Victor Loux — bookmarks tagged “complexity”

Cognitive load

When reading code, you put things like values of variables, control flow logic and call sequences into your head. The average person can hold roughly four such chunks in working memory. Once the cognitive load reaches this threshold, it becomes much harder to understand things. Let's say we have been asked to make some fixes to a completely unfamiliar project. We were told that a really smart developer had contributed to it. Lots of cool architectures, fancy libraries and trendy technologies were used. In other words, the author had created a high cognitive load for us.

Tog's paradox

votito.com/methods/togs-paradox/

Tog’s Paradox (also known as The Complexity Paradox or Tog’s ComplexityParadox) is an observation that products aiming to simplify a task for users tend toinspire new, more complex tasks. It’s one of the key reasons for thesymptom of requirements changing after delivery in enterprise softwareproducts, and for feature creep in consumer products. Tog’s Paradox alsoexplains why it’s futile to try to completely nail down requirements for asoftware product, as the product itself will have...

cohost! - "complex simple good bad code"

cohost.org/tef/post/2503472-complex-simple-good

The Market for Lemons - Infrequently Noted

infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?

Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

lepiter.io/feenk/developers-spend-most-of-their-time-figuri-9q25taswlbzjc5rsufndeu0py/

What does it mean when we say that developers spend most of their time figuring the system out? Why is it important? And how else could we look at this problem?

Buchanan's Four Orders of Design

twitter.com/andybudd/status/1405183677055881225

The Coming Software Apocalypse - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

Writing Disposable Code, Not Reusable Code | Björn Wilmsmann

bjoernkw.com/2016/11/06/writing-disposable-code-not-reusable-code/

Complexity Has to Live Somewhere

ferd.ca/complexity-has-to-live-somewhere.html

Design’s Unsexy Middle Bits - Christina Wodtke - Medium

medium.com/@cwodtke/designs-unsexy-middle-bits-a8cc17f0246d

In How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Design Thinking, I wrote about how I learned to value design thinking and in Five Habits of Design Thinking I explain how you can build the skill of…

Five Models for Making Sense of Complex Systems – Christina Wodtke – Medium

medium.com/@cwodtke/five-models-for-making-sense-of-complex-systems-134be897b6b3

In one of the classes I teach at CCA, students were confused by mental models, conceptual models, concept maps, etc. I ended up drawing a taxonomy for models on the whiteboard, and it may help…