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{30} Problem Validation, Design Specs & Gradient Borders

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{30} Problem Validation, Design Specs & Gradient Borders

Featuring Jen Abel, Vitaly Friedman, Cory House, Yanko Valera, Shripal Soni, and Chris Sev

Dane Lyons
Feb 21
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{30} Problem Validation, Design Specs & Gradient Borders

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Product: Problem Validation

Jen Abel

Twitter avatar for @jjen_abel
Jen Abel @jjen_abel
Customer Discovery is a search for problem validation, NOT product validation. Why? The market is correct when speaking about the problem and is usually very wrong with how to best solve it. For startups, it's essential to remember this.
12:03 PM ∙ Feb 16, 2023
37Likes3Retweets

This is an important distinction. I’ve seen a lot of pitfalls from companies seeking product validation. It’s easy to ask a friend if a solution is good and get a false positive from someone offering words of encouragement.

You are less likely to get a false positive when asking if someone is experiencing a problem. It’s a less personal, more rational thought experiment.

It’s also important to appreciate the fact that your initial solution is likely to be garbage. Not always, sometimes companies hit the lotto on their v1. It is much more common that your v1 is suboptimal, and you get closer to a more optimal solution after many rounds of improvements.

So I agree. Early conversations should focus on validating the problem. It’s ok to also talk about solutions. That’s part of the improvement process. But validate problems, not solutions.


Figma: Design Specs

Vitaly Friedman

Twitter avatar for @vitalyf
Vitaly Friedman 🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 @vitalyf
What a fantastic tool: EightSpaces Design Specs (figma.com/community/plug…) automates design specs based on your Figma component, from anatomy to props to layout and spacing. Via @nathanacurtis. 👏🏼👏🏽👏🏾 #ux #design #figma
Image
7:18 AM ∙ Feb 21, 2023
104Likes9Retweets

This is a neat tool. A lot of teams could produce better results with something like this.

I often worry about silo’ing the dev and design teams and essentially making the design team manage the dev team. I’ve always hated workflows that involve a non-collaborative spec handoff where design becomes a bottleneck for every change. This tool in those environments could get ugly.

If used in a healthier workflow involving a non-blocking design system, I see this helping a team get closer to pixel perfection without jamming the gears.


GraphQL: Network Inspector

Cory House & Yanko Valera

Twitter avatar for @housecor
Cory House @housecor
Problem: If an app makes multiple GraphQL calls on the same page, all the GraphQL calls look the same in the network tab. My approach: Click on each call, one by one, to view the payload's query name. This is time-consuming. Anyone have a trick for this?
Image
3:44 PM ∙ Feb 20, 2023
1,259Likes88Retweets
Twitter avatar for @yankovz
Yanko Valera @yankovz
@housecor I use
chrome.google.comGraphQL Network InspectorSimple and clean network inspector for GraphQL
3:47 PM ∙ Feb 20, 2023
1,090Likes76Retweets

This has been one of my frustrations in troubleshooting GraphQL. Digging into GraphQL requests on the network tab in Chrome is tedious and very unintuitive. A simple extension to help name and organize requests can be life-changing.


CSS: Gradient Borders

Shripal Soni

Twitter avatar for @codewithshripal
Shripal Soni @codewithshripal
CSS Tip 🤩 Create beautiful gradient rounded border with ease using CSS🔥
CSS Code to create gradient rounded border: .box {
  border: 12px solid transparent;
  border-radius: 24px;
  background: 
    linear-gradient(black, black) padding-box, 
    linear-gradient(
      45deg, 
      #FF52E5, 
      #F6D242
    ) border-box;
}
7:10 AM ∙ Feb 21, 2023
419Likes62Retweets

This is a wonderful technique that can produce a beautiful gradient border in a few lines of code. Producing an effect like this used to involve a very ugly hack involving a bunch of images and some messy markup. It would have been difficult to pull off the 45deg gradient.

Discretion is advised: Old School CSS Round Corners


CSS: Tailwind Apply

Chris Sev

Twitter avatar for @chris__sev
Chris Sev @chris__sev
I always liked TailwindCSS but the first complaint is usually how long your HTML gets. Here's how you can clean it up a bit with @Apply Disclaimer: I don't use apply. I'd rather separate into JS components 🎈 Getting Started with Tailwind in 15 Min youtube.com/watch?v=6zIuAy…
3:19 PM ∙ May 24, 2020
55Likes7Retweets

I seem to be in the minority on the Tailwind ‘apply’ debate. I don’t find the large acronym blobs to be visually parsable. The aversion to naming things in the Tailwind community is a little confusing. If you want someone to read your code and understand what the hell is going on, take the time to name things. Using ‘apply’ is much more semantic.

I do agree with Chris that JS components are an acceptable solution. The acronym blobs still live in components, but pages/views/layouts are much more readable.


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{30} Problem Validation, Design Specs & Gradient Borders

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