Welcome to Mark Tattersall's blog.

Antifragility. It’s an awkward word but one that sinks in to your consciousness as you read “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. As a big fan of The Black Swan by the same author, I eagerly devoured this book. It takes the findings of the Black Swan and projects it outwards in to a philosophical and pragmatic outlook on modern life. Taleb is a divisive, opinionated, funny and passionate writer and this book, like his last, seems to have settled in to place at the base of my spine where I will carry it …

The dilemma of a fast growing company is one that needs little introduction. To grow is to add more of everything. More people. More projects. More customers. More money.
What is not clear to me is whether there must, and always will be, more layers. More hierarchy. More planning. More meetings. More stress.
Undoubtedly, to grow is to add complexity. If there are more moving parts then there more possible results from every action (and inaction). So much so that you cannot take all of them in to account with every decision, and some decisions will have unexpected outcomes. However some of …

Traveling is a wonderful way to bring in to focus just how much of your daily life is beholden to a mental model of how things work. On a recent trip back to the UK, a country from which I moved some 7 years ago, I picked up on a series of UK specific cues that my brain mis-interpreted as it varied from what I am now used to in America.
As I was driving round a small town, I turned on to street seemingly only wide enough for one car. On the left side of the road was a car …

I have been watching with interest as education becomes disrupted by a wave of online innovations, startups and visionary individuals. In particular Code School and Treehouse have caught my eye. These services have attacked the problem of professional education with a user experience / web designers eye. Using creative course structures and themes (Code School in particular), video, audio, text and presentation slides, they bring to life pragmatic and relevant topics around web development and design.
But this is the cutting edge. The education system on the whole is, and remains, hierarchical, highly structured, rigid, and …

In the “Lets Make Mistakes” podcast, episode 50, there was a listener question that prompted a characteristic rant from Mike Monteiro. To paraphrase, the question was, “If you create wireframes, are you are designer?”, to which Mr. Monteiro became very heated in explaining that if you are helping to solve the problem at hand, then yes you are a “designer”, because you are designing solutions to problems. End of story.
I understand Monteiro’s line of argument very well, as it is something I have argued myself many times. He is adamant that no time should be spent on figuring …

I just had my first post for the Braintree blog released today, check it out - https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/api-where-to-begin
The first job I took on after joining Braintree was to help solidify, expand and generally make more comprehensible, the API documentation.  We have an awesome API at Braintree, but the learning curve can be a little steep, so I am starting off by working on a Quick Start and then some easy-to-follow tutorials.  I’ll update here as they are released.