Little known fact - there’s a bot on Soundcloud reposting top content from Reddit’s r/listentothis community regularly. I’ve been using it to discover new music for a while now and I’ve already found quite a bit of gems that earned a permanent place in my library.

Enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/rltt

About time I try to nudge my writing again.

At my job I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about UX and how it affects users’ experience with a particular system

I keep seeing people react to system misuse with “oh, we should add this to documentation”. And if they encounter this again, they think “Oh, we just didn’t make it visible enough, let’s add some BIG BOLD TEXT somewhere.”

Let me steal a quote from Dan Luu for a second:

“Good engineering eliminates users being able to do the wrong thing as much as possible… . You don’t design a feature that invites misuse and then use instructions to try to prevent that misuse.”

We, as people influencing the software development process, need to remember this. Try to get into users’ shoes and see things from their perspective. Make interfaces more eloquent and API’s more intuitive.

People will follow. They generally feel much better then...

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Residence - A great post by Sam Phippen.

I don’t think this applies only to programmers either. As an immigrant, the post hits home with a wave of memories about clerical misunderstandings:
“What do you mean you have no bank account in the country of your citizenship?”
“What do you mean you can no longer enter a country you’re paying tax in?”
“What do you mean you have no valid address in the country which passport you’re holding?”

This shows us that for the most part, us - the IT nomads are still a bit of a snowflake situation in the giant machine of international law.