Shawn Wang
100 Bytes of CSS to look great everywhere
An Article by Shawn Wanghtml { max-width: 60ch; padding: 1.5rem; margin: auto; line-height: 1.5rem; font-size: 24x; }
Metrics have a strange hold on the imagination
A Fragment by Shawn WangOnce in place, metrics have a strange hold on the imagination: I've seriously had a CTO carelessly reject my genuine idea out of hand because "it doesn't help OKRs", the same OKRs we previously agreed should not describe all that we do.
I agree with Amir Shevat that we should "do the right things over the easy to measure things."
The Genius of Apple's Name
An Article by Shawn WangIt's easy to have strong opinions about stuff only developers see since user validation is just asking people like yourself. It's much harder to name something consumer facing. Here are some useful rules I gleaned from Apple:
- Two syllables max
- Familiar English word - literal 5 year olds can spell and pronounce it right
- Starts with A - useful for alphabetical sort. Amazon did this too
- Name leads to easy logo/swag/branding ideas
- Evoke aspirational qualities - knowledge, health, nature
Don't Rush to Simplicity
An Article by Shawn WangYou've probably heard this story before:
A businessman finds a fisherman, who is living an idyllic, peaceful life by the sea.
He laughs and tells the fisherman how to get rich instead.
The fisherman asks him what he will do after he gets rich.
He replies that he would retire to an idyllic, peaceful life by the sea.There's supposed to be a deep life lesson in there, but it's always felt insincere to me.
To me it is better to have reached the heights of a career, or suffered an epic defeat, even if I do end up in the same place as everyone else in the end.
To me simplicity is made more beautiful when understood through a long personal struggle with complexity. When I can dance with it, having turned a mighty nemesis into an old friend, and teach others to do the same.
Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.
80/20 is the new Half-Ass
An Article by Shawn WangThe Pareto Principle is making you lazy.
Let me be more precise: The Pareto distribution is a useful model of power law effects in real life. But people are using it poorly, primarily as an excuse to be lazy.
...People forget that the devil is in the details. The first 20% everyone knows to say on Twitter. The remaining 80% is the ugly, nasty, hacky, unglamorous shit nobody talks about unless you've got time to sweat the details.
Death at Home
To build a folly
To build a folly is essentially to do something a second time, something at an inopportune moment. That something is always the memory of something forgotten, about which we can paradoxically say "There it is again."
Follies were misunderstood, purposeless constructions. They were often only small, extravagant gestures in a garden, easily whisking off the imagination to distant lands, a sort of time capsule built to awaken the memory and induce surprise in passers-by. They marked locations, organized secondary paths in a park, or simply predicted the arrival of better times—a demarcation, a sacred spot, a mysterious trail, a hill whose tragic rocky nature begged for a tower, a party, or the arrival of summer.
Simple moments of clarity
I have seen autistic children drawing at a terrific speed and I've always thought that my drawings should not be less rapid, because that speed gives them insignificance. In this speed lies their abandonment and it may cause them to be overlooked as mere doodles. However, I understand that they are like that pristine light that appears when they tell you that you have a tumour. In an instant, everything becomes clear and well-defined. All contours are cruelly illuminated as if it was worth taking a final look at the world. At such times, although the lines in the drawings clump into a skein of events that are indecipherable to ordinary mortals, they can be described in detail by the victim one by one. These are moments when weeds regain their nature as plants.
Only now can I understand these drawings as simple moments of clarity.