Some random stuff

This post is completely random, it might end up being interesting, but there’s no story line that connects its elements. Just some unrelated ideas.

Wondering what’s in this picture, it’s explained as a bonus in the bottom of the story 😉

Source code has all the (up-to-date) facts

I was an engineer, wrote -crappy- code myself, and I loved it when I did it. I figured out that I like the overall perspective more than coding or software engineering, but I really appreciate good software engineers and I believe they go beyond coding.

Anyways, I have a belief that although your project has documentation, confluence pages, JIRA tickets, slack conversations, etc. There’s nothing more trustworthy than the code itself. The code tells you the facts of what this really is doing. Not what it’s supposed to do, not what it did but stopped working, the code tells you what it truly does.

Navigating the source code, — not necessarily very well documented but well engineered code-, concluding accurate facts from it, is a very important skill in a good software engineer.. In my humble opinion 😉

Dark mode and deep blacks

Some apps, including Instagram and Medium, are using deep blacks in their UI designs. That’s a problem.

Why?

The deep blacks on AMOLED screens make all of the content in between them pop out and be very visible, that might feel good as an idea, BUT in reality it sucks. You feel like a lot of UI elements are scattered around the interface and it’s overwhelming. Moreover, there’s the bad effect of pixels racing on the screen when scrolling because deep black means the Pixel has 0 light.

It really sucks and I think using very dark gray is a huge improvement over using deep blacks.

I’m writing this post right now on mobile, and seeing these little white letters on the deep black background, and I feel that my eyes are bleeding already 🤮.

Medium mobile app’s “new story” button

It’s medium, again 😑.

Medium have put the “new story” action label in their side menu. I’m a person who uses mobile apps, who builds mobile apps actually 😅, and I kept looking for the create new post button on medium mobile app for a while 🤔. They didn’t only make me think, wander around the app a little bit, but also they made me feel annoyed when I found it on the side menu as a label 🙄.

I wouldn’t think that it was just a shallow decision to put it in the side menu. Maybe I’m part of an A/B test 🤔. BUT I find the pattern of having a FAB or another button at the action bar in Android (navigation bar for iOS) is more intuitive and discoverable. Maybe they are trying to push the users towards more consumption than creation. It might also be aligned with their premium posts thing which I really hate.

Premium authors creating premium posts for premium readers 🤔.. Well, I said these are random thoughts so won’t try to put a lot of reasoning here 💭

^ Naaah! 😜 .. Although I like that the dialog isn’t in deep black 🙂

Autoplay and the power of defaults

Default settings prevail, unless they are really really stupid. If they are a little stupid they prevail too. That’s based on a study of one person, which is me 😜. I can use the fake stats generator, but I am too old for this shit .

Facebook and Youtube introduced the feature of auto playing next videos not very recently. Netflix uses it when you are watching a series. I think this increases the time spent consuming videos in their apps a lot. So, I think that any app building a play list or queue feature should consider a “play next automatically” as a default value that you will need to turn off.

T shirts with GIF support

I have been thinking lately of why don’t t-shirts support GIF formts, and I think it would be super cool to wear a t-shirt having this GIF on it. (the author curses as medium doesn’t support GIFs apparently 🤬)

GIF link cause we’re in the 90’s ;)*

*Emojis were not invented in the early 90’s, first available in 1997/1999 :*

This picture is of Koshary 🙂

Koshary is an extremely delicious egyptian dish, that contains rice, lentils, macaroni, hummus, tomato sauce, vinegar with garlic and lemon sauce, and fried onions. It’s completely random but I believe it is one of the best vegan dishes ever.

👋🏼