R.I.P. Your Backlog

If everything is going to plan and your operating system is in dark mode, then randsinrepose.com is now dark for you. If you are a light mode person, you can click on the Moon in the upper right of the navigation and experience dark mode stylings. Click again to return.

Why now? Well, I was finishing the Blade Runner piece last week, and as I sat there figuring out the ending, dark mode popped back in my head. As I’m apt to do these days, I fired up the robots to investigate building dark mode.

We had a working version in about an hour. In three hours, I had a version I shared with friends for feedback, and by the evening the same day, dark mode was mostly done. It was most certainly not a “write one prompt and let the robots do their magic.” There were myriad design choices, there was CSS to untangle, caches needed busting, and there were bugs. Lots of them.

Half day. Voilà! Dark mode.

My plan wasn’t to say anything about dark mode except on the About page because dark mode is old news… like 2018 old news. When I launched the Alex King designed site in 2013, I’m sure someone asked for dark mode, but no one’s asked for it recently.

But, see… there’s a lot more going on besides dark mode.

Someday

An engineer putting a piece of work on their backlog is effectively deferring it to never. It’s important enough to write it down somewhere and document that it exists as a bug or a feature enhancement, but it’s not important enough to act.

Yes, sometimes we ambitiously carve out time to “burn down the backlog”, but do you know what we pick from that list? We pick the interesting work. Interesting to code or interesting because of the impact on the feature. Some kind of interesting briefly elevates this work to relevance. The boring backlog work? You couldn’t pay me.

I started working with the robots a year ago this month. Cautiously, experimentally. Like many, I expect, I started by building myself tools to perform actions. Write a script to watch NHL scores. Robots building scripts that I then run. This approach quickly felt inefficient because the robots were far more capable, so unless there was a need to run a script regularly via Cron or the like, I began having the robots fully act on the project.

Then, last October, I discovered a bunch of broken links that had been truncated by a Movable Type migration a dozen years ago. Nothing major — just untidy, but more important — boring work to both excavate and fix. You know who doesn’t care at all? The robots. In a few hours, I knew every single broken link (93 of them, in fact) and fixed them. Did this transform my traffic? No. Did this make Rands .0001% tidier? Yes. Did I feel like it was a proper investment of my time? You bet.

Fixing a hard-to-reproduce font-flash because of the typefaces I use, fixing long-standing minor-ish CSS issues on both desktop and mobile, figuring out why Safari and Firefox never got certain cached pages, analytics everywhere, stopping the site from silently blocking Readwise and other reader apps… this is a brief sample of the backlog items I would have never ever tackled by myself. Starting this year and having found my robot-footing, backlog work turned into feature work. A new footer, rotating promo card, tidying up the comments area, a significantly updated glossary, and now dark mode.

Yes, I am on the Pro Leisure Circuit, so I have lots of time, but if there were no robots, there is no way I’d be spending my precious time working on the backlog. Boring.

Infinite Interns

Do not ask me about the robots in person. Don’t. Last night, an academic friend of my parents gently asked me how I was using the robots with the new book. I warned her, “Do you want the short answer or the foaming at the mouth answer?” She selected the latter. She may have regretted her choice at the end of my 90-minute TED talk on how the robots literally give you superpowers.

Those superpowers are varied and include the ability to:

Iterate and build a rich spec of your ideas without writing a line of code,

Keep that diary you would never write — every decision, dead end, and dumb idea written down… never forgotten,

Chase down years-old weirdness with zero fatigue, where no human could sustain interest,

Deeply research a concept using the latest information available on the internet, and then turn that data into a decision,

Organize any project in a manner that suits your particular project-related proclivities, and, finally…

To do the boring work that you were never going to do anyway.

Welcome to Dark Mode.