design bikeshedding, nerd sniping, and the Treehouse Show

First off - where did I see the term:

design bikeshedding

on the Treehouse show?

It was actually from Episode 96:

https://teamtreehouse.com/library/the-treehouse-show/episode-96-jquery-plugins-progress-bars-http-api-design

..following the link:

interagent/http-api-design

Note: the whole rest of that very dry article was on something called an 'HTTP API' left me scratching my head as to the 'why' behind such a thing..but oh well...

Of course I had known the term "bikeshedding" from the OpenBSD community:

http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed.html

..but I had never heard it used in connection with design (or I guess: design discussions)..just in terms of making code decisions in the open source community.

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Why make a whole Treehouse forum thread about this, though?

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Well, it's easy to dismiss the whole Treehouse show series out of hand (for me anyway).

I actually completed every single Treehouse course before even looking at the Treehouse shows.

It's basically just a "grab bag" for everything that might be called 'miscellany'.

Stuff that doesn't carry enough weight/volume to form a whole course around.

And the "form factor" for historically exploring the series is so incredibly awkward

--it's a huge scrolling list where you have to drill down (open each one) to get at the links for each episode.

Very content unfriendly [IMHO].

It would be a lot nice if the links to the videos and the links for each episode where on a common page,

(but I betcha no one at Treehouse was thinking about the point of view of users who would want to easily consume such content in years to come..)

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Then why am I taking the time to systematically go through all the episodes (working my way backwards).

Here's why:

I like garbage files/folders.

Let me explain...

Long ago most universities would have whole bunches of Apache pages which where just basically folder and file lists that you could scroll through in an anonymous FTP sorta way.

I loved those.

Because systematically drilling down through all the folders eventually you might find a folder labelled "garbage".

Many times such a folder was the equivalent of a Mac computer's trash - everything that had been removed (cleaned-up) over the years was "archived" --dumped in a place no one cared about.

It was almost the whole historical record of what had gone before and was sometimes very interesting to pick through,

(much more so than the current content that had been systematically "filtered" and winnowed through the years).

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Or here's another way to think about why stuff that's a bit "out there" is important.

Just about every single radical idea that eventually went on to change the world started out on the "margins" --the ragged edges of the tapestry of ideas.

It usually took time (and sometimes just the right set of circumstances) to work its way into the 'mainstream' of ideas.

Here's a few examples:

There's the classic one : Very few people in medieval times ever though that the idea of the earth revolving around the sun (instead of the other way round) was anything but ridiculous (i.e. heretical).

Then some guy named Copernicus finally decided to put out such a crazy notion in a book entitled:

De revolutionibus orbium coelestium

Here's a better one (more technology related)..

Did any one really care (when I guy named Boole first published about a whole book it) about an algebra that really only dealt with zeros and ones?

Of course not --it's was pure trivia for anyone but math geeks at the time (1800's).

Only later did anyone realize it was significant in regard to the design of computer circuits.

Another example:

What does lighthouse design from the 1800s have to do with car headlights?

I could give you a link to the Wikipedia article on collimated light, but instead I'll you this one (nicer diagrams):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens

For those that want to explore the math:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations

..or there is a [code] link to a pastebin on this page:

http://blog.matthen.com/post/50502763320/the-bending-of-a-light-ray-depends-only-on-the

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So what's the take-away of this forum thread?

Always keep scanning for interesting bits of miscellany (not to be confuses with "Miscellania", a small island off the northernmost part of the Fremennik Isles).

..because the trivia of today could 'germinate' (or contribute to a critical mass of techniques) that shapes the mainstream of web design/development in the future.

..and you can say: "I saw something about that first on the Treehouse Show...

..which lead me to search a little deeper an I found something interesting..."

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Never stop searching for good ideas to use,

(even if you didn't think of them first).