Blag

A couple months ago I created a tool to generate text messages out of emoji for Slack.

I wrote up a proposal on the WICG wiki for default grid placement. I'm hopeful that it gets some traction from other developers who've faced the same issues. I'm also worried that I've missed an existing proposal for this feature because I didn't do all that much research before sending it off into the void.

Over the weekend I made a word finding website as a react app.

It's still got problems including, but not limited to:

• it's entirely JavaScript driven
• it searches really slowly after 8 or 9 characters
• sorting is slower than frozen molasses
• I haven't done any accessibility testing on it
• the design is as motivating as a bucket of beige paint
• the dictionary in use is pretty bad*

_{*can't really complain about it much though given that it was free and in public domain}

Unlike many of my other personal projects, I've actually released this one.

In particular my goal with this project was to build a minimum viable word-finder and launch it in the span of a day. In that regard, the project was a great success and I'm quite happy with how it's turned out. In particular the live-updating actually works pretty well for my use case.

Jeff Bonforte gave an excellent talk at the Facebook At Scale Conference. The entire talk is worth watching, but to me the most important part comes at 16:45, where he talks about the issues with hero culture and rewarding "firefighters".