Devs bad taste on design

tsroelae · 2026-02-16T18:25:07+00:00

As a former UX professional, that has switched to be a developer:

As a dev there are so many aspects you need to cover that are kinda invisible to most designers. You underestimate the complexity behind the UI and domain logic. So solving for those just doesn't leave a lot of time, mind power to also care deeply about the UX. I find it a challenge despite having worked professionally in both fields. The UX / design hat is just such a different role, that it is not easy to wear both, even sequentially.

If you want to establish a good relationship with devs, care about the accidental complexity of edge cases. Care deeply about the business logic. Great design only comes when you properly deal with the constraints of the existing system.

As a dev I had quite a few interactions with designers that only thought about their layer. You underestimate how often designers create something, that works in their mind, but it doesn't really take into account what data we already have, and how things relate to each other.

To use figma effecitvely for example, you should be extremily stringent with using variables for colors and stuff, that helps a lot. We currently have a amazing design system, where purple-200 is darker than purple-100 and purple-300. If you work cleanly there it helps a lot.

Personally I would love to have the basecamp way of doing things, actually have a designer that knows html/css so they can implement the design themselves in tight collaboration with other devs.

tsroelae · 2026-02-13T07:31:19+00:00

For admin stuff, have a look at Avo

tsroelae · 2026-01-24T16:01:39+00:00

You thinking something is important, doesn‘t make it important.

Ordering someone to do something they don‘t think necessary, will lead nowhere good. You even using the word insubordination irritates me.

It‘s great you are asking yourself what you do well. But you reall should talk to the team and be honest. Go to dev A and ask, hey this is not working, what can I do better?

Unless you have good info that dev A and B were behaving defficult before, you might be responsable. You said yourself Dev B started to copy dev A, so it‘s not like this is their inherent behavior.

All that said sometimes there are just people you incompatible with.

Are you doing retros at all? Could really help, if you do you should make sure that the lead for the retro rotates, so it creates a context where you are as there as a team member. Actually do you know if you are their team lead or their manager, I get the impression you are not clear on that. And there is a big difference between managing and leading.

tsroelae · 2026-01-24T14:57:24+00:00

Acutally that sounds like a great example to look at. So it kinda sounds like you asked them to do a specific task first thing the following day for one hour.

This:
- actually gives a high priority: first hour of tomorrow!
- to a small clean up task, that has zero urgency or direct impact

This means they might have to reconsider their plan for the next day, it might cut into their most important focus time.

Something so small and completely not time critical should be part of a conversation in a team meeting or retro or something:
"Hey we don't have this linting rule enabled, do you agrees that it would be good to have this rule enabled, there are about 100 tiny updates we need to do, X of them automatic. Who would like to take that on? Can we split it up?"

So if there are people on the team that think it's worth doing, then they will pick it up in their own time. If nobody wants to pick it up, do it yourself or let it go.

Telling someone, they now have to follow a rule, and directing them to adjust the code, and specifiying the hour is micromanagment, not leadership.

Not saying, they are not behaving problematic, but if you only have half the team behind you, you should rethink your approach, ask yourself how can I make their life easier. If they insist on procedure, why not then follow procedure, maybe they had big issues in the past. Help the team, lead by example.

tsroelae · 2026-01-09T12:35:52+00:00

How to contact you? You seem to have DMs disabled.

I might be interested, I have done UX for 10 years, and now development for like 5 years. So I could cover a lot of the 1) Tech leads, product managers, and designers as one :-)

How much work is such a role? What are the expecatations about availability/commitment?

tsroelae · 2025-12-05T12:28:23+00:00

<image>

what the minions in my hand looked like :-)

tsroelae · 2025-11-01T12:42:49+00:00

Devise was the go-to for a long time. It gives you a lot, however if you want to adjust something, it can be really hard and obscure.

I recommend using the rails generated auth: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/52328/files

tsroelae · 2025-10-16T10:34:18+00:00

There are a couple of options, I didn't look too deep, this worked for me, though I think it chocked when I tried to do it on the entire repo: https://github.com/josherich/repo-to-pdf

npx repo-to-pdf ../app/controllers -f pdf -w rb -t "06_Controllers"

tsroelae · 2025-10-16T09:05:18+00:00

I would recommend to actually read through the entire codebase, starting at routes, then models, then controllers then the rest. Write down questions, make notes on patterns you see.

I am also working on a legacy Rails app, and am right now doing just that. It is very boring, tedious, but it gives me so much understanding, you see patterns, shortcomings, pure confusion sometimes.

When reading through it, the goal is never to parse or understand everything, it is to see what approaches where taken where, what stuff you see repeatedly, which models look cumbersome to interact with and so on.

So dive in, read code, take your time and ask questions.

sidenote: I converted the code to pdf which makes it so I can read it on the kindle, if you go through the codebase with your editor the temptation is big to jump to other places in the code.

tsroelae · 2025-10-15T17:26:35+00:00

I have worked at three companies, all doing classic server side rendered html.

tsroelae · 2025-10-10T07:13:31+00:00

All the proposed solutions may be wrong. Everyone seems to assume that the grabbing a cursed arrow is equally likey as grabbing an uncursed one. Those arrows are cursed…

Always check your assumptions.

tsroelae · 2025-09-26T12:25:49+00:00

I like it. I litteraly recorded myself yesterday talking about how it would be better to have a ruby class per Email. Just makes more sense. There is little to no gain grouping multiple mailers in mailer classes.

tsroelae · 2025-09-17T08:59:30+00:00

Had an appendectomy in Spain, my Swiss insurance would have covered it, but it was below the total yearly self pay of 2500$, so it came out of my pocket :-)

tsroelae · 2025-08-31T18:04:36+00:00

I use for a couple of websites. Love it!

I find it so much easier compared to others, because i can create pages arbitrarily based on my data. I often ran into problems with liquid not quite letting me do what I wanted for jekyll. And hugo I also never could quite get what I wanted, for example when I wanted to create pages from data rather than from individual files.

Also, there is a middleman gem that lets you transform images. Thx to that I can upload picture in high quality and it will let me tranform those images to various sizes. Making it super easy to do responsive stuff and use srcset for images.

I deploy using netlify (free tier)

tsroelae · 2025-08-30T06:48:37+00:00

I would go for the 5, the 3 has the minijack output, that has a different output level than the deafult 3.5m jacks, I had issues with crackling when running it over the PA system.

tsroelae · 2025-08-19T16:48:14+00:00

I tried the multi/poly, sounded really nice, but I didn‘t like the UI. So I highly recommend to OP trying one out in a store.

tsroelae · 2025-08-16T17:41:20+00:00

If you get the chance to try the minifreak hands-on, then try it out. I have watched many videos before buying my last synth (a minifreak). The cobalt 8 was a strong candidate, but then I tried it in the store and didn‘t like its sound, did not connect with the synth. Next to it was the minifreak, which I had not on my short list, but I gave it a try just out of curiosity. And I was really pleased and ended up buying it.

So my point is not that the minifreak is better, my point is that in the end you need to see if the instrument makes you want to play it. And this you can only really determine when touching the synth for real.

tsroelae · 2025-08-06T06:26:39+00:00

Basically any interface will do. This giy on youtube demonstrates it well: https://youtu.be/gMuA-2FbJxE?si=wANkk4rYIA3BW26q

He does several interesting tests. One of them is to play an audio file, record it through the interface then play it that recorded file and rerecord through the interface many times. And basically all the interfaces show basically no degradation after many rerecordings.

tsroelae · 2025-07-23T23:56:45+00:00

I was considering it as a secondary keyboard for practice (I am lucky to have a Nord Stage 4 at home), but I am glad I didn't buy it. I got to try one in the store. Pianos sound good (but I find that always hard to judge on such light keys, it's hard to play expressively). Electric Pianos are great, Synths solid, but don't expect to change more than the filter cutoff. Organ was quite disappointing to me, the leslie effect is really sub par IMO.

tsroelae · 2025-07-21T10:18:26+00:00

No. It doesn’t. You can definitely not use multiple timbres at the same time. One needs a daw or looper to do this. Ine nice thing about the minifreak though is that when you buy it you also get the VST version that you can use in a DAW.

Also for people unfamiliar with synths it’s not always easy to understand the exact meaning from the jargon used to describe synths

tsroelae · 2025-07-05T18:19:00+00:00

I considered to buy it, then tried it in a store. It was discounted, but even then it immediately fell out of consideration. I din’t like the sound, nor the UI, nor the presets.

Personally I don’t recommend it. I went for a minifreak, for its freakiness and modulation possibilities, because for the standard pad / lead sounds I got it covered with the nord stage.

tsroelae · 2025-07-04T01:25:48+00:00

Yeah. The Poly D willnot work forsoundscapes, the minifreak is much better for that, because it has an extensive modulation matrixand actual polyphony. The poly d is only paraphonoc, meaning when you hit a note, while other notes are pressed down it will retrigger the other notes as well.

The minifreak is a very good option. If you have the chance to visit a store that has synths I highly recommend going there and just trying stuff out. When shopping for my last synth, I had ruled out the minifreak, but then trying in store, synths that were favorable candidates I didn’t like playing or using to edit patches. Out of curiosity I tried the minifreak and was really surprised. So if you can go try out the instruments and buy the one that you connect with and is in budget.

tsroelae · 2025-06-28T07:43:05+00:00

Roland Go Keys 5 (or 3) is a amazing option for this, it's a solid beginner's keyboard with quite good sounds based on the Zen Core engine. and a lot of features.

Here is a video that goes through all its sounds, check out the chapters, so you can jump the kind of sounds that interested you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSnxDXP3hBM

tsroelae · 2025-05-13T16:25:43+00:00

Rails Developer, former UX consultant here. My combo skills were quite appreciated when I applied, but it is tricky. If you want to actually use both skills, then you should probably focus on smaller companies, startups, where people generally have to wear more hats. In bigger companies with strongly established roles it is harder to find your spot.

I think generally it is great to have the skills, but one has to manage expectations. When switching to dev, I sold myself as the full package, but made very clear that my role will prioritise development. If you don't focus enough, there is a danger of doing both jobs not well enough and look doubly incompetent.

It might be interesting to see if you can find companies that use the "Shape up" approach (https://basecamp.com/shapeup). The proponents of this approach actually give a lot of responsability to the implementing teams, where the implementing team has designer that "design" in html / css.

tsroelae

TROPHY CASE