Long one.
I used to think the goal was to write code so clever that other people would admire it. Then I had to go back to something I wrote eight months earlier and I could not work out what I had been thinking....
Community Feed
The feature nobody asks for and everybody notices when it is missing: an empty state that tells you what to do next. #design #ideas
Trees in a forest are mostly older than the oldest person you have met, and they will be there after everyone reading this. Worth standing under one for a minute. #science
The human body replaces most of its cells over several years, at wildly different rates. Gut lining in days, bone over a decade, and some neurons never. You are mostly new and partly original. #science
Your API is a promise. Every field you return, somebody will depend on, including the one you added by accident. #dev
What is a piece of advice you were given early that turned out to be completely wrong for you?
Bahati ni kazi iliyofichwa. Hakuna mtu ameamka akakuta amefanikiwa.
Thing about shared hosting that nobody warns you: you will not have a migration runner, a queue worker, or shell access. You will have PHP, a database, and a cron that fires a URL.
It is enough. It has always been enoug...
Design systems are just agreeing with yourself in advance. #design
Writing a commit message is the last chance to notice you changed two unrelated things. If the message needs an 'and', that was two commits.
Faith is not certainty. Certainty does not need faith. It is moving while you are still unsure, which is most of what any of us do anyway. #faith
Kenyan freelancers: write the scope down. Not because you expect trouble, but because "we agreed" is a sentence two people can say about completely different things.
Long one about shipping.
I delayed a project four months over a settings page. Not the feature, the settings page. I wanted every option in it to be right before anyone saw it....
Nimegundua kitu. Code review ni kama kuchelewa kanisa. Unaingia kimya na unatumaini hakuna mtu amekuona.
Still the fastest tool I own.
Every planning app I have tried wanted me to pick a project, a tag and a due date before I could write down the thought. By then the thought is gone. #ideas
Spent the morning reading someone else's code. Not to fix it, just to read it.
Highly recommended. You learn more patterns in an hour of reading than a week of writing your own. #learning
The cheapest performance win on most sites is still the images. Not the framework, not the server, the images.
Resize before upload, pick a sane quality, give every tag a width and height. That is most of it. #dev
A form that loses what somebody typed is worse than no form.
If validation fails, put the values back. If the connection drops, keep the draft. People fill forms on buses and in queues, and they do not get a second go a...
Kenya switched to a new curriculum and nobody told the websites. Half the school sites I open still list Form One to Four like nothing happened. There is work in that for somebody. #kenya
A honeybee has to visit about two million flowers to make one pound of honey. The average worker bee makes about a twelfth of a teaspoon in her whole life. #science
Kuandika code usiku ni tamu. Kusoma hiyo code asubuhi ni adhabu.
There are more possible arrangements of a standard deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth. 52 factorial is about 8 followed by 67 zeros.
Shuffle properly and that order has almost certainly never existed before. #s...
A cloud weighs about half a million kilograms. It stays up because the droplets are tiny and the air beneath is moving up faster than they fall. #science
Octopuses have three hearts, and two of them stop beating when it swims. So it prefers to crawl, because swimming exhausts it. #science
Sharks existed before trees. Sharks are about 400 million years old, the first trees around 350 million.
They have also outlived four mass extinctions, which is a better record than most companies. #science
Eldoret people, where is the best place to actually sit and work? Needs power, needs WiFi that does not die at 2pm, needs chairs that are not punishment. #eldoret
If you are learning to code and you feel stupid, that feeling is the job. It never fully leaves. You just get faster at moving through it.
The people who look confident are the ones who have been confused about more thi...
Sunday reminder that rest is not laziness. Even the instruction to rest came with a reason attached, and it was not productivity. #faith
Your browser ships with a whole database. IndexedDB has been there for years and most of us still reach for localStorage and then complain about the five megabyte limit. #javascript
Accessibility is not a checklist at the end. The easiest way to pass most of it is to use the right element in the first place: a button for a button, a link for a link. #design
If you are freelancing and somebody asks for your rate, give a number and stop talking.
The silence after is not rejection. It is arithmetic. #ideas
What is the worst production incident you have survived? No names, no companies. Just the feeling.
Naming is genuinely the hard part. I have renamed one function six times today and it still does not say what it does, which probably means the function is doing more than one thing. #dev
If a page needs a loading spinner for something that takes 80 milliseconds, do not show the spinner. A flash of loading is worse than a short wait. #design
Something I keep noticing about building for the web from here.
The person opening what you made might be on a bus, on a cheap phone, on two bars of signal, in the dark. Not on your laptop with your fibre and your 27 in...
Backups you have never restored are not backups. They are a feeling.
Pick a quiet Saturday, take the newest one, and put it somewhere harmless. You will find out something you did not know, and it is much better to find...
Water expands when it freezes, which is almost unique among liquids. If ice sank, lakes would freeze from the bottom up and most of them would never fully thaw.
Almost everything alive in cold water exists because of th...
Nimegundua kitu: client akisema 'ni kitu kidogo tu', jipange kwa wiki mbili.
What is the first thing you check when something breaks in production? Mine is the time. If it started exactly on the hour, it is a cron job.
Alt text is not for search engines. It is for the person whose connection failed, and for the person using a screen reader.
Write what the picture is doing in the sentence, not what is in it. #design
Loading comments...
Sign in to comment.