Ryan Driscoll
David BissetDeveloper: "We don't need to write documentation. Users should obviously know what to give as input. "
Users:
Andrew Feeney@davidbisset “Check out my latest sawtooth wave synth sounds.”
`Da Elf
gr0k@davidbisset in my experience it's usually the customer telling the developers to not bother with documentation hahaha
lizzzzard@gr0k @davidbisset customer != user
@lizzard @davidbisset no, but a customer should know their intended users, and their software should be well documented. And either way, the customer certainly shouldn't be the one to get in the way of documenting their software, but that is my experience, making users even more likely to do stupid things...
@gr0k Keyword here is "should". 😑
bituur esztreym
xmlns="Dan"@davidbisset as a toddler, I on more than one occasion shoved slices of buttered toast into the slot on a VCR. 😅
fleaz@davidbisset Small correction on your alt text: Band saws don't use sawblades, they use a band hence the name :D
Due too the small size, that's probably a disc for an angle grinder or a really small hand-held circular saw.
René van PaassenCircular saw. If you want to keep your hands, don't ever mount this on an angle grinder.
emily dogmom@fleaz @davidbisset when it goes in the cd player it's a band saw though 🎶🎵
Sternwarte Vach (Andy)@davidbisset heavy metal disc 😂
I am Jack's Lost 404Carbide tipped heavy metal 🤘
Henning Holgersen@davidbisset someone please give that QA tester a raise.
R0B0 G0D@davidbisset Reminds me of a conversation I had with the makers of the Vivaldi Browser. They allow Markdown formatting in the browsers' Notes facility. I asked if they could pop a wee guide or cheat-sheet in there to get people started, like a lot of text-input-heavy programs do.
"Oh, it's not up to us to describe Markdown."
"Not even the form of Markdown you've chosen to implement?"
"..."
If you aren't going to cater to users don't expect users to use what you're giving them.
@R0B0_G0D good point.
xs4me2
Crylar@davidbisset love that that picture could go with a thousand game dev jokes.
Esme CiredutempsQp @davidbisset
Quand je vous dis qu'on a besoin de matériel auto apprenant.
Comment elles disent les ux designeuses pour mes tasses et les portes.
J'ai oublié l'adjectif.
Quand je vous dis qu'on a besoin de matériel auto apprenant.
Comment elles disent les ux designeuses pour mes tasses et les portes.
J'ai oublié l'adjectif.
Raymond Russell@davidbisset
Not sure of the attribution and I paraphrase.
"When it comes to designing something that is foolproof, your average designer underestimates the ingenuity of the average fool"
Not sure of the attribution and I paraphrase.
"When it comes to designing something that is foolproof, your average designer underestimates the ingenuity of the average fool"
Slight variation:
Every time you try to idiot-proof something, they invent a better idiot.
spinlock 
@davidbisset remember to sanitize your users' input, kids!
(Oh and while you're at it, please refactor that SQL database code to use prepared statements. Yes, I know, but it won't get any easier in the future when it's even bigger.)
Mrs Mouse at work@davidbisset huh. so this is how the make industrial metal music.
Jonathan Reeve Price@davidbisset Yes, how often have I heard this...and then I discover that even the engineers have trouble explaining how the code works.
Mirko Schenk@davidbisset But in that case, there *was* a documentation for the car stereo. Almost nobody reads them.
Shell Peters@davidbisset LOL! That tracks.
Although I would say that ideally writers should write the documentation as part of the development teams...
@davidbisset bug hunters
Alyssa Voronin@davidbisset Love listening to metal. 
GuitarKat@davidbisset Someone needs to legit make a CD that looks like this and get it to work. That’d be awesome lol
Mike Fraser@davidbisset Developer: "I think it's easy to use therefore everyone else will"
Eljorgeabides@davidbisset we don't have time to test the edge cases
@eljorgeabides or the skin in this case.
Ariaflame@davidbisset When I was learning to code at school mumble mumble years ago they said to make the code work, then to make it idiot proof, then to make it teacher proof.
Thestaroftheworlds
KokaZari@davidbisset This is the last Nickelback's cd
Tim Allison
Major Hayden 🤠
Frank Hightower 🐁@davidbisset I'm sure if we write enough error messages, users will eventually learn to use our software and wont rage quit at all!
joel b@davidbisset in our defense someone could have totally written ‘DO NOT INSERT BUZZSAW BLADES’ in the manual, the box, and on the face plate and someone would still do it.
david turgeon@davidbisset sure, back in my day we called that a nine inch nails CD
Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾A friend who worked in tech support once told me he got a call from an irate customer complaining that his computer's CD tray wasn't working.
It turned out that he was using it as a mug holder and he was annoyed that the "hole" wasn't the right size.
Sam Easterby-Smith@davidbisset @JackDeeth users have excellent taste in Krautrock 👍 https://www.discogs.com/master/11460-Can-Saw-Delight
JohnWFrom brainstorming to development, finding the ways to make an app as simple and intuitive as possible for a user is probably the most time consuming task.
Eli the Bearded@davidbisset I remember that photo circulating among noise musicians on Twitter a few years ago
Ian Tindale@davidbisset band saw? Go look up what a band saw actually is :-)
Cogito Ergo Disputo@davidbisset
Tester: Here, I found another bug.
Dev: That's not a bug! No user would ever do that!
(...)
《Software is released》
User: Hold my 🍺!
Elena ``of Valhalla''@davidbisset the funny thing is that I don't remember if I own a CD that is shaped exactly like that or if I saw it at the music shop (in the 1990s) and decided to buy the regular edition instead (I think it's the latter).
Luca Sironi (da chiudere)@valhalla @davidbisset that would be awesome, do you remember which one it was ? i never saw different shape for cds, aside small rectangles
@luca @davidbisset eh, it was the 1990s, I don't remember, probably some Power Metal band.
Maybe Primal Fear? the cd I have has that shape *printed* on the CD, and I've found that they did a shaped CD for other albums: scraperecords.com/product/prim…
I remember that limited edition shaped CDs were briefly a fad, but they were also a bit of a hassle and didn't work in all players (especially if they were unbalanced).
Gary@davidbisset Developer: See? No need for documentation. They have to buy a new car after it breaks through the back to the engine. Win for me win for the car company.
Miguel@davidbisset You are neglecting curiosity... 
Brock Chapin (bchap1n)
Matthew Walton@davidbisset absolute truth especially when an “intuitive” api is written, because there is no way it’s intuitive to anybody other than the original author.
Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)@davidbisset I've seen a CD jammed into a 5.25" floppy drive numerous times.
gwEm
DJ Fragile Toolchains@gwEm @davidbisset "obviously"
Deb has moved! (see profile) 🇨🇦@davidbisset 🤔 reminds me:
There's a version of that called poka yoke in Japanese.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke
Colloquially:
mistake-proofing or idiot-proofing.
Ex: it's impossible to put a car's automatic transmission into Reverse while the car is moving forward.
For a poka yoke designed CD player, *only* a CD would be allowed to enter.
All other schemes require instructions!
(Or, sell it so cheaply that we can throw it away when it breaks: dollar store junk)
@deborahh wow, that's interesting... and smart.
@davidbisset only as smart as your code, though. Isn't that what you want to test? 🤔
Seems kind of like Dunning-Kruger, but for tests. I don't see evidence, in the anectodal reports I've read, of chatGPT know it's own limitations. Quite the contrary, at times ;->
/cc @GeePawHill @jbrains
J. B. Rainsberger (he)@deborahh @davidbisset @GeePawHill One of the most elementary forms of poka yoke in code regards designing statements that must follow another, such as "A must happen before B".
To enforce this constraint, let A produce a result that becomes an input to B. This way, there becomes an obvious way to compose the functions that preserves the required sequence.
Let's do more of that kind of thing.