When you’re on a website or an app, you look at something (a post, or a part of a UI), and your brain just starts calculating how this was made in your own language.
Like brain, stop, I’m tired, I don’t need the calculations right now.
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I can’t imagine how normal people use any software at all. When something doesn’t work for me, often I can figure out what could’ve gone wrong. For instance, there might be bug in the JavaScript form handler, and I can just bypass it. Or an app doesn’t invalidate its cache properly, so I just need to flush it manually.
It’s the same for people who don’t understand basic electronics or mechanics. Any problem just becomes “it’s broken” and the only solution is to take it to an expert and pay for their time, or toss it and buy a new one. It’s expensive to be ignorant.
To be fair, mechanic items, and especially electronic ones were far more repairable back then.
You could see, desolder and solder components without issue. Nowadays most of the electronics are inside chips, and only the components that need to be physically big (like those responsible for the power supply) are human sized. Sure, there are some small SMD that can be manually diagnosed and replaced, but even then you often need a lot of skill and equipment.
100% and if it’s a website I’ll likely lose a few hours digging around to see how it’s done.
For me it’s just the brain doing unnecessary calculations to see how this ui element was made. Why unnecessary? because when it calculates, it’s the time after work where it starts calculating, like brain, you’re tired, stop it.
Yes, but for games (I’m a game programmer)
Maybe I’m a bad programmer, or maybe I’m just busy and tired, but honestly I don’t often care enough to investigate until I need to build something similar.
It’s not you investigating, it’s just the brain calculating and coding how it was made in the language I learned.
I don’t know if its true, but I think this is a curse every kind of designer and developer has for their domain of work.
Yup. My background is computer science transitioned to IT Infra.
My sister sent me a screenshot of a Spotify one-liner error, white text on black background, captioned “they wrote a lazy error”. I immediately recognized that the actual problem was the load balancer in the front end trying and failing to connect to the backend/middleware in the first error, then in the second it recognized a failed health check and reporting that no back ends were available. Root cause is probably networking issue or actual server crash.
I also have a bonus that in high school I had watched a ton of videos on VFX/SFX and knew a rough way around After Effects and compositing (before I jumped into CS I had considered this as a career path), so now when I watch TV and movies I can also see some of the “layers” they use to compile the on screen effect.
aaaand then I dream about it, and wake up at 3 am with an epiphany as to how it could be done. Too bad it never works for my own projects…
