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functional journalling

2022-10-25

1 minute read

I chatted to a recruiter about a job yesterday, a UI engineer role, which sounded pretty cool. I don't think I'll get it, but it got me thinking. They talked in the PD about something I want to investigate further: Functional UI design.

I've been getting into functional programing over the last year or two, which is a style of programming where you write your functions to have no "side-effects", aiming for "pure functions". This means any changes are made within the function, and if you give it the same arguments it will always return the same value, regardless of the state of the rest of the program. I feel vulnerable writing this down, realising how little about it I've fully understood. It's appealing because it reduces the complexity of a program, keeping each component self contained. You can write cleaner tests, and test components in isolation.

I'm not entirely sure how this applies to UI design in a way that's different to normal UI design, aside from maybe being more aware of the functional paradigm as you design the interface.

Another thing I noticed in my call was how much I waffle, and how I fall into using jargon to cover vagueness. I don't like it, and I think I could practice a lot of phrases in preparation for interviews and chats. I was really impressed in an interview with Jack Self where he talks about "speaking in whole sentences". I'd like I'm going to practice this.

Listening to

Nova by Burial and Four Tet

questions