“The Design of Everyday Things”. The book that sparked a change in my career (to be honest)
In programming, the analogous problem is API design: taking whatever data structures are used by a software tool internally, and figuring out how to present them to external programmers in a useful, intelligible way. If there’s a mismatch between the internal structure of the system and the structure of what-users-want, then it’s the API designer’s job to translate. A “good” API is one which handles the translation well.
User interface design is a more general version of the same problem: take whatever structures are used by a tool internally, and figure out how to present them to external users in a useful, intelligible way. Conceptually, the only difference from API design is that we no longer assume our users are programmers interacting with the tool via code. We design the interface to fit however people use it - that could mean handles on doors, or buttons and icons in a mobile app, or the temperature knobs on a fridge.
Back in 1993, I took an interest in Wolf 3D a hot new program on DOS which my dad described as “video game”. It was my first time looking at a PC and a video game. I went down that rabbit hole, majored in computer science and started working as a contractor for the military designed and built games used for training soldiers. It went down hill form there, joined EA worked on a few mobile titles and then quit the gaming industry for good.
Restarted as a system engineer, worked on backend systems and databases, then infrastructure management, and then on frontend. Took a break from software development and tried my hand at design. Lead product design at 3 startups all acquired within 2-3 years.
Went back to software engineering, something was off tried engineering management and it still did feel right. Took a engineering role on the growth team of a early stage Chinese startup and hacked a short video app’s growth and put it on the map.
Decided that I love solving problems; and engineering and psychology were my strong points. Wanted to learn how to manage (very large) business and dabble a bit in finance. Now I’m a product manager for a very large business.
[Work]: I switched jobs in November 2019 and I've been busy with the transition from SDE to PM. I began working from home in February and I will continue to do so till next year. I had to turn one of the spare bedrooms into an office and discipline myself to stick to a 09:00 to 17:00 work schedule (So far failed 90% of the time. I work till 20:00 everyday).
[Health]: With commute out of the picture, I take long walks at 23:00 every night. Tokyo is a crowded city and the night time walks lets me avoid crowds/people. I escape into the woods and off the beaten path during weekends.
[Finance]: Financially secure for now since my new job is stable. I made the right call at the end of last year. The startup I worked at previously is going through a very rough time right now. The acquisition wasn't favourable, they downsized and pivoted into an entirely different product.
[Play]: Keeping myself busy with gardening and video games.
Overall quality of life hasn't changed. I'm not an extrovert so I'm quite comfortable with the stay home logic.
Hmm interesting, thanks for the report! I'll see if I can set up some kind of client-side error tracker so I can investigate more easily in the future.
It's possible that it timed out when computing the result — it evaluates the answer in a web worker with a 2.5s timeout and execution is slower on mobile. I used to get timeouts more regularly, but it's fairly optimized now — it checks all of the test inputs and evaluates both the expected solution and user-provided solution in a single Python function.
> I was expecting a video streaming CDN so anyone could build a Youtube/Twitch competitor without having to deal with storing, transcoding and (live)streaming video. I vaguely remember AWS offering something like this. Not sure how much money there is in this market but definitely sounds like a great product fit for someone like Cloudflare.
Tooling around Hasura is starting to mature. People have already mentioned nhost, I’d also like to point out a terraform module [0] to put Hasura on AWS
We had two young engineers (who are no longer with us now) discriminate against applicants for software development roles because of their age, religion, or origins. One of them is a google developer expert and he quite openly rejected people by discriminating against their age (anyone 40+) and beliefs. I didn’t want to veto the hiring decisions even though I could have because at the end of the day they’ll have to work with him.
Then we had a 58 year old engineer apply for an open position. Happy to say that we hired him and it was purely on merit (even sponsored his visa). The retirement age is 60 but his ambitions go beyond that. Needless to say he is one of the best on our team right now.
> We had two young engineers (who are no longer with us now) discriminate against applicants for software development roles because of their age, religion, or origins. One of them is a google developer expert and he quite openly rejected people by discriminating against their age (anyone 40+) and beliefs. I didn’t want to veto the hiring decisions even though I could have because at the end of the day they’ll have to work with him.
I'm not sure that's a great reason to condone illegal discrimination.
Shared housing is becoming popular in Tokyo now, specially in Setagaya. Thanks to Netflix and Terrace House for the hype and people are starting to realize they can live better in a sharing accommodation that they wouldn't be able to afford alone.
Things like that might also have the unintentional benefit of providing a sense of community and staving off the epidemic of loneliness that modern society is sinking into.
I totally agree and I would love to see this idea implemented in many other places but sadly not all the countries share the same mentality that Japan has about social duties.
In programming, the analogous problem is API design: taking whatever data structures are used by a software tool internally, and figuring out how to present them to external programmers in a useful, intelligible way. If there’s a mismatch between the internal structure of the system and the structure of what-users-want, then it’s the API designer’s job to translate. A “good” API is one which handles the translation well.
User interface design is a more general version of the same problem: take whatever structures are used by a tool internally, and figure out how to present them to external users in a useful, intelligible way. Conceptually, the only difference from API design is that we no longer assume our users are programmers interacting with the tool via code. We design the interface to fit however people use it - that could mean handles on doors, or buttons and icons in a mobile app, or the temperature knobs on a fridge.