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there are already datasets

2022-09-29

3 minute read

It's hard to know what you want, and even harder to make it.

conjugação

I went to Matt and Harry's place last night for dinner and to do body doubling (explained in last post). Harry was working on buying a new phone and some other office stuff, Matt was working on watching tv and reading, I was working on conjugação.

new wine new skins

I set about filling in all the data from conjugacao.com.br but I realised it wasn't actually providing much I really needed, and getting the info was getting harder and harder. There are already datasets of verb conjugations, and the actualy interface of the program is turning out to be the hard part

turns out to be the hard part

I forgot to bring my notebook, so I went into figma to continue developing the wireframes. I realised I'm going to have to do the hard part, actually typing out dummy data to see how it looks on a screen. I'm still using the Helio wireframe kit, it's good to not think about it too much, and it's good that its kind of ugly. Now is not the time to get caught up in making it look nice.

Here's the figma landscape as it lies a figma file with some black and white elements on it

and here's a close up of the current MVP - extremely stripped back. I need to make it as simple as possible, so I can start testing it. a black and white wireframe featuring an input, a 'conjugar' button, and 3 verb 'cards' with conjugations on them and a selector for the verb tense

Here's the wireframes from the whiteboard too, for a bit of fun. a whiteboard with wireframes drawn on it, leaning on a messy bed with a laptop behind it

Product design is (surprising no one) hard! It's hard to know exactly what is needed, and even what problems I'm solving?

I can see how agile became popular, this iterative process will hopefully turn promising as I go from design, to implementation, back to design, ad nauseum. I can learn so much from testing an actual product, so there's value in getting there as soon as possible. That being said, I think I need to go harder on the whiteboard layouts - it feels like effort but it's actually much less investment than programing or high fidelity wireframes.

did somebody say layouts?

I'm going to read Refactoring UI, in fact I had a quick peek inbetween this paragraph and the last paragraph and was blown away at how many of the observations made above were contained in the first chapter. I always really liked the videos they make, really impressive work and it's a systematic approach that really appeals to me and the way I like to work.

what else

I got out for a quick boulder yesterday morning, then popped into town to visit an old workmate.

Portuguese class was good! We spent most of the time discussing food, it was fun! Next week I'll steer the conversation into homework immediately. You can buy Feijoada kits in melbourne - could be time for a new cooking adventure.

Harry found my blog through his site analytics, will keep this in mind when I'm putting links in the blog. He also suggested a good contender for renaming gopub - seki. Easy exercise for the reader to derive naming rational there.

Once again I've been distracted while writing, it happens to the best of us.

listening to

Men I Trust, and trying to cover their songs with my little keyboard and Abelton Live Lite. It's hard to get the right instrument! I'd like more control over the sound, always more to learn. Keen to practice some more beat making (inspired by this video), you can do a lot with those 707/808/909 drum machine recreations.

questions