The top software engineering blog posts worth your time

Taste in design and technology doesn't move forward linearly but swings like a pendulum, as Constantinos Psomadakis explores in "The Pendulum of Taste." Psomadakis uses examples from Apple's iOS design shifts to the resurgence of vinyl records to illustrate how trends react to and eventually overshoot previous aesthetics. This cyclical nature means that what feels futuristic can quickly become dated, leading us back to appreciate past styles.

1. The Pendulum of Taste: Why Trends Swing Back

Constantinos Psomadakis’s “The Pendulum of Taste” explores aesthetic shifts, arguing taste swings between nostalgia and futurism, not linear progress. Psomadakis uses examples like Apple’s iOS design, vinyl resurgence, and “interest decay” to illustrate how trends react, overshoot, and prompt counter-reactions, offering insights into design, technology, and cultural cycles.

Psomadakis observes that taste doesn't advance steadily but oscillates. Early adopters embrace novelty, but as trends reach mainstream, their distinctiveness fades—a phenomenon he calls “interest decay.” This loss of individual signaling value pushes people to seek new aesthetics, causing the pendulum to swing. He illustrates this with Apple’s design evolution, moving from skeuomorphism to flat design and then reintroducing elements of imperfection and physicality. This mirrors the resurgence of vinyl records, film cameras, and retro fashion, despite rapid technological acceleration in areas like AI and autonomous vehicles.

The article posits that achieving “timeless taste” involves understanding these cycles. Psomadakis highlights designers like Dieter Rams and Jony Ive, who focus on fundamental problem-solving rather than chasing fleeting trends. Their work endures because it remains relevant across different aesthetic eras. He uses the Japanese art of kintsugi, which repairs broken pottery with gold, as a metaphor for appreciating an object’s history rather than erasing perceived flaws, suggesting that true timelessness lies in enduring appeal that survives multiple pendulum swings.

Psomadakis breaks down trends into phases, from initial experimentation to dominance and eventual excess, leading to a reaction. He suggests that the current cultural moment, marked by a fatigue with digital maximalism and a growing awareness of digital ownership, is pushing a swing towards the physical. However, the rise of AI-generated content may create a counter-trend, driving people away from screens and back into the physical world, emphasizing hardware design. Constantinos Psomadakis’s “The Pendulum of Taste” concludes that by observing the direction of cultural change rather than just the current state, one can anticipate the next swing and cultivate enduring taste.

Beyond Microservices: The Case for the Monolith

Here are five software engineering blog posts you should read:

  • Constantinos Psomadakis’s “The Pendulum of Taste” explores how design styles swing between nostalgia and futurism, using examples from Apple’s iOS design history and vinyl record sales. Read it here.

3. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

Authored by Google researchers, this influential paper argues that in many modern machine learning applications, the sheer volume and quality of data can often be more critical than the sophistication of the algorithms used. It posits that with sufficient data, simpler models can outperform complex ones, highlighting the importance of data collection, cleaning, and feature engineering in achieving high performance.