I'm a designer who grew up with Adobe Photoshop and other tools for photo and video editing. After episodes of losing hours of work when my computer crashed and I had not bothered to save it, pressing Ctrl+S has become a second habit.
If I were to break this down using the classic model of habits, the cue to this habit would be when I authoring something and I take a tiny mental break between two thoughts. That's when this habit of “saving” kicks in. The reward is seeing the “unsaved” status disappear.
Although so many web based tools have come after that which auto-save the work, my fingers just keep returning to those two keys on their own. Some tools provide a little something to remind me that I don't need to save. Some tools just disregard my eccentricities. What really grinds my gears is when browsers think I'm trying to save the web page I'm on. I can't think of many people who actually would want to save html files. Sure, keep your Ctrl+P and Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, but do not assume I want to download a webpage with a shortcut that's associated with saving state.
That being said, all webapps which allow people to author anything should just disable this if they care about user experience.
I met an old wise man today. Normally I would argue that being old has not a lot to do with being wise. But this man got me thinking about the qualities that are common to old age and wisdom.
Old people (some young people too) speak with such gravitas, it's enchanting. It would probably be possible to distill the qualities of that speech into simple things that one can learn. Speaking slowly would be one such qualities. I (and many others) think fast, speak to keep pace with it and end up tripping over our words. People who speak slowly build a filter such that their thoughts come out in a far more articulate manner. If someone took a class where I could practice speaking like old wise people, I would go to that class over all the ones I took for my college.
Also, old people have so many stories to tell. That's something no one can teach in a class.
I don't know who it was that said that a language changes (or defines) the way you think about the world. Similarly, programming languages also change the way you think about software. I've had brief trysts with three languages, GW-BASIC, C++ and Javascript.
GW-BASIC, a dialect of BASIC, was very methodical. The basic structure of the code was more important than the logic. I could reasonably predict what my code would do, so there was less debugging required. But if my logic was flawed, it was difficult to change the code, sometimes I opted for rewriting the whole program. While it worked for smaller programs, I would never want to write more than a hundred line program in this language.
C++ vs Javascript – I know that both of these languages are perhaps very different but looking back, I can only remember some major distinctions in my thinking. C++ was self contained and deterministic. Javascript was about code reuse and explorative. With Javascript, I could never tell if something was going to work or not. Javascript (or the way we use Javascript) forced me to think in terms of libraries, modules. While this was way more powerful, I found it way more difficult to understand the program and debug.
What is Agency? It is the capacity to act when there are no clear guidelines. As someone who's recently begun managing (I dislike the term) other people, I've come to realise the importance of agency, particularly in high growth environments.
An annotation is meta data over a resource which helps people communicate in context of the resource.
When someone points to a particular line in a book, that's them temporarily annotating using their hands on a book. When someone highlights some part of a book with a highlighter pen, that's annotating.
I'm trying to make Postman the best place for collaboration for developers. For this, I'm looking at some of the best collaborative software (Google Drive, Airtable, Figma, Whisical, Slack etc.) and thinking deep about how these products promote collaboration.
Some of the constructs that help people collaborate are
- Comments and annotations
- Notifications
- Access control
- Easy sharing
- Allowing easy organisation of resources
- Versioning, conflict resolution, reviews
- Realtime context sharing (when you know who else is working with you, even if they're remote)
Take this with a grain of salt, but:
We have a tendency to jump at work which is easy to do. In my experience, very little of such work has impact beyond the instant gratification. Most impactful tasks which are also easy would've been done by now.
We do small things for others. They offer us an easy break from routine. I don't want to say that you should be a jerk and never do anything other people, but you should take a moment to think about if the thing actually is helpful for others. Thoughtful actions are better than the ones which are most readily visible.
I read this on Twitter. This simple statement resonated with me so much, it made me write down this article.
Writing helps you distill your thoughts and focus on the best ones. Then it helps you refine them. Mundane thoughts are silenced. Stray thoughts become ideas. New patterns emerge. Ideas solidify. You become confident in those ideas.
Writing frequently also helps your thinking process. With the goal of producing more ideas, and to control what I'm thinking about, I'll try to write frequently here.