060: Building Trustworthy Tools

Elm Radio

• Error messages should give three pieces of info
  • The problem
  • Why it's a problem
  • How to go forward
• Needing to do magic incantations to get things into a good state adds cognitive load and makes debugging harder
• Make tools more predictable
  • Clear mental model (avoid inconsistencies and leaky abstractions)
  • Doing an operation through different means should consistently arrive at the same result
  • Give context
  • Avoid caveats
• Tweet about layering platforms properly
• Extensible web manifesto
• Avoid boy who cried wolf (becoming blind to noise from errors or warnings or other feedback)
• Halo Effect