» A few days back, someone on Twitter highlighted that viewing a single image on Imgur causes downloading and running a megabyte of React first. The consensus in the thread was that the engineers at Imgur need to be morons in order to let something like this happen.

My take on this is that it has grown organically. Imgur is not interested in making the mobile experience (that’s what this is about) great, they want you to use the app instead. Coincidentally, the “Download the app” button is among the first elements to be rendered. My best guess is that the current mobile page is just something cobbled together on top of old software, with the business people breathing down the developer’s neck.

» Malware for ATMs causes them to spit out all the money that they have.. Looking at the details of this is scary:

  • ATMs are apparently running on Windows
  • They are not always running with the latest patches
  • It seems to be possible to connect any USB device to it in some cases
  • It also seems to be possible to run any program on these windows machines

To be honest, you had me at “Windows”!

» Arvind Narayanan on why enterprise software sucks. His main example are baby clothes, where two different groups of stakeholders exist: People who want to buy a cute outfit, and people who actually want to quickly dress and undress their kids.

The fact that people who are buying the software are not always the people who are using the software is a fundamental truth that has a direct impact on the motivation of developers. I have seen many people run into a trap of developing a “user friendly software” without an understanding about who is actually buying the software. It can be very frustrating putting a lot of effort into a fancy dashboard no one uses as opposed to improving the parts of the software the users are frequently using.