Vladislav Gapurov gapurov

👀📎 It looks like you're preparing to MC a conference...

🚨 GIANT DISCLAIMER: This stuff is far from authoritative. But it's what I think works for me, and what I enjoy in an MC when I'm attending a conference.

Biggest tip - enjoy yourself.

'Users hate change'

This week NN Group released a video by Jakob Nielsen in which he attempts to help designers deal with the problem of customers being resistant to their new site/product redesign. The argument goes thusly:

Humans naturally resist change
Your change is for the better
Customers should just get used to it and stop complaining

There's slightly more to it than that, he caveats his argument with requiring you to have of course followed their best practices on product design, and allows for a period of customers being able to elect to continue to use the old site, although he says this is obviously only a temporary solution as you don't want to support both.

2019 update: this essay has been updated on my personal site, together with a followup on how to get started

2020 update: I'm now writing a book with updated versions of all these essays and 35 other chapters!!!!

1. Learn in public

If there's a golden rule, it's this one, so I put it first. All the other rules are more or less elaborations of this rule #1.

You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people "learn in private", and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves. Again, that's fine, but we're here to talk about being in the top quintile. What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust. Write blogs and tutorials and cheatsheets. Speak at meetups and conferences. Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. (Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discourse, they're not public). Make Youtube videos

3. Clone Open Source Apps

You already know you should be making projects to learn things and potentially add to your portfolio. You've read your Malcolm Gladwell, you know that you need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Given you're just starting out, I have a slightly contentious suggestion for you: DON'T make anything new.

Your decision-making is a scarce resource. You start every day with a full tank, and as you make decisions through the day you gradually run low. We all know how good our late-late-night decisions are. Making a new app involves a thousand micro decisions - from what the app does, to how it should look, and everything in between. Decide now: Do you want to practice making technical decisions or product decisions?

Ok so you're coding. You know what involves making zero product decisions? Cloning things. Resist the urge to make your special snowflake (for now). Oh but then who would use yet another Hacker News clone? I've got news for you: No one was gonna use your thing anyway. You

Moved to Shopify/graphql-design-tutorial

Strings

`String.prototype.*`

None of the string methods modify this – they always return fresh strings.

charAt(pos: number): string ^ES1

Returns the character at index pos, as a string (JavaScript does not have a datatype for characters). str[i] is equivalent to str.charAt(i) and more concise (caveat: may not work on old engines).

	# (c) 2020 Humu
	# MIT License

	from typing import Any

	import github

	AUTOMERGE_LABEL_NAME = 'automerge'

	// this is a big array of 76 items I need to split into groups of 10
	const hugeArray = Array.from({ length: 76 }, (_, i) => i);

	function chunkify(array, chunkSize = 10) {
	// make a new array
	const chunks = Array.from(
	// give it however many slots are needed - in our case 8
	// 1-7 with 10 items, and 8th slot will have 6
	{ length: Math.ceil(array.length / chunkSize) },
	// this is a map function that will fill up our slots

	""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
	" Font
	:set guifont=Source\ Code\ Pro:h14

	""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
	" Hide pointless junk at the bottom, doesn't work in .vimrc for some reason?
	:set laststatus=0
	:set noshowmode "don't show --INSERT--
	:set noruler "don't show line numbers/column/% junk

	// finished version of https://youtu.be/yIcve5wIuAg

	function add(...args) {
	function curriedAdd(...args2) {
	return add(...args, ...args2)
	}
	curriedAdd.value = args.reduce((total, current) => total + current)
	return curriedAdd
	}