This is marvellous: Tog on magic and software, and what one can teach the other. The stuff about perceived time periods, and also on distraction, is particularly great. It's not just about the functionality: it's about how you present it; showmanship all the way down. (And: I like the reminder about the kinds of honesty that are important, in order that dissimulation still works0.

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

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

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

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

"When a product is connected to the network it has two brains. A little local one that can perform cheap calculation, and a big one in the network that can do potentially anything at all: massive facial recognition, searching all of Amazon, advanced artificial neural networks, whatever." It's great that Matt's writing so much again – but "little brain, big brain" is a great explanation of the concept.

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

Stanford's iPhone development course.

"Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view — editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating? Surely I’m not the only one who does this?" Something else that's been on the pile (to link) for a while now.

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

"At some point, I begin to feel that I am carrying entire Latin American forests home with me. Also, I am afflicted with a terrible need to stop and write things down, at almost every corner, slowing my passage through the city and impeding motion. I am locked in this ridiculous two-step, unable to travel more than half a block before sitting down and writing out more, papering over the last thirty feet, dripping more ink onto the street: this absurd project, this incomprehensible, incompletable urge, this terror of forgetting and compulsion to record." Beautiful writing from James, which has been sitting on the "to link" pile for far too long.

"Here is an extraordinary piece of film. It is a live outside broadcast of a British army simulation of an attack on a train in Britain. It went out at prime time on a BBC programme called Saturday Night Out. And it happened in 1956."

"Maps are having their F-64 moment, right now, which is important and wonderful but I don't think anyone really wants to live in a world with an infinite depth of field. It's an appealing idea but then something like the Hipstamatic comes along and we all get irrationally weak in the knees, all over again." As usual with Aaron, I could quote most of the article, but in this case, I'll pick my favourite piece of writing, rather than perhaps the most succint quotation; just read the whole thing. (And: I wish I could code or even write like this).

"Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature – really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand."

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

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

Alan Taylor on a year of the Big Picture. It's been a successful one, if you ask me, and it's a wonderful site; there are few updates in my RSS reader I look forward to as much as it.

If you want a wrap-up of the Microsoft keynote, you could do no better than Brandon's wrap-up for Offworld – spot on, nicely detailed, and covering all the facts with great illustration. Whilst their titles – L4D2, Forza 3, etc – are obviously real assets, it's their commitment to the 360 as a platform in the living room that was impressive.

"…what I'm hearing is the actual drum line recorded by the song's drummer, and I'm triggering those sounds by playing notes within the designated timing window. And that timing window, even on Expert, is quite a bit more generous than real life. It's the difference between truly playing a beat and merely invoking a beat. When I play Rock Band, though, that difference is camouflaged so subtlely and so well that I never even notice. That's a beautiful bit of design, isn't it?" Yes, it is. Bill Harris on the magical quantize that you forget exists in Harmonix' games. This, incidentally, is something I'm convinced Neversoft never got right, especially in the horrendous Guitar Hero 3.

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

"This is my dedication to the creative team behind Pixar's movie The Incredibles. I loved the depth of the world, the buildings, the gadgets and most of all I loved the chairs. Enjoy!" Collecting things is important. This is lovely.

"Master of the mix Jaguar Skills provides a special soundtrack to round off Radio 1's Gaming Weekend. " Available until June 2. It's epic. Get it.

"In this piece, each of the departments involved in making a videogame are examined and accused of one particular vice. In making these assessments, the assumption behind each is that the purpose of the videogames industry is to make games that players want to play, and not to make the games that developers want to play." It is good, and I'm looking forward to the second part.

"…as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp – which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about. History will see this decade as the period when games struggled with their destiny in this way." 2K Marin's JP LeBreton with a smart, insightful take on the road ahead for games design, and the many positive steps being taken along it (and: a decent commentary on the "shooting people" issue).

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

"Best of all, for impatient gamers the developer plans to conceal load screens with a mini-game where players can connect a USB keyboard and write an undergraduate thesis on the illustrations of Gustave Dore." Seriously, this already sounds much better than the Redwood Shores version…

Farbs quit 2K Australia. This is his resignation note. It's fun, and not in any way mean.

"With this unique book, programmers, administrators, and others who handle data can learn by example from the best data practitioners in the history of the field. Modeled after O'Reilly's highly-acclaimed book, Beautiful Code, Beautiful Data lets readers look over the shoulders of prominent data designers, managers, and handlers for a glimpse into some of the most interesting projects involving data. In an engaging narrative format, the authors think aloud as they explain their work, highlighting the simple and elegant solutions to problems they encountered along the way." Oh. This could be lovely.

This is both good and bad in places; I'm not totally convinced by the "What would players rather shoot — a wall, or a Nazi?" argument, but I'm very interested (as per my previous writing on Far Cry 2) in notions of non-player characters as protagonist; the player as lens through which story emerges, rather than hero of said story. Stuff to think on, for sure, but I'm still working out how to respond to this; I'm not sure it fulfils its goal of discussing "how writers and designers can collaborate smoothly and successfully"; it just shows me some examples.

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

Chemically, this makes sense, but I'd never thought this might be possible.