331–340 of 458 posts
There's a quote I learned when doing theatre, which I've seen attributed to either the stage magician Doug Henning or possibly Stanislavski, describing the process of art as taking something that's difficult and making it habit , then taking something that's habitual and making it easy , and then taking something that's easy and making it beautiful . For example, as an actor, you learn your lines by rote (they become…
Oh wow. This hits hard in the feels. Here's my personal submission for "UI problem that has existed for years on touch interfaces, plus a possible solution, but at this point I'm just shouting into the void": https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3... In short, an interface should not be interactable until a few milliseconds after it has finished (re)rendering, or especially, while it is still in…
> In short, an interface should not be interactable until a few milliseconds after it has finished (re)rendering I was a console game developer working on UI for many years so I am deeply familiar with the problem when a UI should be responsive to input while the visuals are changing and when it should not. You might be surprised, but it turns out that blocking input for a while until the UI settles down is not what…
To the original author's point, the consternation arises when you as a programmer just know there is an animation time, or a delay time, etc. that is hardcoded into the app and you can't adjust the value. The lack of interface and inability to have that exposed to the user is at least one major frustration that could help OP.
There's a quote I learned when doing theatre, which I've seen attributed to either the stage magician Doug Henning or possibly Stanislavski, describing the process of art as taking something that's difficult and making it habit , then taking something that's habitual and making it easy , and then taking something that's easy and making it beautiful . For example, as an actor, you learn your lines by rote (they become…
I've come to a less pleasant way of putting a similar workflow. If something hurts(in the sense that you dread doing it, even though it needs to be done), make it hurt as much as possible and keep doing it until it doesn't. Along the way you'll find the ways to make it easier, faster, more efficient, etc but if you put it off every time until you can find the fortitude to embrace the suck then it's never going to get noticeably better.
Most of the time this is business process related, especially when inheriting legacy systems. Ideal outcome is that you understand it enough after really digging into it to cut out or replace entire swathes of the processes without losing confidence that it will continue to operate smoothly.
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Not everybody who is a great programmer is a great parent. :-( I, for example, would perhaps not be a bad parent, but very likely at least one who does not obey the social expectations of how to raise a child.
Same. Also I have absolutely no interest in having them.
Oh wow. This hits hard in the feels. Here's my personal submission for "UI problem that has existed for years on touch interfaces, plus a possible solution, but at this point I'm just shouting into the void": https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3... In short, an interface should not be interactable until a few milliseconds after it has finished (re)rendering, or especially, while it is still in…
I've had this a few times, particularly on mobile, where you're doing something and some pop-up will steal focus, but of course you were tapping or swiping or something the exact instance it popped; it stayed just long enough for the after-image on your retinas to catch a single word and you realise it might have been important, but it's gone now, with no sign. This happened to my just the other day; I was purchasing…
You're not going to be able to do it. They're not on facebook, you can't just link to the video, you're going to hold the phone carefully but the bared fraction of their palm will register with the screen, or the page will refresh, or the screen (now 27 feet deep in the doomscroll) will scroll all the way to the top of the screen.
And you'll end every iMessage with a b. b
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Yes, 1,000%. The one I don't quite know how to solve is when I'm tapping a device to connect to -- whether a WiFi router or an AirPlay speaker or whatever -- and I swear to god, half the time my intended device slides out from under me a newly discovered device enters above and pushes it down. Or sometimes devices disappear and pull it up. Maybe it's because I live in an apartment building with lots of devices. I've…
To me the BIGGEST annoyance is the iOS “End call” button. Just as I’m about to tap it, the other person ends the call and what I’m actually tapping is some other person on my call list that it then immediately calls. Even if I end the call quickly they often call back confused “You called, what did you want?” Apple: PLEASE add a delay to touch input after the call screen closes.
and the notification doesn't self-dissapear, so stressed navigation also includes a ham-handed reach and swipe up to make the appointment dissapear. Hope it wasn't important.
The screen is MASSIVE folks. SO MANY PIXELS. keep the GPS AND the calendar appointment.
Software engineers, I love yall. To see the light at the end of the tunnel. To see some glorious perfect paradigm that maybe could be. I envy you. I grew up in a datacenter. Leaky air conditioners and diesel generators. Open the big doors if it gets too hot. Now let’s go back. Back to when we didn’t know better. Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Everything, eve…
> Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. I don't really agree with this. Yes, it gets outdated quickly and breaks often if you build it in such a way that it relies on many external services. Stuff like relying on "number-is-odd" NPM package instead of copy-pasting the code or implementing it yourself. The more dependencies you have, the more likely it will break. I…
There are certainly horizontal slices of every stack that can be written to remain stable regardless of the direction the business takes, but those are rarely the revenue drivers that the business cares about beyond how much they have the potential to cause instability.
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Thank you for your comment, especially for this > I've written a lot of Rust. I've read less than half of the Rust book. Just knowing that there's someone out there who has worked like this or has been in the same situation gives me enough confidence to go through it!(the just write code part) I've gone through so many resources (including the book) and I never managed to finish any of them. But I think now I need to…
> I've gone through so many resources (including the book) and I never managed to finish any of them. But I think now I need to get comfortable with having gaps and just start writing code and not be afraid of writing non-idiomatic rust code, atleast for now. i was in the same boat. i’d probably gone through the first half of the rust book and made actual hand written notes several times over the last 5 years. starte…
Additionally, one of the most unsettling things I find about LLMs is the (now well-observed) phenomenon of hallucinations. As someone who is terrible at memorization and has gotten by life thus far in large part to mental models - I didn’t realize until their popularization that I may or may not have regularly “hallucinated” things my entire life - especially when forming opinions about things. … makes you think …
Great article!
edit: I also find that the type of abstract thinking reinforced by writing software regularly, is addictive. Once you learn how to abstract a thing in order to improve or increase efficiency of the thing, it starts a cycle of continually abstracting, then abstracting your abstractions ad infinitum. It’s also a common bug I see in young CS students - they are fantastic problem solvers, but don’t realize that most (all?) of CS isn’t a thing - it’s the thing that gets you to the thing. Which is (I believe) why we have a generation of software engineers who all want to build platforms and marketplaces with very few applications that ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING. They haven’t taken enough humanities courses, or gained the life experience or something - to find the “REAL” problem they want to solve.
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Your browser should be set to open all pages in reader mode.
Some sites seem to be able to disable reader mode. I'm not sure why browsers allow this but it happens often enough, reader mode just isn't an option on some sites. In firefox you used to be able to do something like: about:reader?url=https;//www.example.com But seems that doesn't work anymore.
But results may vary.