It’s Day 2 of the 30 Days of Summer experiment! If you’re just joining, here are some previous posts (skip if you’ve read them):

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What is 30 days of summer (2022)?

Part 1: Rant

There’s a lot of literature on the topic of help-seeking and what makes it hard, but I wish we did more to encourage it. For example, consider a startup. It typically attracts people who’ve been successful in things they’ve done before, and pride themselves on being right and figuring it out by themselves. And we spend our time trying to maintain good documentation that people can independently reference when they need to. I’m not arguing against documentation. I think documentation is great. But things change too quickly in a startup for documentation to be the only strategy. Why don’t we recognize help-seeking more as an effective strategy for knowledge-sharing?

I realize this all sounds abstract, and you’re probably thinking: we do do this, we just call it mentorship. I agree that’s a part of it, but I think we don’t do it nearly well-enough, and the moment I realized this saliently was when I joined the startup I currently work at. The codebase had pretty much no documentation or technical design docs, which would typically be stressful and disempowering for a new person. But I had a fantastic mentor. Whenever I messaged him a question, I would get an answer right away. We could jump on a call whenever I wanted. I received code reviews in an hour of submission. This was all very different from my experience working with other people in industry. How did he do it? I think it was small comments like “Oh ya, this bit is super hard” or “That’s a great question”, and that he prioritized helping me whenever he received a Slack notification, at the cost of his own deep work and state of flow. An organization can also go further and establish processes for reflection on one’s help-seeking and help-giving. For example, at a research lab I was a part of in university, I had to fill out a Google Form answering the question “Who can help me with what I’m currently working on” every week. What’s great is that, as an externality of celebrating help-seeking, you end up with a culture that’s accepting and inclusive, and super fun to work in.

Part 2: Log

Yesterday, I:

• Watched a couple more of Garry Tan’s videos, How To Design Everything and Should you be the CEO. I honestly think he has great content and am enjoying his channel so far. I’ve felt that a few content-creators on video and podcasting are not respectful enough of their audience’s time, and some hour-long podcasts could be edited down to 10 minutes instead. But Garry’s stuff feels really well-executed.
• Talked to a friend about the difference between romantic love and prosaic love. Romantic love is the Romeo and Juliet style love of chasing the extraordinary, the feeling of getting swept off your feet. It’s magical, unreal, and unsustainable. Prosaic love is about embracing the reality of your lover and making that the source of your love - their eye crusties, imperfections, and stupid things they say. I’m a big believer in prosaic love!
• Read an article called Atomic Design, which explained design system components in terms of the building blocks of chemistry (color / typography ⇒ atom, button / form ⇒ molecule, navigation bar / photo grid ⇒ organism). The purpose of such a vocabulary is to encourage people to think about design systems in this manner from the start, and “craft a system right out of the gate instead of cherry picking patterns after the fact”. As a non-designer I can’t speak to its utility, but I found the analogy super interesting.
• Watched a video on The human side of a Design System. I thought it was a great way to learn the recent history of design systems and tooling surrounding it, and I loved the speaker’s humility. I also learned that Apple’s 1986 Humane Interface Guidelines, a 150-page document, is available to read online, and I hope I get a chance to read it sometime.
• Read a couple of app dissections that Brian Lovin did in 2016, where he examined apps to find noteworthy interaction design details. I read the ones on Twitter and Facebook Paper (an app that was discontinued but got a lot of love from Silicon Valley when it was released). Something I found interesting was how different the apps looked in 2016 compared to today. For example, see below:

Twitter Profile, 2016

Twitter Profile, 2022

Today, I plan to continue learning about design. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have an excellent day!