The Impact of Design

I got this from an O'Reilly newsletter. This outfit is overflowing with ideas - and they spread the good word everywhere.

This one was The impact of design at Shopify. I don't even know what shopify is, but I could understand this:

Engineering is not the art of building devices; it’s the art of fixing problems. Devices are a means, not an end. Fixing problems means first of all understanding them — and since the whole purpose of the things we do is to fix problems in the outside world, problems involving people, that means that understanding people, and the ways in which they will interact with your system, is fundamental to every step of building a system.

I sure wish I had heard this back when I was working in Silicon Valley in the Nineties!