The Perl 6 project is ten years old »

Carl Masak looks back over the past ten years of Perl 6’s development, from its catalyst and initial design, to budding implementations.

API design matters »

Michi Henning writes about the cost of bad APIs, and how to design good interfaces:

A great way to get usable APIs is to let the customer (namely, the caller) write the function signature, and to give that signature to a programmer to implement. This step alone eliminates at least half of poor APIs: too often, the implementers of APIs never use their own creations, with disastrous consequences for usability. Moreover, an API is not about programming, data structures, or algorithms—an API is a user interface, just as much as a GUI. The user at the using end of the API is a programmer—that is, a human being. Even though we tend to think of APIs as machine interfaces, they are not: they are human-machine interfaces.

Game/Space: An interview with Daniel Dociu »

BLDBLOG interviews game world designer Daniel Dociu:

Are there specific architects, historical eras, or urban designers who have inspired Dociu’s work? What about vice versa: could Dociu’s own beautifully rendered take on the built environment, however fantastical it might be, have something to teach today’s architecture schools? How does the game design process differ from – or perhaps resemble – that of producing “real” cities and buildings?
Of course, there are many types of games, and many types of game environments.

There’s some really beautiful concept design artwork included in the interview.

Monocle design notes »

Dan Hill has written a detailed piece on the design and production of the Monocle website. It’s a great insight into the team’s creative process — lots of sketches and mockups, and a review of the project path and decision points.