Ryan Singer @rjs

Product development is the push and pull between what people want and what technology can do.

Christopher Alexander wrote a lot about “unfolding.”

Unfolding is the process of learning what something should be by working on it.

Improving a messy product is hard. The closer you look at the ugliness, the more you want to throw it all out and start over. But that's not always possible. We can't stop the world and redesign everything.

What helps us make meaningful progress is a watertight "frame" — a narrowly defined problem, outcome, and time frame. When we know why we are ch... See more

A challenge when teaching others is unpacking the tacit prereqs we ourselves don't know we have.

Tasks are, at best, strings on your finger to not forget something real that you bumped into.

The truth of a project is the state of the APP, not the state of the tasks.

Not "how far are we on that task." What works and what doesn't? What's broken and what's usable?

Direct manipulation has been the unquestioned high bar for UIs since the Mac.

LLMs are changing that. Starting to see use cases where it's easier to say what you want than to drag by hand.

Direct manipulation will always have a place, but not an unquestioned place anymore.