Sylvain Abélard - talks, events, blog, projects, translations...
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Read 4 days ago and current, but nothing has been published for 9 years.
Blunt statement: nobody wants more than 20 results. I’ve done web apps for many things, especially in Faveod and Ruby on Rails. It’s easy to have your brain think in CRUD mode, and it actually maps people’s uses pretty well. Listing, showing, editing data. But we often have to choose from a huge list (hint: use autocomplete), or display the whole data set like Excel would. If Google has shown…
I usually hate Video on Twitter. Why is that? It took me some time to understand what bothers me so much. I used to think that I read fast and video makes it hard to skip/accelerate things. That’s part of the reason, but not the whole problem. Why would it irk me so much? Media diet and medium On my laptop, my media diet is made of RSS, newsletters, stuff sent by friends. On public transportation,…
Don’t. That’s right: don’t validate phone numbers! Perhaps you want to check, not what a phone number looks like, but rather that the user can access the phone they are telling you they own. If that’s what you needed: send a text or a call with a code to verify the account. As a bonus, your user and your system will then be typo-proof. So then again, don’t validate phone numbers. You can check it…
You set up a great community, but life happens, it’s time to go. First, thanks for what you did. Setting up things that work, especially with humans, is hard, demanding and often thankless. You could have done nothing, but you did. You might learn, hours or years after you left, how people liked what you did. Pat yourself on the back, you deserve it. Now, how would you set the transition up? Well,…
Hard problem ahead? Want me to help? Well I’m willing to, but I will not give you the answer ;) — — — What I want to know from you are these: context - what do you have now? where are you? goals - where would you like to go? Feel lost already? Not sure? No problem, continue telling me more about, we’ll sort this out. If you can’t answer, that’ll be hard for both of us. Calm down,…
Never Don’t just copy-paste code. You are learning code, you are stuck. You can be either hasty, frustraded or both. I understand and absolve you from all this, but please, don’t “just” copy-paste code. — — — I’ve seen questions on the Internet (forums, IRC, Slack, StackOverflow…) that were obviously exercice for school or program. There’s no shame in asking questions, but in the…
J’ai lu une histoire de ce genre au primaire. J’ai tenté de trouver la source, mais je ne trouve que ça : http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/traveltales.html#twotravelersandfarmer Alors voici ma transcription, de mémoire. — — — Un voyageur arrive devant une ville, et voit un vieillard assis. “Bonjour ! Peux-tu me dire quel genre de gens sont les citoyens de cette ville ? — comment…
“I’m learning to code, when will I be good enough to get a Junior-level job?” This is a question I get a lot in my tech communities. There are three keys for me: TRUST SKILL TASKS — — — SKILL How can I guess what my “skill level” is? You can do plenty of job interviews, and see what people want, what you like, and how much they offer you. You can show up with MOOCs’ certificates…
I don’t like the word “troll”, as in “internet trolling”. Some people use this word for many wildly different things. As developers or philosophers, we know good naming is hard, and we know bad naming creates pain (Camus). Please use the correct word. Cynicism You're probably being inconsiderate, or not helpful. Dark humour You have better things to do than being a smartass. Fake news (aka Lies)…
I like to laugh at absurd things, of which Life provides plenty. I kinda like dark humour. But it’s dangerously close to pitfalls. — — — I’ve had more than my share of cynicism , which hasn’t led me to much good. Neither for me, nor for others. Dark humour usually has the same problems: it “passively allows” for actual harm. Some people will be as smart as you and see the snark.…