I hate it too (and others like "learnings" when "lessons" would suffice), but I see the purpose it serves. Asking a team "What's the ask?" is a way of explicitly asking what the concrete requests are which can be documented and followed up on (i.e. "circle back"), whereas just asking for "requests" is more like asking for preferences, which may not be binding, or a vague direction to go for planning.

For those not aware of them, Design Within Reach has a lot of nice famous designed furniture and shelving, but pricey. They often have 15% off season sales though. Good place to shop if you're into the stuff seen in this blog post.

[1] https://shop.noguchi.org/collections/akari-light-sculptures

There are bits in here that are a little bit over-designed in my opinion. Do you really need two fountain pens at the ready? Must they be there on the desk at all times? I find I carry my single fountain pen with me when I need it. I also can't see myself always sitting at the desk to read. I have books scattered about the house wherever I was reading last. Also, it's great to have such a wide desk for both digital and analog, but how many of us have the space for that luxury? Anyway, just food for thought if you look at something like this and feel jealous and think whatever space you work in today is now poorer for seeing someone else's nicer setup.

The app has a lot of UX details that I've really enjoyed working on. I wrote up some notes about it here: https://www.freshcardsapp.com/3/

Separately, also working on a Zettelkasten notes app that pushes you to make small, atomic notes that you can organize in "collections" to provide structure beyond just hyperlinking in the note text: https://understory.ussherpress.com/ This has been a lot of fun iterating on. I started with a Miller Columns UI, like Finder, to visualize the graph of connections between notes, but I found that it was too overwhelming to use, so I scaled back and went with a more Notational Velocity-like quick search bar with note addressing. The app UI mimics a browser because I found that it works really well for something like this. I need to polish it a bit more and want to find people who will give it a beta test to help me iterate on the ideas some more.

It would be cool if it included sample OBJ files to entice me to find my own later. Otherwise I feel like I just hit a wall immediately in the app will probably not try it again.

My point was more that I've seen product demos where parts of a product were presented as having been pored over painstakingly when in reality it was decided on day one that it would work that way. However, because it's a prominent feature, it feels cheap to show the reality, so I get that for demos there's a bit of storytelling that goes into it so the audience feels like it was a revelation.

For UX that I've designed myself, I have definitely found that a lot of the great ones required a ton of iteration and almost "courage" to go against my initial bright ideas and look at things from a different perspective. It often required taking away elements that I thought were absolutely required at first but later realized made more sense to go without. If someone were to look at the final result, they would definitely think "Well, obviously that's how it should work." But more likely they'd have go through a similar journey that I did to come up with it if they hadn't seen the solution.

In a way it's like finding out how a magic trick worked. It's only obvious in retrospect.

I've been to a lot of meetups and it's definitely hit or miss and obviously depends on the sociability of the people that show up. The better ones I've attended are generally ones where people aren't trying to network for work purposes and are there literally to just socialize. The networking ones I find very dull as it's people just talking shop and career and if you've nothing to offer them on the career front, they move on quickly.

I used to use TheDraw for doing ANSI art, but I also ended up making my own ANSI drawing tool back then. It's stupid to think of now, but one reason I made it was because I had a monochrome monitor, so I couldn't "see" color. I wanted a feature where I could put the cursor over a character and it would tell me the color there when I was drawing so I could still use color in the work.

I wasn't prolific, but did do a handful of ANSI art pieces for local BBS SysOps who liked them well enough. Only later on I realized when I got an actual color monitor that I had a few color mistakes in them and they never told me. lol

We also had algorithms to detect finger shape to detect location of the pointer and when you were touching the screen. I saw way too many videos of fingers touching screens back then, so it's funny to see similar video clips here.

I think of it differently. Speed is great because it means you can change direction very easily, and being wrong isn't as costly. As long as you're tracking where you're going, if you end up in the wrong place, but you got there quickly and noticed it, you can quickly move in a different direction to get to the right place.

Sometimes we take time mostly because it's expensive to be wrong. If being wrong doesn't cost anything, going fast and being wrong a lot may actually be better as it lets you explore lots of options. For this strategy to work, however, you need good judgment to recognize when you've reached a wrong position.