Reliability is the most important feature - 123dev #26
Posted on October 1, 2021 • 3 minutes • 522 words
Comments
Simplicity vs User Experience
Why do fans have that weird nob to turn on oscillation but they have buttons for speed control? Why not put an oscillation button on the front? The nob is hard to reach and especially difficult while the fan is oscillating. It’s terrible UX.
It’s incredibly simple to implement which makes it extremely reliable. As a user of a fan’s interface I would prefer a button next to speed controls. As a builder, I rather not implement a secondary motor and deal with the guaranteed support and defective returns a more complex system would have.
With any system, the most important feature is if it does what I expect it to do. This is equally true for software we write, process we implement, and systems we build.
Psychological safety
I remember reading a report years ago that Google published to determine the key metrics for a high performing team. It wasn’t talent, collaboration, or anything else I would have guessed. The key indicator was how safe did the team feel to make a mistake and speak up. The report called this metric “psychological safety”.
Over the years I’ve been on a lot of teams and most of them I feel like I would say I had the safety to not worry about failing or asking a dumb question. In the past year I’ve come to realize this is one of the biggest privileges I have as a while, cis male. Even if I feel like the team is safe and welcoming of all ideas that doesn’t mean everyone on the team feels the same way. I’ve tried to change my actions and behaviors to not make these assumptions anymore and to make sure I explicitly let everyone know they are safe to make mistakes and learn without repercussions.
Links
Here’s some good advice about how to use secrets at the command line. In most cases people don’t think about this because everyone has their own computer and assume it is secure. In reality there’s lots of things that can read your shell history, crawl /proc, or get information you may be leaking unintentionally.
How to Handle Secrets on the Command Line — smallstep.com How to keep secret credentials safe on the command line.
A great intro to CSS I wish I had read last year. Lots of other links to dive deeper into topics like flex boxes and grid too. As someone who before last year wrote almost no CSS I’ve had to start from the very beginning.
CSS: From Zero to Hero - DEV Community — dev.to CSS defines the way things look on your websites. HTML is your content, JavaScript adds interaction,… Tagged with beginners, css, frontend.
This was a fun look at how UTF characters work and specifically emoji. I feel like a lot of what I learned in college was a lie when I think that most characters are more than a single byte.
Bear plus snowflake equals polar bear - ⌨️🤷🏻♂️📷 This is simple enough; this page is encoded as UTF-8, which implies 8-bits per ASCII character, or a byte per character.