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.
Einmal Ist Keinmal
Jacked in
In digital design, products and services are frequently imagined and implemented placelessly: as if the consumer were jacked into The Matrix, and considering this product or that product from among an infinite set of choices at an infinitely-provisioned mercantile. The things we make are good, by this way of reasoning, if they fit the market’s demand.
Immer wieder
My attitude toward Alexander’s teachings prior to experiencing the places and spaces realized in his practice was akin to what Alan Watts said about certain teachings in The Bible:
Sometimes, as St. Paul pointed out, commandments are not given in the expectation that they will be obeyed, but in the expectation that they will reveal something to those who hear them.
Today, my answer is unequivocal. My interpretive lens: literal. Time and again, across cultures and continents and islands and oceans, in five different places now I’ve examined the evidence, and am persuaded.
Nicht nur einmal: immer wieder.
But what if it is?
Occasionally, one or two students out of sixty would take this task [of timeless thinking] up with some seriousness, and before too long would visit me in office hours to see if I could relieve them of their distress. They needed me to assure them that what Alexander says in his books isn’t…you know…real. For a number of reasons, not the least of which being the seeming incompatibility between how they’d been taught to think about design and what these teachings insist one must do in order to be, as they might say, “doing it right.”
And having never been to any of Alexander’s buildings, I’d simply turn the question around and ask “but what if it is real?”