allenu

56 ms·

1. 661.▲
   by allenu 6y ago

   > One anecdote, 10 years ago, I went to a birthday party, a time where I hated social gatherings pretty much. Yet the day after I felt 'replenished' of somethings. As if my internal world couldn't satisfy me fully and even
2. 662.▲
   by allenu 6y ago

   Did you have difficulties finding places to self-promote? I'm finding that that is a tricky thing to do. I don't want to jump into a community and start selling my product since a lot of places don't like it and it is tacky a
3. 663.▲
   by allenu 6y ago

   It's definitely a product problem to get them back, but I think in the context of the post, we should be careful how we use the term "user". It sounds like a user in this case is simply one who viewed the page and clicked &qu
4. 664.▲
   by allenu 6y ago

   I released my own app a month ago after working on it on the side for a year... and I am finding that marketing is important indeed. Just having something in the app store doesn't guarantee eyeballs. You have to find ways of getting yo
5. 665.▲
   by allenu 6y ago

   This reminds me of the famous comic about org structures of various companies. [1] Perhaps this is why Steve Jobs liked to get his fingers in everything, to make sure everything flowed smoothly according to his vision. [1] https:/&#x2
6. 666.▲
   by allenu 6y ago

   This is what I was thinking as well. Once you recognize Conway's Law and Sinofsky's "don't ship the org chart" quote, you start to see it a lot in large companies. Want another great example? If you write iOS apps,
7. 667.▲
   by allenu 6y ago

   I wonder if it's a case of Conway's Law at play. Google is a big company and there are multiple pieces involved in GCP and so in the end the interface between those pieces is inefficient and slow. They've shipped the org char
8. 668.▲
   by allenu 6y ago

   Forced constraints are definitely a great training tool. I think constraints in general also bring about great creativity in the artist. Having little to work with forces the artist to look at the essence of what they're trying to crea
9. 669.▲
   by allenu 6y ago

   I like the idea of separating the content from the presentation, although working with JSON directly to create the content, to me, is not fun. Did you play around with just using markdown directly and embedding html tags in that in a simila
10. 670.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    I love this. I read through the page source before reading the content of the blog fully to work out what it does. Really simple idea, but clever!
11. 671.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    This is how I discovered his music as well. I probably saw it for the first time 15 years ago and I still listen to the soundtrack regularly. Incredibly powerful, both film and music.
12. 672.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    I think the message of Mister Rogers is that you are special and valuable just the way you are and not that your specialness means you can achieve anything. Perceived success or lack thereof is independent of a human being's innate val
13. 673.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    There's a great book, The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, that covers a lot of this. From what I remember, experiments have been done that show your body can react to stimuli before there is actual neurological activity, seemin
14. 674.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    Good on you. Most progress bars are about user experience and not so much about accuracy. People just want to know that there's a long sequence of work and that progress is being made. It's often an illusion and showing too much h
15. 675.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    I actually don't mind the occasional lying progress bar. I think TurboTax is famous for this, where they just toss in fake progress bars to indicate that they are crunching some numbers, which really just take milliseconds, if that. Th
16. 676.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    Conveying progress in a lot of cases is difficult. Sometimes you have two sets of tasks where the first set determines how much is done in the second. That means you can't accurately predict the overall length of time required to finis
17. 677.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    I think I've noticed this attitude from "enthusiasts" as well. Even if a solution people are using has flaws, with regular use they get so used to its idiosyncrasies that they can't imagine it not working the way it does
18. 678.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    I posted recently on a large subreddit to promote my app. I read the rules on the side of the page that indicated which day to self-promote and what flair to add, etc. I still got banned a few minutes later, and the post taken down. I asked
19. 679.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    Exactly what I thought I would see.
20. 680.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    This is so true. Highly efficient systems can be fragile. If one part breaks down, the whole is affected. The system needs a bit of slack to be able to handle the unexpected. It's been a while since I read it, but I think the book Slac
21. 681.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    Thanks for the compliment! Honestly, it would be challenging to distill it down into a post. I don't think I could convey it well enough. A lot of the journey is just training your eye to see things you like and ask what makes it the w
22. 682.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    I thought I had a good sense of aesthetics, but I struggled with coming up with a color scheme for my own app. Once you pick colors that look nice, when you put them together, something always seems off! There isn't a unity and it&#x27
23. 683.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    You can make a usable product using a Windows 95 palette, but I think it may look outdated to users. Depending on your target market, the color scheme you use can have an effect on how your product is perceived by your potential customers.
24. 684.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    Thanks for posting this. You hit the nail on the head. I've seen this dogmatic attitude as well, as if following how Anki does it is the One True Way and if you stray from it, you may as well quit. It's just a tool, and if you mis
25. 685.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    I think it's been working really well. I found with Anki that it was sometimes difficult to self report precisely how well I remembered something. It also added an extra cognitive step on each card to have to consider it, which over ti
26. 686.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    I’m learning to unicycle. I just go to the park and practice. It’s definitely a challenge to learn, but not due to age. Will be 43 in a month.
27. 687.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    I wrote my own app as a fun project and as a way to look at how I could make a flashcard a better user experience overall. The daily overdue experience was just one thing that I didn't like. I think Anki is powerful and has a lot of co
28. 688.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    Thank you! Unfortunately, no. My professional dev background is in iOS and Mac, so I naturally wrote it for those platforms first. If there's enough interest, I might try to port it to Android next year as a fun project.
29. 689.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    I found that issue too when I tried Anki. I missed a few days and when I returned there was a pile of cards that needed review. I later wrote my own flashcard app[1] with spaced repetition and ended up hiding the details of what was overdue
30. 690.▲
    by allenu 6y ago

    There's a great Strange Loop talk by Evan Czaplicki (of Elm fame) where he alludes to the challenges of maintaining an open source project.[1] In it he describes how feedback often starts as an innocuous "Why don't you just..