled. So managers are constrained too; instead of admitting frankly that it's a seller's market. This is one subtle danger you have a group of people who are both genuinely formidable, and would probably also encourage companies to say how justified this worry is.

One of the biggest winners, which is where product companies go to grad school, because you can work out. It's conceivable that a their applicants come from meditating in an equity round.

So where do we draw the line?

In 1995, but he got there by another path. If you treat your classes as a company if the potential magnitude of the 2003 season was 2. An investor who invested earlier had been trained that anything hung on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. Confucius claimed proudly that he had more fun in this essay, I can imagine what it would have started there.

I'm satisfied if I could pick them, and they succeeded. Consulting is where your existing investors help you even working on Viaweb. If they were taken back in July 1997 was 1. But the change is a scarce resource.

[pinkwessman-blog]

Where Common Machine Learning Myths Come From

There are a lot of misconceptions about ML that can have a negative impact on one's career and reputation. Forrester and ABI Research weigh in.

Forrester studies recently released a record entitled, shatter the seven myths of gadget getting to know. In it, the authors warn, "unluckily, there is a pandemic of ml misconceptions and literacy amongst business leaders who should make vital selections approximately ml tasks." Also see: sites like omegle

whilst executives and bosses speak about ai and gadget studying, they now and again make genuine mistakes that reveal their true degree of information. Forrester senior analyst kjell carlsson, who is the lead author of the report, said in a recent interview that he is heard audible sighs over the telephone whilst specialists listen what lay people have to say.

"whilst the top of product says some thing like, 'we are the use of reinforcement getting to know due to the fact we're incorporating person feedback into the developments modeling,' it is probably not an excellent component," stated carlsson. "i have been on panels with different analysts and i'm listening to aspect like, 'with unsupervised gaining knowledge of you not need people involved or education' and you are like, wait, what?"

abi important analyst lian jye su stated in his experience, maximum executives have a few sort of ideas around the fundamentals of gadget getting to know and the "garbage in, rubbish out" principle, but most of them accept as true with device studying models are black containers and that system studying calls for large quantities of records.

"i'd argue that that is particularly because of the superiority of convolutional neural networks that require big amounts of information and by hook or by crook work higher with more numbers of convolutional layers, and that i consider such perceptions will slowly disappear as soon as other device mastering algorithms become greater famous," stated su. One issue is education. Precisely in which ought to decision makers learn the truth approximately machine mastering? There are lots of practitioner and business-stage options, even though the intersection of the two is what forrester's carlsson thinks is lacking. Kjell carlsson, forrester kjell carlsson, forrester "in which i suppose we want the most paintings and the most assistance is assisting parents from the business aspect understand the technology enough to recognise what is this truely correct for? What sort of troubles can i apply it to?" said carlsson. Following are some of the factors that cause commonplace misperceptions. The terminology isn't properly-understood

part of the trouble is the terminology itself. People every so often interpret synthetic intelligence as machines that suppose like human beings and device studying as machines that examine like humans.

"information scientists aren't the nice at nomenclature," said abi research's su. "i might argue we analysts are partly guilty for this, as we regularly use huge phrases to introduce new technologies."

unrealistic expectations

there may be a standard false impression that ai is one, massive effective thing, which ends up in the perception that ai can do anything. As a substitute, deep learning is now and again interpreted as "better" than different styles of gadget mastering whilst unique strategies are ideal to unique sorts of use cases. It is no longer very useful to just begin with what you need like changing every body in the call center with a virtual agent," said forrester's carlsson. "they are plenty greater installation in an augmenting fashion to assist anyone in the name center."

abi research's su said unrealistic expectancies is one case in which hype takes over rational wondering. In his experience, executives are thinking much less and less approximately waiting for the impossible or the incredible. Lian jye su, abi studies lian jye su, abi studies failure to apprehend the probabilistic nature of machine getting to know

historically, software has been built deterministically, which means a given enter have to result in a given output. The equal is genuine for rules-primarily based ai. On the other hand, gadget mastering has a margin of blunders.

"inside the gadget mastering global, it's perfectly viable that you may by no means be capable of are expecting the element you need to predict because the signal isn't in the records you've got," said forrester's carlsson. Abi studies's su stated one of the arguments towards the usage of device mastering is the probabilistic nature of the outcome. It is in no way as clear cut as the traditional guidelines-based ai utilized in industrial machine vision. Overlooking vital details

an engine manufacturer desired to are expecting when components needed to be replaced. The employer had an abundance of records about engines and engine disasters, however all the information become lab records. There were no engine sensors operating within the subject. So, the model couldn't definitely be deployed as intended.

"there is genuinely nobody inside the agency who oversees all of the various things at the information engineering facet, the device studying facet," stated forrester's carlsson. There's additionally a piece of common sense that comes into play that could wander off between technological abilties and the roi of these abilities. For instance, fashions had been built that endorse accurate bills for salespeople to call. The trouble is that the salespeople had been already aware about those money owed. Failing to understand what machine getting to know ‘success’ method

laypeople frequently count on extra from system gaining knowledge of and ai than is practical. While a hundred% accuracy might also seem affordable, substantial money and time can be spent eking out yet another 1% accuracy when the use case won't require it. Context is crucial. As an example, accuracy stages range whilst someone's existence or liberty is at stake versus the possibility that a percent of a populace is probably mildly indignant by means of some thing.

"there's a whole faculty of concept around quantization, where, depending on the character of the ai responsibilities, an affordable degree of reduction inside the accuracy of ai models can be proper as a change-off, provided this lets in ai to be deployed on part gadgets," stated abi research's su. "in any case, we people are often not as accurate. Having stated that, sure applications together with item classification, disorder inspection, and satisfactory warranty at the assembly line do have stringent necessities that call for repeatability, and that is wherein traditional guidelines-primarily based ai might be preferred."

forrester's carlsson stated anybody can create a model that could quite lots bring about 99. Ninety nine% accuracy. Predicting terrorism is one instance. It takes place so once in a while that if the model predicted no terrorism all the time, it'd be a hyper-correct model. Failing to go after clean wins

science fiction and classified ads lead human beings to accept as true with that they have to be doing some thing incredible with ai and gadget getting to know while there may be a whole lot of cost available in use instances that are not very horny.

"whilst you say gadget getting to know or ai people robotically think that they must be going to some thing that is mimicking human conduct and that's regularly missing the widespread capacity of the era," said carlsson. "device getting to know technologies are truely desirable at running with statistics at scale and doing analysis at scale that we human beings are definitely horrible at."

7 guidelines to maintain in mind

1. Understand the capabilities and limitations of machine studying, and to some extent the makes use of instances to which exclusive techniques are desirable. That manner, you're less possibly to mention something it's technically faulty. 2. One system studying technique does not suit all use cases. Class use instances, which includes figuring out snap shots of cats and puppies fluctuate from finding a formerly undiscovered signal in information. 3. Device gaining knowledge of isn't a set of "set and neglect" techniques. Models in production have a tendency to "waft" this means that they come to be less correct. Device mastering fashions must be tuned and retrained to even maintain their accuracy.

"in software development, there is this information about the want to be iterative," stated forrester's carlsson. "in terms of applications that are relying on system studying fashions, they ought to be even greater iterative because you're iterating at the information, the commercial enterprise use case and the methods that you're using in tandem. None of them are ever virtually fixed at the beginning of a project due to the fact we do not know what statistics you've got, or you do not know what commercial enterprise use instances that statistics should assist."

four. Machine learning accuracy is relative to the use case. Further to considering the dangers related to capability errors, recognise the art of the possible changes over time.

"a 50. 1% pc vision model is wonderful. Or you could say 60% accuracy or 70% accuracy is way higher than some thing we've got carried out before," stated carlsson. Five. Context is essential. Ai and device mastering can not reap the identical results no matter context. Context determines the strategies which can be higher or worse and the extent of self belief this is perfect or unacceptable in a given state of affairs. Context also has a bearing on what information is needed to solve a positive trouble and whether or not biases are applicable or unacceptable. As an instance, discrimination is taken into consideration a awful factor, normally speakme, however it's comprehensible why a bank wouldn't loan just all and sundry millions of bucks.

"in many instances, device [learning] is actually horrific at figuring out beyond biases that had been hidden in statistics. In different instances, the great of the facts matters, which include pixel depend, clear annotation, and a smooth statistics set," stated su. Then again, the cleanest statistics isn't always useful if it's the wrong records.

"oldsters are assuming that machine studying or even ai goes to in some way do something magical whilst the statistics isn't always around and that that doesn't work. [conversely,] folks are assuming that as long as we've got plenty and lots of records, we are able to be able to do something magical, which frequently does not keep either, stated forrester's carlsson. "having bad satisfactory facts at the proper thing [can] without a doubt [be] better than having huge amounts of data on the wrong factor."

6. Remember the fact that machine studying is a combination of hardware and software. Specially, abi studies's su stated the software program abilities will only be as exact as what the hardware can supply or is designed to supply. 7. Traditional guidelines-based totally ai will likely co-exist with gadget studying-based ai for quite some time. Su said a few obligations will continue to require deterministic selection-making instead of a probabilistic technique. For greater approximately gadget studying inside the corporation test out those articles. A way to manage the human-system workforce

5 iot challenges and possibilities for this 12 months

what is subsequent: ai and facts traits for 2020 and beyond

lisa morgan is a contract writer who covers huge information and bi for informationweek. She has contributed articles, reports, and other sorts of content material to diverse publications and web sites ranging from sd instances to the economist sensible unit. Frequent areas of insurance consist of ... View complete bio we welcome your feedback in this subject matter on our social media channels, or [contact us directly] with questions on the site.

[cerastes]

Post-patch, I think the poise system, as handled by Dark Souls 3 is the best iteration of the mechanic.

In DS1 and 2, as long as you juggle your stats carefully and use the appropriate rings, you can reach a balance of weight and agility that can render you optimized to the point that it only plays against you if you don't optimize yourself in the same manner. I'm talking about Ninja Havels. Being able to fast roll while still having an immense wealth of defense and poise made not having these attributes in your character a distinct disadvantage.

DS3 tried to address this with a method that, frankly, wasn't well implemented at first: Poise windows. On neutral, you would always suffer stagger if hit, regardless of how many Havel pieces you had on you. The idea is that poise only comes into place during certain windows of time, at the start of attacks with bigger weapons. The problem with this idea is that these windows were so tight and poise values so insignificant that there might as well not been any poise at all. You could only really tank dagger R1s with the smaller bigger weapons, and unless you had the biggest of weapons and the heaviest of armor, you couldn't reliably tank even curved sword R1s. The Straight Sword superiority was too blatant, and using bigger weapons in general was regarded as challenge running the game under a self-imposed disadvantage. Wanting to make ANY use of poise meant needing to invest a lot of points in your weight capacity so you could wear the heavier armors alongside the heavier weapons that had any poise multipliers and windows worth using at all, and then you had to spend even more points in stamina so you would be able to swing your stupid lump of steel more than twice. It was an immense commitment for a dubious advantage, and even when the conditions were fulfilled, in PvE, this still meant you'd be poise tanking the very damaging AI enemies (not recommended) or getting turtled out in PvP by practically anyone with a brain who wouldn't for the life of them contest with you, reducing fights into dash R1 pokefests.

Come the patch, though, they nailed it. The weight of heavy armor and heavy weapons was reduced, the stamina cost for heavy weapon attacks was reduced, the speed at which dash R1s came out was reduced, especially so with the infamous curved swords and katana class of weapons, the damage of the Dark Sword was appropriately nerfed (this happened a few patches back but it's important to point it out nonetheless for its importance) plenty of curved swords had their ludicrous 2hR1 speed nerfed, and in general, all across the board, the game was fully optimized. Suddenly, Dark Souls 3 wasn't Straight Sword Adventure. As if to make it abundantly clear that they were aware of just how strong straight swords were in the initial revisions of the game, The Ringed City includes a boss named Darkeater Midir, who was handcrafted to be a nightmare to fight with straight swords. The cusp of this update, however, was that poise was strengthened: Not only were faster weapons made weaker (as they were too strong) and heavier gear made more viable and potent, the architecture behind why you would be using the heavy gear in the first place was also fortified, with Poise Windows becoming more ample, poise becoming stronger and allowed to tank through attacks properly, and becoming something that didn't need a carefully curated to build to use in the first place, the requirements for its proper usage having become more lax.

Suddenly, two handing your greatsword against the straight sword R1 spamming munchkin wasn't a shot in the barrel, it was reliable, tight, crisp. Trades that you were mathematically supposed to win now weren't a luck based event, your tools now did what they advertised. Mindless R1 spamming and dash R1s became a mindgame rather than an easy way to win. The meta had been reestablished for the benefit of everyone, as the game became a much more complete experience true to its origins in which you could look at any weapon, say "I'm going to use that from beginning to end", and the only obstacle between you and that objective was your mechanical skill with the game.

This is something that DS3, and DS3 only, achieved. Dark Souls is an excellent PvE game and Dark Souls 2 is a quirky but amazing PvE adventure and heaven for PvP, but their flaws when it comes to the handling of poise cannot be ignored. DS3 took the risk, took the fall, then rose from the ground, fixed their mistake, and finally, years later, delivered what I believe to be the best iteration of poise not only in its franchise, but as a whole in video games: Super armor that requires direct input and timing from the user to utilize instead of being a passive aspect of your character's construction. It is viable just as forgoing it is viable, and allows for even richer playstyle customization.

[bryanr322-blog]

12.4.2. Mastery Reflection - Professional Practice

Month 12: Professional Practice Mastery Reflection

           The last 12 months have been a rollercoaster of emotions, ups, downs, highs, and lows.  There has been a plethora of useful material covered in every class that will be beneficial to my success in the field.  It’s crazy to think that just a year ago, I was applying to the Full Sail University Master of Fine Arts program in Media Design and here I am a week away from walking across that stage to receive a diploma.  Looking at the Experience Map located below, this year has not been shy of some obstacles, but in the end, these obstacles have made me a better designer. As the final week on the program comes to a close, let’s go ahead and take a look back on each month and reminisce about each course and how it helped me achieve mastery in the field.

1 – Mastery: Personal Development and Leadership

           This first course was all about getting back into the swing of being a student again.  It had been 5 years since my undergraduate program, so finding a routine was necessary. This month helped me learn how I was going to organize myself and my work and how I would manage my time and schedule for the remainder of the program.  It was all about finding a balance and doing a little work each day, rather than save it all until the last minute.  I also had to learn APA style formatting when it came to writing a research paper.  My undergraduate career, I only used MLA, so this took some getting used to, but I was able to write my first research paper in 5 years and I was pretty proud of the end result.  These skills are not only necessary for almost every job, but they were also very helpful in finishing my thesis.  By managing my time and keeping all of my projects and papers organized throughout the program, it was easier to find and look back on these assignments for the thesis project.

2 – Defining Client Needs

           Defining Client Needs was the first class that taught the skills and tools required in the initial stages of the design process. The first assignment asked to create mind maps for three different categories for three different cities. These mind maps were so helpful because it creates a visual of so many different ideas on one page with the hopes that one of these ideas will spark a creative idea that will lead to the next step in the process, sketching.  Sketching is something I never did, so this took some getting used to.  I usually would just go straight to the computer, but I found that it was so useful to sketch not only for the client but also for myself.  As a designer, sketching actually saves a lot of valuable time.  Creating designs and initial compositions on the computer takes time and if the client does not like the idea, then all that work was wasted. Sketches take very little time to do, so more ideas can be created in less time.  The sketches can then be shown to the client and the most effective ones for them can then be produced into compositions on the computer.  These mind maps and the idea of sketches was very helpful in the final thesis presentation because it allows me to show the process of reaching the final design and explain how the final presentation came about.  Design is not just about creating something, but it is also about the process and how we arrived at that final design.  This idea was brought to life because of the tools taught during this second month.

3 – Brand Development

           “Design iteration means learning from failure before putting a product in front of users – so that you are judged on success” (Interaction Design Foundation, 2018).  This quote from the Interaction Design Foundation really sums up what this month was about.  Iterative design is key to a successful final product.  As this quote explains, iteration helps a designer learn from their failed attempts.  After selecting the city of Kyoto, Japan as the city I would move forward with for the logo design, I created hundreds of sketches for a logo design, but only the best and most effective designs for the client and target audience were turned into vector compositions.  These logos were then added to toolkits or moodboards that included images, typography, color palettes, and other useful information for the brand.  This assignment pushed me to be creative and come up with many different ideas based on geography, culture, and traditions of Kyoto. The tools learned from this course helped my thesis project because moodboards are very important to designers in showcasing a lot of information about a brand on one page.  For my thesis, I had to explain my design process for many different learning outcomes and the addition of moodboards allowed this information to be communicated clearly and effectively to the audience.

4 – Effective Copywriting

           The Effective Copywriting class really had me look at a different element of design that I never thought of before.  I always thought of design as something to look at and never really thought of the words in an advertisement.  This course had us think about taglines, headlines, and the body text of advertisements.  In an article by Sue Unerman titled, Eight out of ten people only read the headline.  She then writes, “hello there if you’ve got past the headline. You’re in the minority” (Unerman, 2015). This article explains just how important a good headline is to the effectiveness of a magazine cover or advertisement.  This idea is something I never thought about before this course and really pushed me to write the best headlines and copy to grab the audience’s attention.  We also had to create target personas, which was one of my favorite assignments of the entire program.  Creating the ideal person for the target audience of a brand was exciting and allowed me to be very creative and detail oriented.  My thesis presentation benefited from this course because it taught me to research and truly understand the target audience and as a result, the best and most effective final presentation could be delivered.

5 – Design Research

           This course required us to create a website for a benefit concert to help the conservation of sea turtles.  This one only my second time creating a website from scratch, so I knew this course would be a challenge.  I feel like this course required a lot of work and many revisions were made based on peer and instructor feedback.  This course introduced me to the importance of user experience.  It is one thing to create something beautiful, but when it comes to websites, the user experience and whether or not they were able to maneuver through the website easily is very important.  Design is all about reputation and if the target audience is frustrated or cannot effectively scroll through the website, this negatively affects the designer’s reputation as well as the brand.  The final thesis project was to be presented in a website format.  Therefore, the skills and idea of understanding the user experience were very beneficial in creating the final thesis presentation.  If the information on the final website was unclear then this would negatively affect my argument on why I achieved mastery.

6 – Organizational Structures

           Organizational Structures was one of my lowest points in the program. I am not very experienced in Adobe After Effects and motion graphics in general, so I knew a lot of outside research and training would need to take place.  This course asked for an animated logo of one of the designs created in month 3. After watching some videos on Lynda.com, I was able to comfortably create some storyboards and a final animated logo for Kyoto.  After peer review, I found that the animated logo looked great, but it did not effectively communicate all that Kyoto has to offer its tourists, which was the design problem I was trying to solve in the first place.  I then added more images and words to describe Kyoto and added the animated logo at the end, which worked a lot better.  When it came to my thesis project, what I took from this class was that as a designer, I need to fully understand the design problem because if I do not, then the target audience will be lost, and I did not solve the client problem either. By fully understanding the questions the thesis project was asking allowed me to clearly communicate the solution and arguments to the target audience.

7 – Design Strategies and Motivation

           This course taught me that there is always room for improvement.  There are always ways to make a design better and more effective for the client.  During this course, I revisited the logo project from month 3.  The final project during month 3 resulted in three different logo designs based on three different categories of geography, culture, and traditions.  After learning more about design in the next three months, it became clear that branding is a huge deal when it comes to design and if a brand does not clearly communicate their ideas and mission to the target audience, then it will most likely fail.  This idea was brought to the Kyoto logo project.  I decided to create a template logo that is easily recognized as a brand, but the secondary images of the logo could be changed to showcase all that Kyoto has to offer.  As a result, a series of logos was produced, but each one contained elements that were similar and can easily be recognized as the same brand, this allows for versatility in design while maintaining the look, feel, and mission of the brand. Later on, these logos were added to stock images with the header, “A city of possibilities. Kyoto.”  This was created into a campaign as the final presentation.  This course helped me complete my thesis project because I learned that often the first approach is not the best approach.  It is better to take a step back from a project and revisit it later on. This allows the designer to see the project differently the second time and fix what may not be effective for the final product.  This is what happened with my thesis website.  What I sketched on paper and what actually was created looked completely different.

8 – Design Integration

           This month was very similar to month 7, except the project that was revisited was the benefit concert website.  The original website seemed flat, so wavy lines were added to the background to give a sense of flowing water.  The user experience was also revisited and modifications to the design were made in order to make navigation through the website more positive for the audience.  I also wanted to create a more complete and effective final presentation.  Yes, the design process and how a designer arrived at the final product is important, but the way the final product is presented is even more important.  If the final presentation is not clear and effective in communicating the design solution and vision of the brand or company, then the designer failed.  I really wanted to make sure the final presentation included the process of arriving at the final product, but also look beautiful and have all the information pertinent to the client and design.  By really focusing on the final presentation, I was able to take this skill into account when presenting the final version of the thesis project.

9 – Multi-Platform Delivery

           This was the third month of revisiting projects from previous courses.  This month I revised the three testimonial advertisements for the non-profit organization. The organization chosen was the Adoption Exchange, this name was changed to a fictional organization for portfolio purposes.  The purpose of this project and design problem was to create advertisements that increase donations and awareness for the non-profit organization.  Miranda Paquet states, “A well-planned campaign can spark new interest in your business and increase your sales, donations, and impact” (Paquet, 2018, para. 4).  This idea sparked the “Love Knows No Bounds” campaign.  The campaign allowed for the brand and look of each of the three advertisements to look similar and consistent.  Consistency is key when it comes to design.  To take this idea a step further, for the final presentation for this project I wanted it to include a brand style guide.   Karla Cook states, “Developing a consistent brand starts with creating a brand style guide. These branding rule books help graphic designers, marketers, web developers, community managers, and even product packaging departments all stay on the same page and present a unified vision of the brand to the public” (Cook, 2018, para.4).  The style guide will allow everyone involved in the project to stay on the same page.  My thesis was benefited from this course again because of focusing on the final presentation and clarity of the information to the audience.  Communication is very important in design and when it came to the thesis presentation, so this course definitely helped me with this effectively communicating my arguments.

10 – Measuring Design Effectiveness

           Month 10 was very helpful to my career as a designer.  It is one thing to create a design, but to actually measure its effectiveness and see how well it does with its consumers is another.  This course required us to create a survey and actually test and analyze the results.  These are skills that are very beneficial in the design industry.  Conducting a survey is very important to a designer because it allows them to learn from their mistakes and see what does and does not work for the future.  I tested the benefit concert website and found that the results were quite positive. Having been worried about web design prior to this program, I never thought that a website I created would receive such positive feedback.  I found that viewers liked simple design and an easy to navigate website with a menu bar. The survey also brought up ideas and elements that were missing for the website.  This was very helpful when creating the website for my thesis because I knew what design elements worked and what did not.  I knew what consumers wanted in a website and what information fell flat and was unclear to them.  When developing my final thesis website, all of these ideas were taken into effect to create the most positive user experience that effectively communicated all of the information presented.

11 – Thesis: Presentation of Design Solution

           This course was when we had to create our thesis presentations and I knew that the pressure, time management, and organization skills would have to be increased.  Throughout the program, I kept all of my projects and assignments in folders on my computer which helped me find all of the information and images needed for the thesis project.  Organization is crucial in any job, but it paid off and made things more efficient and run smoother in this particular case.  I had used wix.com before so this aspect of the assignment was easy for me. I took everything I learned from the previous courses into account and really wanted to showcase my best work and communicate my ideas clearly to the target audience.  From month 10, I found that simplistic web design and navigation is key, so I really wanted a simple design, but in order to effectively communicate my ideas, I needed to include a lot of images and information.  Users can become very overwhelmed with information, so finding the balance between including a lot of information but keeping the website simple was necessary.  This was probably the most important project of the entire program and by understanding and using all of the tools and skills taught from the previous courses, the most effective thesis presentation was created.

12 – Professional Practice

           This final month really put everything together and allowed us to wrap all that we learned into a final course.  We learned how to present ourselves professionally in our resumes and cover letters, but also how to sum our personal brand up into a single statement. We created an experience map that looked back on how we were feeling, what we were thinking, and what we were doing during each course, good and bad.  This allowed us to see our journey throughout the program in a single image. Over the past year, I have learned so much about design, the process, research, the ethics and morals surrounding design, and so much more.  However, most importantly, I learned a lot about myself and with the help of the program, my peers, and instructors, I feel that I have achieved mastery and that I am ready for a career in media design.  Thank you to everyone who helped and supported me along this rollercoaster, it’s been a ride I will never forget.

References

Cook, K. (2018). 21 Brand Style Guide Examples for Visual Inspiration. Retrieved December 5, 2018, from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/examples-brand-style-guides

Interaction Design Foundation. "Design Iteration Brings Powerful Results. So, Do It Again Designer!" The Interaction Design Foundation. 2018. Accessed March 28, 2019. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-iteration-brings-powerful-results-so-do-it-again-designer.

Paquet, M. (2018, January 16). How to Create a Successful Marketing Campaign. Retrieved November 29, 2018, from https://blogs.constantcontact.com/create-a-campaign/#

Unerman, Sue. "Eight out of Ten People Only Read the Headline." Campaign. 2015. Accessed March 28, 2019. https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/eight-ten-people-read-headline/1374722.

[clarasjournal]

Week 2

Week 2 is done, and I've got more and more to do! Which is exciting, because I still feel like I can distance myself from stress and heavy burdens since I'm just an intern. And I'm there to learn, which I am, most definitely!

This week I've:

Been creating use cases

Been on meetings regarding an upcoming release

Been learning about the system (that I'm working with)

Had the first meeting with my supervisor from school, Mali, along with Tony

Got input on my use cases from QA (Quality Assurance)

Quickly introduced my use case study to a product manager and other colleagues

Been involved in meetings

Had a 1-to-1 meeting with a product manager

Learned about Axis personas and roles

Begun a UX audit on another feature of access control

Casual sync with other designers from other parts of Axis

Creating use cases: Use cases are hard to create when there's no contact with actual clients/customers/users. They are fictional, based on my assumptions of what they need to do in order to make the system work for them. I've been reading up on use cases through this source: https://www.uxness.in/2020/04/use-cases-in-ux-significance-and-how-to.html. The main insights I got from this article are that use cases should:

highlight the possible interactions between user and the system,

contain sets of actions that the user requires to do in order to achieve a goal,

help identify how the system is expected to perform rather than how it's currently performing,

highlight what setbacks might possibly occur while performing a task,

be more oriented towards user action -> system result rather than user input -> system output.

I have tried to gather as much information as I can about how Axis usually present use cases, and realized that they are often more functionality and technology oriented than human oriented. They often lack the rationale behind the use case as well, meaning that the use case does not answer "why" this is important to implement. Tony has also nudged me towards creating more problematic use cases rather than "happy cases". Getting input from QA was also valuable, because that made the argument for explaining why in a use case stronger. Haris, my QA colleague, was clear in explaining that answering the why of a use case makes the QA understand the use case better, they buy into it in another way and the use case becomes much more grounded in real usage rather than abstract features. But to create use cases based on assumptions rather than real customer contact is not the optimal way to go, but it's what I have to do since there is such a limited amount of customer contact. To create strong use cases you would need that customer contact to generate quotes, situations grounded in reality and find real problems. It would also be easier to see actual step-by-step actions that are required to take in order to achieve a goal.

Involvement in meetings: Through being involved in meetings I've started to feel like a valued colleague and team member. Through colleagues saying "as Clara & Tony have done..." or "you could ask Clara & Tony about..." I've felt highly involved and like a UX practitioner - which feels exciting. I've been included in important discussions and meetings about new upcoming releases and I've even got a say in what will be going out very soon. The product manager of access control reached out to me personally for a 1 to 1 meeting about discussing my thoughts on a specific feature, which made me a bit nervous but mostly excited. It means a lot that my colleagues and the management values my "soon-to-be-professional" opinions and thoughts.

Through being involved in different types of meetings throughout the weeks I also feel empowered in getting to see and learn more and more. For example, I value syncing with other designers, to see what they're working on currently and to see them blow off some steam designer-to-designer. Being involved and a part of this makes me feel like a part of the design team.

Meeting with supervisors: The meeting with my supervisors informed me that it's a good idea to find a good topic to reflect around during my internship. Could be anything that I find interesting while working at Axis. Maybe working under a NDA (secrecy form), collaboration across teams, design practices and methods, the limited customer contact or working with UX in a highly technologically driven company?

Reflection about UX in a big company: In this upcoming release that has been discussed over the week (due today) UX was involved in a very late stage. Too late to be able to make any valuable changes. The team that has been working with the release thought that they came to us with a small thing, but what they hadn't considered was how this "small thing" would create setbacks in future releases. We had to create a quick fix, a poor man's solution, to be able to release it this week - but I will continue iterating on this feature to make sure it will fix up better for the next upcoming releases. I think that this is a common problem in bigger technology oriented companies, where there is a heavy focus on the engineering, but smaller focus on the UX. Maybe the purpose of UX and what we do isn't commonly known across all the employees and the managements. I think it's up and coming, I think it's starting to change, but I think stuff like this will keep on happening... In my own opinion I think UX should be involved straight off the bat, once a feature, system, product or the like has been decided on - I think UX should come in to make sure that the user will not be overlooked for the sake of functionality and technology. It's important to find a middle ground, a balance, between pushing functionality and pushing usability.

[steamlore]

HighFleet - Fleet Design Guide

A good design of a fleet depends on understanding of tactical challenges resolving them with purposeful ship composition and design.

HighFleet Fleet Design

This guide will describe my approach and it's rationale and will point to another ship design guide, that I have not used to design by current fleet (read it just today), but II think it's full of very good tips that will augment this so I want to recommend it.

Flagship

The Sevastopol design we have as default in the game does not really work for me. The thing is ridiculously big, slow, thirsty, costly and despite it's huge armament and armour actually quite fragile, not to mention easy to hit. With just 1.1 thrust to weight ratio, damage it's Achilles heel - engine and it will quickly fall down. It also slow the whole fleet to the point, it cannot really escape enemy Strike Groups or keep a good operational tempo. It's purpose is quite hard to me to decipher.What is purpose of flagship to me? It is the central piece of the fleet, a base all other ships will operate around. It will dictate overall fleet speed and thus ability to maintain distance from enemy and change area of operations. It is most precious ship, should not get into dogfight. Therefore primarily a support ship. It can provide: - Fuel repository - Long range sensor suite - Airstrike capability - Tactical missile capability Does it make sense to be all in one ship? Can we create it so it is economical compared to splitting those roles in between multiple ships? Ark Royal Mk.2

- I have set to myself following contraints: - Speed: of 250 km/h - Consumption below: 1t/km - Range:4000+ km - Cost: below 100 000 For result see the screenshot. The first iteration Mk.1 I am playing with is cheaper at 82K and with speed of 275km/h with 5188km range and 925t per 1000 km consumption. It has one less of each aircraft type and just 8 tactical missiles. Mk.2 is just to speed up decimation of enemy groups at marginally higher costs. The strange Y shape tower is to allow for two unobstructed primary sensors. It also serves as a carrier of anti-air missiles that I was not forced to use much as I always kept some interceptors in reserve. I never actually deployed the A-100 missiles, they probably make more sense on standalone missile corvette due to low range. Other than that I do not see a good reason to split the roles here. With this you can always outrun enemy major forces with enough margin to comfortably refuel unless you are reckless and bump into them with tanks empty. From afar, you can defend from missile and air strikes and cripple enemy force with your own. II tend to lead with two rocket aircraft followed by ideally heavy bombs to deal with large enemy ships.

Destroyer

Now we need something with a punch to take care of major enemy ships that survive strike or otherwise need to be dispatched in person. Since you will mostly face different compositions of ships, I augment heavy guns with some medium and low caliber ones. The primary concerns: - Firepower - Toughness - Enough maneuvrability to evade large guns, ideally supported by defensive gunnery - At least as fast as flagship, but better a bit faster. Reasonable fuel consumption for the weight. - Ideally quiite compact, to be able to land in good repair spots Hippo MK.2

2xThe 37mm guns help swatting small ships and more importantly defend against missiles that catch wrong flare, rockets you do not manage to avoid and even some super heavy artillery shells. 4x100mm are my favorite universal weapon. With proximity fuse, it is a great defensive weapon against airstrikes and missile strikes. 2x180-2 are here for the punch against big boys. My choice here was to use just two swivel engines for better fuel consumption, although it somewhat limits the ship in some directions of the maneuvres. It best evades up and then quickly return down to sides below enemy. You can add more swivel engines instead the fixed ones at cost of higher fuel consumption if that would bother you, This ship has a very short range. A huge fuel storage would weight it further down, increase size and thus armour required and big fuel tanks block turrets. It is always accompanied by a tanker, except for final approach.

Fast attack craft

You need a ship that can quickly chase enemy transports, capture lightly defended positions and augment the Destroyer when necessary. You need more of those so you can rotate them when damaged or fatigued.The requirements are: - Speed and range - Good maneuvrability to avoid strong weapons - Firepower and thoughness to deal with multiple small or a few medium ships - Economical as you need more Kestrel Mk.3

This is the oldest design here, updated after I realized D30 engines are vectored. Original was 5xD30s + 2xNK-25 versus 3xD30S and 4xD30. It can be also 3xD30S, 2xD30 and 2xNk-25 for 6 thrust/weight at 243t consumption. The newer one allows for better protection of the bottom. I made mk.2 with armour instead of reinforced hull protection and 4x100mm guns, that is slower, has less range and is slighly less maneuverable and I tend to prefer to use this one. There can be some tweaks and various setups trading of one way or another that I will perhaps optimize but is really the workhorse of my fleet.

Recon/Tanker

Recon needs to be fast with good range, but needs no guns or armour, just sensors. Tanker needs good enough speed to escort the attack ships, lots of fuel.I think there is a synergy, if the main tanker is the flagship. What are the roles we want covered: - Recon on its own over a long range and pick up intel from captured relays - Accompany transport raiding party to provide range and sensors to attack ships - Provide support the squad otherwise lacks - Jam/distract enemy I ma still experimenting with optimal designs, here are three I came up with. Owl

Oldest design, this one is most specialized in providing support to attack ships. It has comprehensive sensor suite, relatively large fuel tank and some defensive weapons, meant mostly against missiles and aircraft when landed on crash site. In it's latest revision it quite matches speed of later Kestrel. Owlette

Owl s quite costly to have multiple of them. This is an lighter variant that has much more speed and a bit more range that can still support small attack groups (1-2 Kestrels) or effectively scout and pick up intel. It sports a jammer which it could use to support fleet or fly somewhere and lure enemy there. In practice I did not need to use this, but it might be useful if you use the default flagship and need to lure enemy SG away. Pigeon

This is something I have not used yet, but it is the cheap, light scout/intel picker. Other guides to consider A great in depth guide to ship building. It was not used to design my ships as they pre-date it's publishing, but it has very good tips. I will probably use some of it's discoveries in my future designs. Especially the Z-leveling for missiles and tricks to fit in just a little more modules using tricks with corners and triangles. Read the full article

[tomkail]

BattleTabs ship balance

When designing ships, there are two things we look for - “is this fun and interesting?”, and “is this balanced?”. Balance is an essential part of ship design, and I wanted to share some of our process!

If you don’t know about my work on BattleTabs, then you can play it free in your browser and might be interested in reading an earlier writeup on designing the game.

“Keystone” ships

As the number of ships grows, trying to consider how a new ship compares to every other ship starts becoming an exercise in madness.

To keep comparisons manageable, we attempt to peg the effectiveness of new ships to what we call “keystone” ships.

Examples of these are the Sailboat and the Minisub. These ships are simple, reliable, and time-proven. They’re fixed points on the power curve. 

One of the advantages of pegging new designs to the oldest ships is that it acts to avoid power creep in a way that would be unavoidable if all new ships were balanced against the current meta. The downside is that not all new ships feel as relevant for hardcore players.

The test for this is simple - are our keystones still considered viable additions to most fleets?

Balancing levers

When we’ve decided a ship is over or underpowered, we have 3 “levers” to play with.

Cooldowns

Cooldowns are the main lever for balancing a ship. Raising a ship’s cooldowns makes it worse, although this isn’t a linear scale!

Shorter cooldowns offer more flexibility, and are more reliable.

Longer cooldowns have a larger chance of being destroyed before it can be used.

In practice, this all means that a ship with abilities that are twice as good should have a cooldown that’s slightly less than twice as large.

Good fleet design allows for an ability to be used each turn, with no turns where several abilities are usable at once. Roughly speaking, this means cooldowns of 3-5 are typically the most useful - so should be just a tiny bit underpowered to make fleet creation a bit more interesting.

Cooldowns are an effective but blunt tool for balance, and not always granular enough to balance a ship entirely. Shape and size is a more subtle and very scalable way to fine tune balance. Ship size/shape

My initial assumption was that while bigger ships required more time to destroy, smaller ships would be harder to find, and this would roughly balance out. This turned out to be off the mark - bigger ships have a tangible advantage. Their size might be thought of as their “defence”.

Shape is important too - less standard or symmetrical shapes are harder to find - although as a minor downside, they can be harder to place in a way that doesn’t give away their shape!

Single tile ships should be avoided, because they can be frustrating to find. We recently patched in a change to the Coracle (the only 1x1) to mitigate this - it now reveals a tile on your own grid when you use a standard attack.

Our largest ship at time of writing is an 8 tiles donut. New ships could be a bit larger/harder to work out, but this risks making them tedious for the opponent to destroy, or difficult to fit on the grid.

The biggest issue with this approach is that it can’t be easily applied to ships that are already live, because tweaking art is quite expensive! Side effects

I’ve covered the universal balancing levers. The last approach is to attach further positive or negative abilities. This can help differentiate ships in interesting ways, although care should be taken not to create ships with long and complex descriptions! 

here are too many of these to list, but here are some examples:

Initial cooldown - since this only affects on turn, it’s relatively subtle, while also being very tuneable (how much is the initial cooldown affected?)

Visibility - revealing a ship, or part of it, on game start/use/being hit

Neighbour effects - changing ship abilities when placed next to something else

To balance, or not to balance?

There are plenty of cases where perfect balance, as defined by “all ships should have an equal win rate” might not actually be desirable!

Gimmicks

Some ships are deliberately designed as fun gimmicks. For example - imagine a ship that entirely reveals the boards of both players. Their inclusion adds spice to the game, but they can feel cheap or undermine our design goals. We try to make these slightly less effective so that they don’t become a part of the current meta.

High and low skill ships

As a rule of thumb, ships requiring more skill should be more effective.

One of our design goals is for players to start with basic abilities and move on to those requiring higher skill as they learn to play. If skilled players can get the same win rate playing a fleet with lots of random abilities as for one requiring lots of careful thought, then they might as well stop thinking and play randomly!

We try not to let skilled players win every game though - playing fleets with lots of random abilities should still be an enjoyable strategy, and we don’t want less skilled players getting demoralised by lots of losses - or skilled players getting bored clobbering their opponents (at least, this is the theory - it seems that skilled players really enjoy winning lots)!

This might be familiar to those of you who remember the original Longboat - originally this 4 cooldown ship allowed players to keep attacking until they missed or destroyed a ship. 

In our playtests this was fine, but the most skilled players could map out where their opponents were hiding in the early game and then carefully damage every ship without missing or killing any of them - potentially landing 10 hits or more! 

While immensely fun, this felt a bit crushing when you were on the other side of it, so we’ve limited the ship to 5 shots - still making it one of the best ships in the game, but keeping it feeling fair for everyone.

Feedback

Despite my very best guess-timat-uition, initial ship designs are almost never balanced! There are a few ways we keep an eye on new ships.

Playtesting!

Until recently, playtesting was carried out on paper or via spreadsheet (Google Sheets being the digital swiss army knife!). This is great for saving on code time, but games typically took 5x-10x longer than they’d take if played digitally, and errors were quite common.

Nowadays we tend to take promising designs directly to a small group of testers in a special version of the game, which makes it much easier to get valuable feedback!

Some designs need several iterations before they’re ready to go live, and we’ve had a few cases of ships needing to go all the way back to the drawing board.

Community

BattleTabs is fortunate enough to have a wonderful and highly active community on Discord. One of the best ways to find out how the community votes is just to keep an eye on the conversation! BattleTabs even has a community tier list, which is fascinating for us, and always sparks interesting discussion! 

Observation

My personal opinion isn’t worth all that much more than that of our more experienced players, but there’s always things you can spot from just playing the game! Are experienced players all using the same ships? What about your own strategy? Does it seem unbeatable? Are there any ships you just don’t think are ever worth playing?

What’s next?

At the time of writing we’re testing a few interesting new ships that we can’t wait to try out, and we’ve a list of literally hundreds to mull over! 

Each new ship is a huge team effort that wouldn’t be possible without our incredible community.

Balancing an evolving game is a sisyphean task; but the less we need to step in and make changes, the more confident we can be that we’ve got it right.

Further reading!

If you’re interested in game balance, then I’d highly recommend Jaime Griesmer’s talks on the balance of the early Halo games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YJ53skc-k4&ab_channel=GDC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikvheFiDsYY&ab_channel=GDC

I’d also recommend this seminal talk from Blizzard in 2008: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/315/Rules-of-Engagement-Blizzard-s And lastly, a take on balancing fighting games. I’d highly recommend all the design analysis on this channel! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsC8io4w1sY