Have kiddos at home for break this time of year? If so, I’m sure you’ll appreciate this quick, fun boredom killer. We’ll create a game for you and your family, and the best part: your kids can create the whole thing!
Play as the Christmas Tree Star, who’s been knocked off the tree by the (crazy) house cat. Like every Star, you’re far from helpless. You’ll jump your way back to the top. But beware! The (truly crazy) cat is still inside the tree …with black eyes open wide …hunting you.
Long before I was offloading brainpower to Stack Overflow, I sought to offload it for my future self (ahem, and teammates of course). I have a book to thank for this. Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think.” It’s a critique of complex user interfaces.
Steve likes them simple and intuitive: the users’ goals are evident and easily accomplished.
Steve’s adage–“don’t make me think”–also plays a fair critique of the code we write. We can take that adage and apply it as a “DX First” approach to writing code. (An approach that admittedly should be sacrificed to UX or Performance Gods as needed.)
In this article I illustrate four high-level ways of elevating the developer experience to the forefront, helping us grok more while thinking less.
