Hmm ... Better pigeon hole clients into only using the teabag.
"Why can't I put the label in the water?!"
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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Our legacy system always puts the label in the water and our clients rely on the faint cardboard flavor.
Smart developer: let's make the label an 8 inch square so it won't fit in any mug.
End user: makes tea in a large pot, to fit the label.
Developer: THATS IT WE’RE A BROWSER BASED APP NOW!
End user: why can’t I run this on my AOL account?
User: Folds square in half to fit into mug.
Huge waste of material on the label.
Since the labels are larger, the boxes for those tea bags will need to be larger too. That incurs in additional waste of material and storage space.
People working in markets selling those tea bags will complain. Now their boxes don't fit in the aisle alongside boxes with tea bags of other brands.
Customers will find it clunky and convoluted. Some will understand why the dev did it, and get angry - because from their PoV it'll sound like the dev is saying "I assume that you're a muppet, unable to distinguish the label from the bag".
And some will still do like others said: use a larger pot, fold the label, etc. Defeating the purpose of the change.
There are plenty situations where you can be smart. This is not one of them, stick to standards and document it properly. "This is the bag, it goes in. This is the label, it goes out."
(Not that it changes much for me. I'm still ripping the tea bag apart and mixing the contents with my yerba mate. Unexpected use case!)
tea_bag.unwrap()
Just get rid of the label altogether. I'm always suspicious when a teabag has a string on it.
You aren't supposed to leave it in the water the whole time.
Not a problem if you're using a teapot, or for a mug you can use a spoon or just your fingers
What's this from?
gravity falls
A proper engineer would make the tag absorbent and use the principle of capillarity to transfer the water to the bag (and the other way round once tea flavoured) to cover this case.
Users can't avoid being stupid, but a proper engineer should be able to cover all cases.
This assumes an infinite timeline and budget.
Well, no proper engineer will agree to less than that
And also the existence of a perfectly insulative, yet durable and long-lasting sheath for the bag. I realise it's just an analogy, and in cyberspace that sort of thing is trivial, with real matter it's beyond a pipe dream.
No, that complicates things way too much. Simplicity in design is beauty. A real engineer would recognize the tag on the string not only as a point a confusion, but also a superfluous feature. Simply remove it. The end user will have to use a spoon supplied by themselves to remove the teabag, but thats their problem. At least there is actually tea in the cup at that point.
Or the pg tips approach: 'd'ya know what? No more tag or thread for ya now you've got to fish and pinch the baggy out of your scolding tea ya wanker'.
If you have access to any kind of UX and UI folks, you automagicallly get a leg up on this, y'all. It is goddamn amazing.
Single dev on a personal project? Go find someone in the community who has an eye for design or hit up a design forum. Work has you on a project with only two other devs and limited resources? Ask for a favor from the UX team down the hall.
We are all tryna make good experiences out here. Let us avoid getting 'teabagged.'
Basically you have to hide all choice behind a settings page. Think of a cattle chute that only let's them go one direction to the bolt gun. Wait...
And that's how an iPhone with an interface that even a toddler can figure out sold a few billion units.
At what cost, though? I thought the generations after the millennials would be more tech-literate. But after seeing Gen Zs around me at home and at work, things are just regressing.
It was inevitable. We took a mishmash of things that kinda worked together with a patchwork of software and shoved it into a streamlined define with a custom made interface to tie it all together. One of those things pushes the user to learn more, and it’s not the finished and polished product.
Speaking as a user (I'm not a programmer even if I'm often loafing around here):
Left is not "optimistic" but "assumptive" - blame the dev and the user.
Right is not "pessimistic" but "diligent" - blame the user.
But the worst type doesn't appear in this pic: they'd put a ball of chicken wire around the label so it's physically impossible to put it in the hot water.
I'm not a programmer yet even if I'm often loafing around here
Fixed that for you...
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Then the users would complain that they can't fit the tag in their water.
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if ( parameters.teaMass <= TEA_BAG_WEIGHT ) {
return "Error: incorrect input. Check if tea bag was inserted correctly into water container."
}
#define TEA_BAG_WEIGHT 0
I write graphics software that almost seems intuitive, until you realize I gave it a split personality.
Even I forget about the split personality side of it.
Documentation be like:
For (literal string) place for i = T end of and rest unit 4
I'd* better write some documentation
Using better by itself is fine in an informal context, and "had better" is only required for formal contexts. And I don't think a meme on the internet counts as a formal context.
And also, 🤓☝️
That'd be a contraction of 'would' in this case, wouldn't it? As an ESL speaker I used to find these grammar 'mistakes' (for lack of a better word) made more difficult for me to parse the sentences. As with code 'written once but read many times' would apply here.
For a lot of English speakers, the "had" and "have" in contractions is completely omitted in certain contexts. It's more prevalent in some dialects (I'm in the south US and it's more common than not). Usually "had" is dropped more than "have".
Also, English can drop the pronoun, article, and even copula for certain indicative statements. I think it's specifically for observations, especially when the context is clear.
looking at someone's bracelet "Cool bracelet." [That's a]
wakes up "sigh Gotta get up and go to work..." [I've]
"Ain't no day for picking tomatoes like a Saturday." [There]
"No war but class war!" [There's]
"Forecast came in on the radio. Says there's gonna be a hell of a lot of rain today." [It said -> Says/Said]
"Can't count the number of Brits I've killed. Guess I'm just allergic to beans on toast." [I; I]
"House came tumblin' down after the sinkhole opened up" [The]
"I'd" can be "I would", mainly if used with a conditional or certain conjunctions/contrastive statements (if, but, however, unfortunately). Also when preceding "have" – e.g. "I'd have done that". Because "I had have" doesn't make sense, nor does "I had " anything. "I'd" as in "I had" is followed by a past participle.
"I'd" is usually "I had" otherwise, forming the past perfect tense. But in "I'd better", it's a bit confusing because "had better" is used in a different sense – the "had" here comes from "have to" (as in "to be necessary to") and can be treated as both a lexical verb and an auxiliary verb. "had better" is a bit of a leftover of more archaic constructions.
It would be a contraction of had: "I had better write..." Using would there doesn't make sense.
More or less my point, languages are weird with lots of arbitrary idiomatic things—'would rather' but 'had better'.
After posting the comment I've thought 'wait, it makes more sense for it to be should' so my guesses are a bit off today.
for lack of a better word
Usages of non-standard grammar.
This one poses me (ETL) no problem, but my brain always tilts when the natives mix subject/verb contractions (you're, it's, they're) with the possessives (your, its, their).
Yeah maybe not even non-standard as much as non-formal in this case.
I wanted to mean 'different from what you learn in English class in school as a kid' so non-formal, non -standard, dialectal, slang, misspellings, same-sounding words...
That's all covered by "non-standard" - because the standard of a language dictates what's to be taken as informal/vulgar/archaic, dialectal, slang, different words or the same word, etc. And while there are exceptions most of the time when people learn a non-native language they learn the standard, in detriment of other varieties.
(Sorry for nerding out about this, I just love this sort of topic.)
you forgot
end user: this product is defective; the developer should be fired
no amount of explaining http errors and windows terminal commands can save my friends from trying to refresh browser on a 5xx error and asking how to exit cmd
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