Jennifer Tidwell, an old colleague of mine at Google, recently wrote a lengthy post about designing and coding, and the difference between coding and software engineering. Definitely worth a read.

http://designinginterfaces.com/2011/06/01/designers-that-code-a-response...

First implementer of hypertext, inventor of the mouse, creator of the chorded keyboard, and a pioneer who was inspired by Vannevar Bush, the inventor of the Memex. The Memex proved that associative indexing was possible and desirable, but Englebart proved that associative links or hyperlinks, were actually implementable using 1968 digital technologies. In class on Tuesday we'll watch a bit more of the 1968 demo (this time narrated by Alan Kay, another pioneer of human interface design)

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

In the talk he delivered at a Canadian software engineering conference in early 2012, Brett Victor, a software engineer who has focused on user interface questions, tells a story about the way principles and values have driven many of our most important innovations and inventions. To prove this, he demos four novel pieces of software he created that sprung directly from his own personal principle: "Creators need a direct connection to the things they make."

Indo-European is the theoretical root language of many seemingly unrelated languages: English, Hindi, German, Spanish, Greek. Philologists and linguists have debated over its geographic origins for a long time. Some said it came from what is today the Russian Steppes, others claimed that it came from Anatolia, in what is today Turkey. No one was really sure, but now some clever computing and some gambling may have resolved that debate.