About 6 years ago, the company [0] that owns most of the local newspapers in my state did a "mobile first" redesign of their website ... which actually was a "mobile ONLY" redesign.
It was so, so bad it was almost totally unusable on anything larger than a tablet. It made it virtually impossible to read articles on a desktop because everything was so spread out, the font sizes were all messed up, navigation was hidden in a tiny little hamburger at the far upper right of the screen, and a bunch of other problems. But what was wild was how easy it was to fix them. I ended up writing a small (maybe 100 line) CSS user style that fixed almost all of the problems.
They did eventually "fix" the site so that it wasn't as bad on desktop.
I am glad I'm not the only person who has had this thought, and I think it every time I see how many people some of these random tech companies employ. Those are the kinds of employee numbers I would expect from a much larger company than Twilio.
For reference, in the past I worked for an immensely profitable eCommerce business and I don't think our entire engineering department ever reached more than 40 people at its absolute largest.
I know all those employees aren't engineers, and I've been around long enough to know that what we see from the outside is just the tip of the iceberg. But if we assume even 25% of them are engineers directly working on the product, that is still nearly 2,000 people. That must be a huge iceberg.
So what on Earth are all those people doing? I am not being sarcastic or obtuse, I am genuinely curious because the only organization that I have ever worked for that was that size or larger was the US government. Is it administrative/managerial bloat? Are there a bunch of different pivot projects going on? What does Twilio have going on that needs nearly 8,000 employees?
When I worked at a VC-backed firm, headcount was a bragging point and seemed to be a metric they were concerned about in the opposite direction you’d expect— that is, if I was a business owner, I’d be concerned about having too much headcount. They were always busy seemingly trying to maximize headcount. I never understood it.
I’m in my early 40s. I know a guy from my college years who is now making a TON of money because he got into COBOL development early in his career and most of his peers are now in their 60s and 70s and retiring. I think he was among the people who helped New Jersey fix some of their COBOL problems a couple years ago [0].
I sometimes wonder what’s going to happen in about 40 years when some then Fortune 50 company who built their entire operation on Node suddenly can’t find Javascript programmers because they’re all retiring. :P
Similar story for me. I went to college at Auburn, which is located in eastern Alabama about 20 miles from the Eastern/Central timezone border. Half of our broadcast TV stations came from both Columbus, Georgia (Eastern) and the other half from Montgomery, Alabama (Central). You had to remember which station you were watching and where it was from whenever a time was listed.
Disclaimer: not in the EU, but have lived through some natural disasters that involved power loss for extended periods of time. So this is some kind of general advice.
If you own your home and you haven't already, do an energy audit [0]. Pay especially close attention to window and door seals. These wear out over time. You can lose a surprising amount of heat through these, and they are very inexpensive to fix. If you have ducted HVAC, check the ducts for leaks as well. Adding additional insulation if possible will also help.
Figure out what your biggest energy sinks are. In most homes the HVAC is the biggest power draw. After that you're looking at major appliances like stoves, washers and dryers, refrigerators, water heater and the like. If you can replace these with more energy efficient versions, it may be worth considering. For ones you can't, figure out ways to use them less.
Close off areas you aren't using. If you have rooms in your home/apartment that are largely unoccupied or only occasionally occupied (like a home office), close them off and consolidate into fewer rooms. If it gets especially cold, close the vents if you have ducted HVAC, seal the doors with tape and put a blanket at the bottom of the door. This will help further seal the heat into the occupied areas. But be careful that you don't cause pipes to freeze by doing this.
Stock up on foods you don't need power to cook. Shelf-stable canned goods are a good bet. It won't be gourmet, but it will keep you alive. If you are in an area that stays suitably cold throughout the winter you could use a cooler outside for food storage instead of a refrigerator.
If you have alternative means of heating (like a fireplace) go ahead and prepare to start using that a lot more. Get supplies like firewood or pellets now and, if possible, be sure you have enough to last you through the winter with increased usage. Find the lowest temperature you can tolerate at home, even if that means you may have to wear a light coat inside.
Monitor your usage regularly. If your utility provides realtime or near realtime usage information, find that now and get in the habit of checking it often. If not, figure out how to read your meter and check it at least daily.
And finally, just try to find ways to not be at home. If you can go work in an office or even a coffee shop, that's a few hours you won't have to keep your home as warm. Try to make your home just for sleeping and adjust the temperature in the home when you are away accordingly. Having a programmable/remote thermostat helps here.
This is an excellent comment that really does distill down what an EM is supposed to be.
As someone who's been on all sides of this (currently an EM, been a tech lead and an individual contributor in the past), I really think there is a lack of understanding among large parts of the tech community about what engineering managers do. A good manager's first and primary responsibility is to reduce chaos for their team. In an ideal world you won't even know I'm here, because I am shielding you from all the stuff that is going on further up in the company and clearing out obstacles so that you can work without interference.
Good managers reduce chaos, bad managers create chaos. In my experience, engineering managers are a lot like all other employees: you have a few outstanding performers, a significant number of average/acceptable/mediocre managers, and some number of pretty bad ones. The difficulty comes in knowing which type you have, and often that only becomes clear when a manager leaves. Either a new EM makes things better, or things get dramatically worse because a good EM is no longer helping the team.
It's like that Futurama episode where Bender meets God: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
I just sold my 11 year old Hitachi plasma TV a few months ago. Honestly, despite its age it had the best picture quality of all my TVs until I bought an OLED to replace it.
The biggest downside to it? It put out a tremendous amount of heat. It got to where I didn't like using it during the summer because it would heat up the room. It was basically like running a space heater.
I rented a place during the summer that had a plasma TV in the master bedroom. I had to disconnect it, and never used it, because it generated so much heat that we could not sleep.
> This whole comment section is pretty frustrating.
I agree. The amount of misinformation and/or active disinformation in this comment section is horrifying and disheartening.
> My trans brothers and sisters have it way, way worse - especially when surgery and/or hormones are not nearly as easy to come by as these people on the internet would like to think.
It really is wild to me how many people think, like, school nurses are handing out hormone medication like candy or something, or you can just go get them OTC at the corner drug store. My kid's school nurse won't even give her Tylenol without calling me, these people really think they're secretly sending kids home with hormone medication?
It is not and easy or fast process. Often, in the case of gender questioning youth, puberty blockers are used to buy time for them while they assess their feelings and the process plays out, because they are entirely reversible - just stop taking them. The whole initial transition process can often take a year or more from first appointment to hormone therapy starting and there are lots of gatekeepers along the way to safeguard you.
In most places if you are under 18 you have to be under the care of an LGBT-affirming physician (which can be very hard to find, even in cities, and often have months of wait time), have had at least some therapy under your belt, and an official gender dysphoria diagnosis to get hormone treatment started.
Surgical approaches are very rarely considered for young people. Like I am sure there have been some, I can't fully rule it out, but I run in LGBT+ circles a lot and have for decades, and I personally have not met a single person who had any kind of gender-affirming surgery done before 18. Most have them done in their 20s or 30s if they can afford it. The wait times can stretch into years, and the surgeries themselves are often considered cosmetic procedures and are often not covered the same as a medically-required surgery. Even among adult trans people, surgeries are often considered a far off goal that many never be reached, and quite a few will find that they don't want or need it once other transitioning processes have happened and they no longer feel crippling levels of dysphoria.
And all of that assumes you have a supportive parent or guarding and, as one stroll through various transgender hangouts on the web will tell you, that is not as common as one would hope. All it takes is one parent to say "no" and you're not doing anything until you're an adult. Once you are 18 things are a bit more open and you have more options to speed the process up, but it is hard being a transgender youth.
There are a lot of misconceptions in these comments about what being transgender is, what the process for getting HRT is, and all of the various steps needed to reach each person's individual goals. And all of this is easily researchable using Google in 10 minutes, it just takes an open mind and a willingness to see others' viewpoints. It's extremely frustrating.
The disinformation has a purpose sadly. And it's clearly working.
I'm not sure how to fix it though.
More doctors speaking out? seeing some parents & their young trans kids feels helps.
The fact that the word 'humanizing' is used just shows how gross this is; that these kids and queer people are somehow not human already.
Just as a thought experiment type rabbit hole, I've spent some time thinking about the net benefit of our increasing representation and being more integrated into society at large.
It feels that on the whole the #s look more accepting. Gay marriage has majority support (so does abortion..)
But seeing trans people and queer people on TV has triggered an insane backlash.
See it on HN threads all the time.
"netflix is all propaganda."
When the representation numbers are just barely catching up the real general population (of which is probably still low given closeting).
Our existence isn't propaganda.
It's not indoctrination to live our truth.
But a lot of people feel threatened and backed into a corner which is dangerous.
And some politicians pick up on this and whip it up into an very dangerous frenzy of disinformation and hate.
One of the big reasons I have always like CDE/Motif was that it, to me, is the epitome of function over form when it comes to a desktop UI and widget toolkit. It's actually the same reason I think the Windows' UI peaked around Windows 98SE. Things that are interactive, like buttons or window frame edges, look interactive and are easy to spot. Buttons look like buttons. Checkboxes look like checkboxes. Contrasting colors are used to separate window frames from window contents. Window frames had actual titles so that you could glance quickly to see the state of your system. You sat down with it, you knew immediately what was what.
NextSTEP/OpenSTEP/GnuSTEP feels similar to me. Yes, by modern standards, they are ugly as sin. But they were super, super usable for the users with very little ramp-up time.
By contrast, everything else is just so flat now. On my Mac, it's a regular Where's Waldo to figure out what is and isn't clickable sometimes. There is very little contrast between the window frames and window content ... if there is any at all, and I really dislike how they've largely done away with title bars entirely. And so much stuff is hidden in menus or behind obtuse, difficult to reach settings. I'll occasionally go look at Windows and it's not much better.
What's really frustrating is watching some of my elderly family members struggle to use newer versions of Windows or macOS because the UX has become so flat that using it can be very obtuse if it's not something that you use all day, every day. It feels like redesigning UIs is becoming a vanity project for companies to show they are "modern" ... rather than trying to make things better for actual human beings that use computers.
I cannot agree enough. From another comment I made:
> one thing that I _really_ like that a lot of UI has been leaving by the wayside is making it clear when something on-screen is supposed to be interactable.
> Buttons look like buttons. Menus are always in the same place (in-window or top o' the screen, macOS style) instead of having to play "find the hamburger" in every single application. Title bars are exclusively for identifying and manipulating windows. You don't have to worry about accidentally clicking some control when you're just trying to move a window.
> The titlebar thing really gets my goat. Firefox uses the titlebar as a tab bar, so you switch or close tabs if you try to grab the titlebar to move things around. Slack has a big ol' search bar in the title bar. macOS[1] Mail.app and Calendar.app litter the titlebar with buttons. One of the basic functions of the window manager, _moving windows around_, has been hijacked to put controls there in the name of reducing clutter when we have _insanely_ high DPI displays and we can easily afford to give a little screen space to a few controls.
> Drives me crazy.
> [1] I'm at work, so I'm on mac. At home I run pop!_OS and KDE, but I have similar complaints there.
> Contrasting colors are used to separate window frames from window contents. Window frames
THIS IS MY BIGGEST⁰ IRRITATION WITH THE MODERN WINDOWS UI. There is no standard window decoration or title formatting, particularly no standard way of differentiating between the active window and others. It is often difficult to tell what application has focus especially if you have two with the same theming on different desktops¹. And it only seems to get worse over time.
I keep thinking of writing a tool that hunts for the top-most window⁴ and draws a nasty great bright green box around it so current input focus is impossible-to-mistake obvious! Ugly but functional.
----
[0] of several…
[1] looking at you MS Office, with nothing but a difference in text decorations²³ between focused and non-focused windows, though that is far from the only or the worst offender
[2] from white to off-white
[3] or, for non-maximised windows, for some apps, a slight difference in how dark that 1px border is
[4] excluding those that are set always-on-top, hopefully that is just a visual thing and the top-most on the task stack is actually the one with input focus
I share most of these sentiments, but I also don't know how much of this is my own wistful "those were the days..." sentimentality and how much of it is based on a those old Us being actually easier to use in practice.
As far as usability, I do think computers have become easier for non-experts to use, especially for basic tasks. I definitely remember helping some very confused people being completely overwhelmed by what to click on, what deeply nested menu was needed, etc., when just trying to browse the web or check their email. Those basic workflows have gotten better.
In many ways I think modern interfaces are more about mobile first, touch based influences, and moving away from keyboard and multi-button mouse based interfaces. Stripping things down to the very basics is almost required now, given the devices people use. You can't "middle click to paste" on an iPad.
It's entirely possible for a GUI to be simple and consistent for all normal actions and also have non-obvious shortcuts for people who want to invest the time.
It's even better when the non-obvious shortcuts are documented and standardized so that you don't have to relearn them for each application.
I came here wondering why anyone would build yet another desktop. Now that I've read your comments--particularly about the flat look--I'm wondering why the github site says "It is probably not well suited for beginners." It looks to me like it could be very well suited for beginners. (And maybe me, too, although I hope I'm not a beginner.)
> It's actually the same reason I think the Windows' UI peaked around Windows 98SE. Things that are interactive, like buttons or window frame edges, look interactive and are easy to spot. Buttons look like buttons.
Unless we're talking about toolbar buttons, where the 3D look that was still in Win95 vanished with either Win98 or one of the early office suites. I still think that's wrong, and maybe even the original sin of our current flatness crisis.
They copied it from web design. In that field discoverability means: hover your mouse over an element, see if the cursor changes, if yes try to click it. And, when all else fails, try to click on everything.
A few years back I was going through some old floppy disks I found in a box and, on one of them, I found a screenshot I took of my desktop circa winter of 2000. In it was a window open with a MUD I was logged into at the time. Another window had Winamp open with a playlist of songs and another window had ICQ open. The only reason I took it was because there was an unofficial competition between our pub and another pub elsewhere on the MUD about which was more popular, and we had finally surpassed them.
It's amazing how many emotions seeing that one image gave me. But the biggest was just this overwhelming sense of nostalgia. As I looked at that, I could remember what I was thinking, what I was feeling, everything that was happening in my super confusing teenage life at that time. Occasionally I will look at that image now, even 22 years later, I can still feel all those feeling again.
Of course, my ex's character is in the screenshot too. So, a bit bittersweet as well. :/
Exact same thing happened. Found a bunch of old screenshots from 2000 to about 2006. So many programs you just stopped using at some point without really realizing, but seeing the screenshot immediately makes you feel like past you again, and what it was like to use your computer back then.
Especially when you see parts of a conversation with someone you didn't talk to in over a decade, or who passed away. You'd think that's what a photo would do, so I was surprised how strong of an emotional reaction screenshots can trigger. But then if you were spending 90% of your time online as a teen/early 20s it's not that surprising on a second thought.
> But then if you were spending 90% of your time online as a teen/early 20s it's not that surprising on a second thought.
You know, this is a very enlightening point. I never really thought about it from this angle, but there is a lot of truth to this.
I struggled a lot as a teen with anxiety, depression and bullying. I had a few IRL friends, but the very vast majority of my social interaction during that time came via MUDs and chatting. Many of the people I played and chatted with were fellow social outcasts, and we created our own parallel virtual communities to support and lift each other up. It didn't matter where we were, what we looked like, or how we did or didn't fit in. Many days in the 90s it felt like going to school was the thing I had to put up with, and logging in and seeing my friends when I got home was my real life.
Without them, there's a very real chance I might not be here today. Even all these years later, the people I met virtually during that time are still some of my best and closest friends, and it's a real treat when my travels take me close enough that we can meet for coffee or lunch. Many were at my wedding even, and in one case that was the first time I had ever met them IRL. And yet we knew each other deeply. It felt like we all grew up together because, kinda, we did.
When you look at it like that, those of us who grew up in that environment would look at a screenshot from that era the same way others might look at random photos from high school. Because this was our world.
Very cute story!
I have a lot of my files going back to my first computer. Maybe 2003 or so. I have a lot of screenshots, high school work. I have all of my chat logs from msn. I just know when I’m older and my mind is weaker, looking back will help jog my memory.
I still have computer files from 15 years ago, the time I was in high school. They are of no use, but I keep them around. Class projects, power point slides, word files.
I'll expand on this since I found it interesting. Essentially it's a reference to a French epic called "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust. It was his life's work and is around 4.2k pages or 1.3 million words! That's much larger than "War and Peace", "Les Miserables", "Crime and Punishment", "The Iliad", and "The Odyssey" combined; which is super impressive.
I have never had a Madeleine cookie, they are not common around here. Are they worthwhile to bake yourself? Since they are so famous because of this reference, I think I should find one to taste.
Interesting, for some reason I translated the Croatian word "kolačić" for "small cake" to cookie. I guess cookie is not a small cake. In Croatian the expression is "madeleine kolačić".
It was so, so bad it was almost totally unusable on anything larger than a tablet. It made it virtually impossible to read articles on a desktop because everything was so spread out, the font sizes were all messed up, navigation was hidden in a tiny little hamburger at the far upper right of the screen, and a bunch of other problems. But what was wild was how easy it was to fix them. I ended up writing a small (maybe 100 line) CSS user style that fixed almost all of the problems.
They did eventually "fix" the site so that it wasn't as bad on desktop.
[0] https://www.al.com/