TIL Unit Testing moment in Obsidian Plugins

I’m working on a Obsidian plugin for self destructing notes. My usual workflow is to spike, delete that spike after I actually figure out what I’m building, and then test drive an implementation, and wow am I having a time with that second part. Between my own unfamiliarity with the …

TIL: Changing Settings Types in Obsidian Plugins

Problem I’m working on a plugin for Obsdian and couldn’t figure out why a particular setting was getting mangled. Turns out, you have to delete the data.json file if you update your settings type. The plugin is for self destructing notes, and right now it has two settings. They used to …

Innovation Tokens Are A Pretty Good Money Metaphor

One of the things I like most about the innovation token metaphor is that it works much better as a money metaphor than, say, technical debt. Technical debt is a spurious metaphor, one that only makes sense when compared to a very specific financial context that is largely divorced from the average …

Parkinson's Law of Triviality

Give it the Craigslist test Erica Heinz Parkinson’s law of triviality — People get overwhelmed by big decisions, and so they spend disproportionate time on small ones. User research participants (and designers) love to focus on fun elements like colors and interactions, and don’t get around to the …

You can’t use the right tool for the job - Undefined Behaviour This was a great read. I usually tend to think of it as “using the right tool for the job accounts for the people using it and environment it’s used in”

Thoughts on Scaling Prime Video

I keep seeing this take on the recent Prime Video scaling article that amounts to “hah, told you that microservices were bad! Monoliths rule!” That strikes me as the wrong lesson, and it implies a narrative about technology choices that’s largely not true–and more than a little …