My distaste of “Giant List of Stuff” aside, a few things stood out:
Have some personality: MID (Medium-Inspired Design) is mediocre.
Everything looks the goddamn same. Same sans serif fonts. Same flat illustrations. Same colour schemes. Same. Same. Same.
Couldn’t agree more… Although perhaps this is just the zeitgeist of what design consumers like and we’re stuck until, IDK, Baroque comes back and the Marquee Tag is lauded as the best thing since sliced CSS.
DRY (don’t repeat yourself) is a luxury for when you have a coherent theory in your mind of the app’s code.
DRY is a great principle for code! Once it’s written. Screaming about it during the “Drafting” phase isn’t helpful, it just makes people feel bad about themselves.
People lie when you do research. Watching what they do for an hour will tell you more than a hundred hours of interviews.
Lie is a strong word; They don’t mean to, we’re just unreliable narrators of our own stories. (You still shouldn’t trust without verifying.)
Same sans serif fonts. Same flat illustrations. Same colour schemes. Same. Same. Same.
I value information density and skimmability above all else. So, for me, bad design is worse than no design. Especially when more padding is used as a design “hammer”. Unless the design of a website is carefully chosen to complement the content, it very often gets in the way of what should be the primary goal of a website: communicating information.
Thanks for sharing, was a nice read, even if it felt like the writer and I share a lot of positions on stuff and echo chambers can be dangerous for growth :slight_smile:.
The only fact I would say that is completely wrong is:
Svelte and Typescript are very useful, but the cost of building is always more than you think, especially once the codebase grows.
The difference in cost of building additional features in Typescript vs Javascript is exactly zero, the costs are still there. The question is do you want your tooling to tell you about all the costs of making a change or do you have to discover, remember, and track them yourself? I know which one I would chose.
I think he was referring to time it takes to compile typescript to JavaScript (build time, not time to build/add new features). As opposed to files on your computer that your browser already understands and somehow reloads straight away when edited. He’s saying there’s a trade off between having a tight feedback loop and whatever benefits you get from your compiler/we pack/whatever.
in my experience it still takes more time to verify non-trivial behaviors versus your compiler telling you, “hey, you just messed this up”, and there is significantly more chance a bug makes it from your localhost to production. that is not free in any sense.
that tight loop might be cool for your first couple of features, but as they get more complex you’re going to end up chasing ghosts, i will never start a new project in anything but typescript going forward myself, because anything interesting invariably gets rewritten in typescript anyway.
136 items is unfortunately in TL;DR territory for most web readers. Even if the content is engaging, some people may not want to take 30+ minutes to sit and read a blog post of that length.
My distaste of “Giant List of Stuff” aside, a few things stood out:
Couldn’t agree more… Although perhaps this is just the zeitgeist of what design consumers like and we’re stuck until, IDK, Baroque comes back and the Marquee Tag is lauded as the best thing since sliced CSS.
DRY is a great principle for code! Once it’s written. Screaming about it during the “Drafting” phase isn’t helpful, it just makes people feel bad about themselves.
Lie is a strong word; They don’t mean to, we’re just unreliable narrators of our own stories. (You still shouldn’t trust without verifying.)
Martin Luther did well enough with his “giant list of stuff”. 🙃 Maybe we should nail this to some door 🤔
I value information density and skimmability above all else. So, for me, bad design is worse than no design. Especially when more
paddingis used as a design “hammer”. Unless the design of a website is carefully chosen to complement the content, it very often gets in the way of what should be the primary goal of a website: communicating information.Thanks for sharing, was a nice read, even if it felt like the writer and I share a lot of positions on stuff and echo chambers can be dangerous for growth :slight_smile:.
The only fact I would say that is completely wrong is:
The difference in cost of building additional features in Typescript vs Javascript is exactly zero, the costs are still there. The question is do you want your tooling to tell you about all the costs of making a change or do you have to discover, remember, and track them yourself? I know which one I would chose.
I think he was referring to time it takes to compile typescript to JavaScript (build time, not time to build/add new features). As opposed to files on your computer that your browser already understands and somehow reloads straight away when edited. He’s saying there’s a trade off between having a tight feedback loop and whatever benefits you get from your compiler/we pack/whatever.
in my experience it still takes more time to verify non-trivial behaviors versus your compiler telling you, “hey, you just messed this up”, and there is significantly more chance a bug makes it from your localhost to production. that is not free in any sense.
that tight loop might be cool for your first couple of features, but as they get more complex you’re going to end up chasing ghosts, i will never start a new project in anything but typescript going forward myself, because anything interesting invariably gets rewritten in typescript anyway.
Probably, this is a reference to the Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail game from 1996. It featured Tetris with dead bodies mini-game called “Drop Dead”.
Only 136 items? Come on, you can do better than that!
Snark aside, this is a pretty good list. I like the sections on markets and business ecosystems.
136 items is unfortunately in TL;DR territory for most web readers. Even if the content is engaging, some people may not want to take 30+ minutes to sit and read a blog post of that length.
It’s like a stream of consciousness. I enjoyed it. Probably was cartharctic to write as well.
Can haz mind-map version grouped by topic and/or theme? K thnks bye.