The Shape of Things to Come

8 minute read. UX (user experience) design is hard - for those not in the industry, it's basically a slightly broader term for UI (user interface) or GUI (graphical user interface), which is to say how we as engineers let you the user interact with our software. I'll preface this by saying I have no formal training in UX, but then again I don't have formal training in sculpture or software engineering either, and I like to think that hasn't stopped me. 2D UX is plenty tricky, but 3D is a real bear. I've ended up designing and building a fair amount of 3D UX simply because there was no one else (a common deficiency of large software companies is a dearth of UX experts). I'm pretty proud of what I've built and I'll describe it in the hopes that it's copied, because I have spent a lot of time being frustrated by awful 3D interfaces. What makes 3D so hard? The biggest issue is that the interface (screen, mouse, touchscreen) is all 2D. Worse yet, it ...

5 minute read. I was raised by back-to-the-land hippies, so I grew up with a pretty negative view of capitalism, but also with no clear idea of what the word meant. My parents were distrusting of rich people; a bias I still carry with me even as I'm becoming one. They considered debt to be evil; they never even had a mortgage, having bought five acres in the 1970s for $10,000 which they borrowed from my five-year-old brother's inheritance. They paid him back, though I have no idea if interest was involved. So anathema was debt that I honestly believed I couldn't go to college without a free-ride, since they had no money to send me. I managed to get enough scholarships from writing a dizzying array of application essays, but upon arrival I realized my stress was probably misplaced given everyone else had taken out student loans.  One of my closet friends in college had the opposite upbringing, where his family not only discussed investment at the dinner table, but played Mon...