Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. I'm not going to waste your time. We're going to get straight into the second part of the interview with Jon Yablonski. But before we do that, if you're enjoying this show and hopefully you are, if you're back for the second part of this interview, if you're enjoying this show, then I encourage you to subscribe in whatever podcasting app you use. And if you're wondering if you should take the extra five seconds or so, that it takes to press the subscribe button, I want you to consider just how valuable one meaningful insight might be to your career. If you change the way you think about one thing and you have that new information for the course of your career, maybe 20-30 years worth of your career, then isn't that worth just a little bit of investment, five minutes, ten minutes of an episode of Developer Tea, just pressing that subscribe button. So there's my sales pitch for Developer Tea. Hopefully, these episodes are extremely valuable to you and that you've already subscribed and you're a longtime listener. But if you're not, I hope you would consider becoming one. Alright, let's get into the interview with Jon Yablonski. So I'd love to ask you about Jacob's Law. This one's a really interesting one because I think it actually wraps up some other, it has kind of these other references to some interesting psychological and behavioral psychology long-term research that has been done. But Jacob's Law, can you tell me what Jacob's Law says? Sure. So Jacob's Law reference to Jacob Nelson who really defined this as in the longer form term for it would be Jacob's Law of Usability. So users spend most of their time on other sites. And this means that users prefer your site to work the same way as other sites they already know. You know, a great correlation I like to make on this one is that we become familiar with how certain interface elements work, for example. A drop down menu or check boxes or a checkout flow even. Something a little bit more complicated. We become very familiar with these patterns, both on the web and in our mobile apps. And I think that those are very convenient for users because they don't have to un, they don't have to relearn these interaction patterns every time they go to a different website or download another app, for example. So I think that that's very useful for the user because it's less that they have to kind of take on cognitively and learn how it works. On the other hand, you know, we all understand as designers and Developer That sometimes breaking from the status quo, if you will, a common pattern has this benefits as well. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. So when are the times that Jacob's Law you intentionally want to break it? You know, I think it really comes down to the content itself. Will the content dictate a different pattern that serves its message more effectively? So you know, it's easy to take a paragraph of text, for example, and just drop it on the site. But if you can format that into something that's slightly more interactive, you can tell somewhat of a more compelling story, and as a result, have a more human connection with your users that they'll respond to, you know, they'll respond to it just because of the mere fact that it kind of spoke to them on a level that wasn't just a paragraph of copy. Right. Yeah, it's kind of like this idea that everybody's goal is to efficiently perform some procedure when they go onto a website. And that may not necessarily be true. And so you get this in all kinds of cultural artifacts. Music, for example, there's some music that is intentionally obscured, right? So that you have to kind of dig for meaning. And so if the point of music is to efficiently convey a particular meaning, then everyone would use the same exact form and perhaps, you know, that meaning could be conveyed directly. But the point of music is not necessarily to just convey meaning directly. Sometimes it is to convey meaning through a process of exploration or of discovery. And of course, music is different in most ways from the average website. But in many ways, it's very similar. And so making it accessible, some music is more accessible than others, right? Based on what the intention of that music is. And the same can be said of many other cultural artifacts. Websites are certainly a part of that cultural artifact bucket that I'm talking about. I absolutely agree with that. And so I think Jacob's law, and Jon, feel free to disagree with me here. I think the interesting thing about Jacob's law is mostly around your awareness of this reality that, you know, this is another conument diversky thing. But you only see what is in front of you, right? What you see is all there is. And so if you're focused on making your website, then very often it's hard to reference things. It's hard to remember that for this person's day, for their web experience, you know, you are only a small, unless you are a super giant, if you're Google or Facebook, and, you know, this probably applies in a different way to you. But you're probably a small sliver of their user experience for the day. And typically we treat things as if we are a major, very important user experience for that person's day. And that's somewhat skewed. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, you know, an example of like that exactly would be the pull down to refresh pattern, which, you know, we're all familiar with now, but when it first came out, it was somewhat foreign to people. And over time, it becomes very intuitive. But if it had not been for, I believe Apple, who first introduced this as a feature, you know, it probably would have taken a lot longer for us to adopt. Yeah. Yeah. And these strange kind of moments in design where somebody had an idea and then that idea became popular and it gained enough traction to become a standard, right? We have those all over the place. We certainly do. I'm thinking of the hamburger menu, right? Yeah, exactly. You know, which really is like this, it's a form of skew morphism maybe where you have this abstract representation of menu items. But that has been shifted and changed and reused and flipped around in 500 different ways. And so now you have a hamburger with the word menu next to it that morphs into an X and that's the pattern. That's the way everybody does things. Yep. It's interesting how that stuff comes about. And I think a lot of it is actually driven by some of these laws of UX. I think a lot of it is the way that we learn. You know, a lot of it is actually cultural. It's taste oriented. And it just so happened to gain enough kind of momentum that it became the way to do things. Yeah. And you know, that's actually relevant to Jacobs law in a lot of ways because, you know, that's sometimes exactly even if it's, you know, somewhat of an anti pattern, which I think many people would argue hamburger menu is. It becomes somewhat of a standardized pattern over, you know, repeated use and it just being a common feature to the point where it kind of transcends into this principle of Jacobs law where people are somewhat familiar with it. And so even though it's not the best, you know, purest form of clear design or whatever that you that you may want, now because people are used to it and because it's what they expect, that is the right way. Yep. In some way, I mean, this can be very frustrating. It can be very frustrating in reality. I think this has happened, especially in the JavaScript community, for example, you know, one of the things that you see happening in the JavaScript community is this really massive kind of takeover that quite frankly, react is highly responsible for this. I'm not going to say that they're in a negative way responsible. But this very simple websites that previously would have been delivered in significantly fewer bytes are now being thrown down the pipe with these massive, massive JavaScript programs to render that content on the page. Now this is obviously a hot button topic for a lot of people, but this, you know, from a purest perspective of, hey, you know, you only send down the content that you really need to send down, right? You never send assets that aren't necessary. This idea that, well, now we're adopting this and it's okay because people have faster internet connections or because the gains that we experience as developers, the productivity gains, there are these interesting consequences and they're not necessarily, you know, they're not necessarily horrible for the industry by any means, but we should be aware of them. That's kind of my homily for the day. Yeah. I think that Jeremy Keith, I think, has brilliant thoughts on specifically around, you know, the role of JavaScript and how fast it's changing. And I think that, you know, he describes this concept of rates of change and how JavaScript is really this layer of constant, you know, it's all over. It's working ahead of us and it's moving so fast that it's really, you know, discovering these new patterns and new ways to build things on the web. And ultimately that will kind of filter down into the foundational elements of the web. And it's kind of necessary if you think of JavaScript in that way that it's kind of working. It's progressing quickly. It's not always moving forward. Sometimes it's moving up down into the right, you know, like it. Yeah. I was. Yeah. You know, I talk, I saw him give it, you know, he said, you know, by the end of this talk, there will be two or three frameworks already, you know, launched. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And that's how fast JavaScript is moving. And I think that ultimately, it's frustrating is that can be for Developer That that's actually a good thing. It's out there and it's breaking things and it's figuring things out for us. And that'll eventually filter its way into these slower layers of the web that, you know, don't change as often, but we'll change for the better because of, you know, the things that we're creating in JavaScript now. Yeah. I think it's, I think it's challenging people to learn how to work around these restrictions and these long held, you know, established, whatever it is that has prevented us from doing this in the past. You know, I think it's a very good thing. If you want to know my opinion on the subject, but it also has these interesting consequences. And I think both are important to recognize anybody who leans all the way and says, this is absolutely the correct way to go or this is absolutely the incorrect way to go. They probably are being more dogmatic than they are pragmatic. And so it's important to keep that in mind. When we look at progress at any level, a lot of the time progress in web development comes by way of abstraction. And as we discussed earlier, abstraction necessarily means that something else is dealing with complexity. In this case, complexity may mean, you know, increasing the file size. Something else is going to, that abstraction is not going to be perfectly efficient. It's kind of the point, right? I like it. Testlers law. Yeah, there it is. Okay, so let's talk about another fun one real quick. I'm going to pick one out here. Occam's razor, all right? This not an intuitive concept necessarily, I don't think. I'd love for you to describe Occam's razor for me. You know, this is one I've actually spent quite a bit of time with and I've even written about it a little bit. And you know, it can have different meaning depending on, you know, how you interpret it. But I think what it boils down to, if I was to just, you know, paraphrase it is that, you know, if you have multiple ways to create something, for example, I need people to select an item from a list. What Occam's razor really predicts is that the simpler option, the one with the fewest assumptions, is the more effective choice. And you know, I think that this, what I really like about this one is that it has a, it, it indicates a kind of a methodology of thinking, of constant questioning and really asking yourself if you really need that, you know, slider, carousel element, or can you communicate the same thing effectively with a much simpler pattern, for example, just a, you know, an image in text or something that's just a little bit less involved, has let, you know, less places to break, for example, and still achieves the in goal. Yeah. Yeah. I love this, I love Occam's razor, the idea that somehow our assumptions are valuable is really what this is, this is slicing away, forgive my pun. And this, this concept is such an important, it really comes down to ego. All right. I'm making a huge jump here. Okay. It comes down to ego because our assumptions are things that we typically have added to the conversation. They're based on experience. They may be based on taste. They can be based on, sometimes even nothing at all, right. They can be based on intuition that is informed by something that we can't, can't quite place our finger on. And unfortunately, those assumptions can lead us down a really bad path. And typically that bad path looks more like expensive decisions than it does bad ones, right. Because a lot of times our assumptions are not necessarily grossly wrong, although they can be, but usually they become really expensive. And that's, to your earlier point about the slider. You know, this is something that, that happens in web development, web design all the time. And it comes down to ego. Not only your ego, but the ego of the people that you're working with of understanding, you know, how to connect a particular decision to its outcome. And so if you have two or three options and there's a cheap one and a middle road one and an expensive one and the cheap one will effectively accomplish the same thing that the other two will, then why would you choose the other two, right. That's kind of the question that Occam's razor asks. And it's hard. It's very hard sometimes to say, man, I really had this vision for this site that I really wanted it to do this thing. And I have to kind of let that go, right. Have you ever faced that problem as a designer of having to let go of an intuition where you're gut? And when you really felt strongly about it? Absolutely. I mean, I feel like, you know, every day, you know, or at least every week, I have to, you know, there's that saying, you know, kill your, kill your sweetheart or kill, kill the idea that you love the most. Be willing to do that. And, you know, be willing to sacrifice it in favor of something that, you know, really is going to be more user-centric in the end. And, you know, I think that sometimes as, you know, like designers can get really married to a concept, they can really think, you know, get drawn to how clever the solve was. And, you know, we're so close to the problem sometimes. It's hard to see the fact that maybe we are making too many assumptions and that really the simpler solution in that particular scenario is more effective. Yeah, it happens more often than perhaps even we realize. I think the idea of striving in your projects, and I'm going to apply this to developers here for a second. The idea of striving as a developer to learn various things or to pick up a language or, you know, there's nothing necessarily wrong with learning. There's nothing necessarily wrong with picking up new languages. In fact, I really encourage that. To assume the value is a huge error to make. And it's an error because so often we build up these stories about what we can make happen in the world about how we can affect the world, about how we can affect our users. Right. And so we create false expectations for ourselves. We create false expectations for our clients, for our employers, and ultimately those false expectations end up being, you know, dissatisfied. And that can become a really frustrating experience for you, for your employer, for your clients, for everyone involved. And it can also be very difficult to detect where it came from. And that's actually maybe the hardest part of all is that something went wrong and you can't really understand when it went wrong because it could have been multiple bad decisions along the way that we're all based on assumptions. I couldn't agree more. Well, this has been an excellent discussion. Are there any other laws that you feel like are useful to bring up before we bring this thing in for landing? Hmm. Let's see here. I think that, you know, the only one that I think is really relevant in a lot of ways to what we've discussed tonight is the Von Restorff effect, which effectively predicts that when multiple similar options or objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered. So you know, in design, this would quite often be, you know, use contrast to make things stand out like buttons or elements like that. You're using these contrasting colors. But I think that this idea comes with a huge caveat and that's that if you overdo this one, everything is competing for your attention. So, you know, a classic example I love to use is lean cars. I don't know if you're familiar. It's quite easily one of the ugliest websites on that. What is it? What was it called? Ling cars? Oh, yes. Yes, I'm very familiar with this. Yes. So, you know, it's so overwhelming to the point where it's kind of hilarious now, but, you know, that's a great example of just something where everything is competing for your attention. And we know that for users, that can be that can overwhelm them, that can, it's hard to concentrate on anything when everything is competing for your attention. And I think that that's one that, you know, we kind of touches on some of the things we were covering earlier with the serial position effect and, you know, really just kind of, undergoing that decision making process through something like, you know, Occam's Razor, for example, where you're really just kind of questioning what should compete for the users' attention, what you're going to place emphasis on, and going through that process of reduction to the point where only the important things are going to stand out. And I think, you know, as designers, we have it, you know, and developers for that matter, as teams, building things for the web, you know, we have to really sometimes be willing to cut things that we were kind of tied to collectively, things that we were kind of, you know, married to ideas that we, you know, are babies. We have to be willing to sacrifice sometimes in effort to focus the experience on the user. Let's talk about today's sponsor. If you have never built an app using composition, then I encourage you to try this out. The concept is really simple, you create a lot of small kind of self-contained things, and then you compose them together to build a larger thing. This is not a new concept, it's been around for a long time. And in order to do this, you're going to need to be able to spin up various services. You're going to create APIs, and then connect to those APIs. And one of the best ways to do this is to use Linux. And one of the best ways to use Linux in the cloud is with Linode. With Linode, you can get started for as little as $5 a month. Now imagine this. Imagine that you have 10 microservices, and each of them only cost you $5 a month. You could be running an entire infrastructure for only $50 a month. In this infrastructure, you would have total control over. Each of your Linode instances can do things like run private VPNs, or you could have your own Git server. You can do anything that you can do with Linux on Linode. It also has high memory plans. So imagine that you're not building something with microservices, but instead you have this larger application that has higher CPU power needs, or maybe it has higher memory needs, Linode can provide for those situations as well. I encourage you to go and check it out. Linode's going to give you $20 worth of credit just for being a Developer Tealistener and using the link spec.fm slash Linode to get started today. Thank you again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. This is super important. The Von Restor effect. Understanding, again, these underlying principles, really understanding even at this, at the kind of the neuro scientist level, why does this happen? The isolation effect. Why does this happen? My theory, and this is backed up by a very small amount of neuro-cognitive research that I've done, Jon, I'd love to bounce this off of you. See what you think. My theory is that when you see a bunch of things that are similar, that your brain kind of goes on autopilot. It's already processed that information. When you see another one, it's going to fill in the space. In fact, your brain can actually do this with vision, by the way. There's a super weird thing that happens. If you have a clock or even a watch that has an analog second hand, and you look away for a second, and then you look back at your watch, you'll see the second hand seem like it's frozen for a little bit longer than a second. Why does this happen? What's happening is when you look at that watch face, your brain is filling in, it's like backfilling the frames, where the second hand was moving when you looked at it. It's a very weird effect. It's one of the ways that your brain actually smooths out your experience as you are experiencing the world. It's also, whenever you move your eyes from one point of focus to another, you're actually effectively blind during that period. The way that you can test this is if you look at a mirror and you look at, you focus on one of your pupils and then you focus on the other pupil. You don't actually notice the transition time, but when somebody else looks at your pupil and then they look at your other pupil, you can see that your brain is filling in. Maybe their eyes move. It's a very strange effect, but what's happening is your brain is essentially saying, hey, your experience is jarring and I'm going to tone it down for you so that your brain, so you don't have to process so much information that really isn't useful to you. Again, your brain is your friend, right? It's trying to keep you alive. It's trying to keep you focused on the things that matter. Instead of you focusing on how dizzy you are from moving your eyes around, it's saying, hey, we don't really even need that information. Let's just drop it all together. We can do this. This is also the same effect that you get when you take the same way home every day. If you've ever been tired while driving and you wondered, wow, how did I even get here? I didn't even get home. That's exactly what's happening. Your brain is essentially going on autopilot. You're not having to actively make decisions, you're not having to actively process information. It's all just kind of happening without your input or awareness. Now, to get to the Von Restorff effect, when you encounter something crazy, right, when you encounter something out of the norm, and it doesn't even have to be that extreme, when you take a new way home, we've talked about this on the show countless times, when you take a new way home, or when you look at something that you've never actually looked at before, suddenly, this becomes a higher cognitive load because your brain is having to reorient itself around that and do unexpected thing. It was going along. Everything was smooth. It didn't have to do any work. And suddenly, something unexpected happened. And so these moments stick out. Also, one of the reasons why we can look back on our lives, on our childhood, and we remember very specific events, not because of their ordinairiness, but because of their unordinaryness, right, because they stuck out. So our vacation experiences, these are anchors that we remember because they were so different from our normal everyday life where we were on autopilot. I love those examples. It has such a profound effect that it also is relevant at the very minute level when we're just browsing a website, right? This is kind of a profound reality that our brain is doing this literally all of the time. Yeah, it goes back to what you were saying earlier where it's, you know, it's something that we've inherited genetically over thousands of years, essentially. Our brains are very effective, dipping machines, right? That's a great way to put it. And they can really point out the, you know, you know, like you were saying our brains have a natural tendency to want to make order, make things make sense. And when something sticks out, visually or even mentally, like a memory, for example, it sticks around our brain. It stands out. And you can essentially find this everywhere. And that's really what I think is great about these psychology principles is that once you've identified them and started to kind of understand how they work and why they work, you start to see them everywhere. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you can start to make concession for them, right? So you can start making decisions that respect them rather than trying to reverse them. Does that make sense? Absolutely. So now you know to make the homepage load particularly fast because the first and last effect, I can't remember the name of it. Serial position effect. There you go. The serial position effect. Because the serial position effect prefers the first and the last things. And so it's less important that somebody is middle of the road experiences incredible than the beginning and the last. Yeah, I totally agree. It's this really you're unlocking these, these, you know, patterns that we all fall into on a psychological level. And if you can start to create and craft user experiences that consider these patterns, you're essentially creating more human-centric experiences. Absolutely. You are respecting the user even further than you were before. All right, Jon, this has been an excellent discussion and thank you so much. First of all for creating laws of UX.com. If you're browsing this and you haven't seen it yet, you can actually go and download the PDFs of these and print them out. I encourage you to do that. Put them in your office or wherever. Where else can people find the work that you're doing and learn more about you? You know, Jon Yablonski.com is a great place to start. I do, you know, I love taking on projects like this. I curate something called the web filled manual where you can learn a lot and also do something called storytelling design, which really kind of collects great interactive stories on the web that I think that really kind of stand out from your normal experiences of e-commerce sites and informational websites. Yeah, webfieldmanual.com if you're looking for that one and then storytelling.design. I believe is the other one correct? That's correct. Awesome. Great resources. Absolutely beautifully done by the way. If you're wondering how to make a website look good, these are three excellent examples. I guess the fourth one would be Jon's personal website is Jonjablonsky.com I believe. Nailed it. Awesome. Well Jon, thank you so much. I have two questions that I like to ask all of the developers and designers who come on the show and if you're ready for those we can go ahead and jump into that now. Yeah, sure. All right. So the first question, what do you wish more people would ask you about? That's such a great question. You know, I think that inevitably when you're talking about these psychological principles I think that there comes up this topic of ethics and I think that, you know, well, I really wish that people would ask me about that more because it's a natural progression into talking about these patterns and limitations of the human mind and then at what point do we want to draw the line and, you know, not make these things cross that boundary of being too sticky or too addictive and I think that you see a lot of that now in these, you know, digital experiences that we engage with every day. You know, there's kind of a level of addiction there and then I think designers, a question I would like to be asked more about is really where that line is and at what point do we start to consider the digital well-being of our users? I think this is a key question. As you start to gain what effectively feel like superpowers even though they aren't by understanding the way people's brains work, you will have a newfound kind of toolset that can, it really is a powerful thing. It really helps shape people's behavior. And so the question, Jon, that you're asking if I'm understanding you correctly is, you know, how do we do that ethically? How do we take those things that we know about humans and not use them in a way that is to their detriment and also not use them in a way that is abusive of that power but is actually empowering them and is in a way that is, you know, using those principles in a way that is empathetic rather than, you know, opportunistic. That's absolutely correct. I think there's an excellent book on the subject. It's called Nudge and it's written by the Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler. He recently won the Nobel Prize. Actually, I believe that was this year. He won the Nobel Prize and it's all about making these, helping people make better decisions by kind of shaping their decision architecture, right? It's kind of a parallel discussion to what we're talking about today but it is a worthwhile read and encourage anyone who's interested in this ethics of design decisions to take a look at that book. There's certainly other literature in the area that I'm not aware of. Jon, do you have any recommendations on places that they can have that discussion? You know, one of my favorite resources on the web right now regarding this topic is CognitiveUSD newsletter that goes out. Excellent newsletter that really collects a lot of cognitive principles and its overlap with design. You know, I think that's a great place to start. And there's a lot of books on the subject matter. Almost too many to start to mention here. But I really would encourage people to go to laws of UX and really kind of dig through the further reading because a lot of these topics and conversations and articles that I reference really kind of evolve into this question of ethics and how it kind of plays into our role as designers and developers creating things for the world. Yeah, because we are creating, you know, we're putting things in people's path. They're going to encounter this stuff and it will change the way they live their life in some instances. And it may change the, it certainly changes the way they spend at least a small fraction of their time. And so it's important to pay attention to it, I think. You know, I had a guest on the show recently, and he was Max Hawkins. And Max as kind of a personal expression in this arena, he has intentionally disconnected himself from these algorithms that try to make decisions for him. Right. And so the idea is that he's going to de-bias or in fact create an opposing bias to escape that little bit of decision that is imposed on him by these, by algorithms that have been designed to help him, you know, like for example, we look for the best restaurant in the area. And the way that Max does it, he visits a random restaurant. He takes a sample of the restaurants in the area and then quite literally, well, I guess not literally, but figuratively rolls the dice and then goes to that restaurant. And where most of us would ask for the best item on the menu, Max asks for the worst item on the menu. And I think there's a very interesting process, right? But it speaks very well to this exact topic that you're talking about and that is, you know, how these decisions are made, they really are affecting even the smallest parts of our lives. Absolutely. And I think that this is becoming more and more of a topic, you know, a great place to go and learn a lot more about this is humantech.com. Or humaintech.com is. Yes, agree. Absolutely. Great resource. Absolutely. This whole time well spent movement, which really is just an awareness of what we're doing in our digital lives. I think is important and seeing the patterns and even the anti patterns in this, you know, technological revolution that we fully adopted. Being cognizant of its drawbacks is, I think it's our responsibility as digital citizens. Couldn't agree more, Jon. Thank you for that. I do have this last question. I want to ask you. I believe it's probably going to end up being somewhat related. But if you could give 30 seconds of advice to all developers of any background, any level of experience, what would you tell them? You know, I would tell them, first of all, rights, you know, really put yourself through the process of thinking through your own ideas and thoughts and putting them down on paper or digital paper and editing them and putting them out there in the world because others will benefit from that immensely. And then you also, it has the benefit to you of clarification of your thoughts. And it's a great way to kind of look back and get a sense for what you were kind of experiencing or learning at that time. So it kind of works as a digital diary, if you will. But yeah, I think that writing is a quintessential skill that we should all have or can have. And it's a big sacrifice and a big commitment, but it's well worth it. Yeah. And if you're, I totally agree with that. If you're feeling like you can't write something because it's going to take too much time, something that I like to tell people all the time is that the value of your writing is often not at all correlated with the length of your writing. And so this is, I mean, that's the point of the show. We started out to be intentionally short. And so even if you get started with writing very short articles, some of my best writing, especially technical writing or commentary on the tech industry, some of that writing has come by way of very short posts. And I mean less than five paragraphs kind of posts. You'd be surprised that people are actually, you know, people's attention to man is short already, right? So start with that. And I guarantee you you're going to find that eventually as you practice this, that you're going to be feeling like, man, this is too long. I'm going to have to get up and have to edit it down for people to even want to read this, right? That's something that I've faced in the past. And anyway, the point is, and I also encourage people to heed Jon's words here to write. And you said that was the first of all. Is there any more that you want to kind of share? Yeah, absolutely. I think the other one is, and you know, very relevant to laws of UX, really think about how side projects can be adopted into your life and use them to explore new ideas and really discover things that you want to learn more about. I think that there's been one thing that has been absolutely transformational for me as a designer and developer has been to really get in the habit of identifying ideas and, you know, editing those ideas and really honing in on things that I want to learn, things I want to level up with, things I'm inspired by, things that I want to, you know, really kind of explore. And then carve out the time and become disciplined and carry through with that. Yeah, this is super, super important. It's very hard to do, and it's also very hard to find the energy and gumption to do a side project sometimes. But I guarantee you, if you have that first couple of steps, it just take the first couple of steps, you know, and that's not just buying the domain name. It's taking the first steps of launching the project. Make it as small as you need to to get at least that very first piece at the door. You'll be surprised, I believe, especially with enough effort. First of all, the personal benefits are through the roof. There's so much you learn by owning something on your own and truly kind of pushing on that boundary for yourself. But secondly, if the side project that you create is also benefiting other people, there's so much that you learn from that as well. Couldn't agree more. And that's really how Developer Tea was born. Awesome. Jon, this has been an excellent discussion. Do you have any other thoughts for people who are listening, anything else that, you know, can they follow you on Twitter or anything like that? Yeah, please do. Follow me on Twitter at Jon Yablonski. And you know, really, if you have ideas for principles that I can add to laws of UX, please reach out. I'm continuing to kind of build that website and add content to it and really augment what's already there. And I really want to just continue to evolve it and the conversations that it's kicked off. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jon. A huge thank you goes out to Jon Yablonski for joining me on the past two episodes of Developer Tea and for sharing his wisdom and insight and creativity with the world. I echo what Jon has to say about side projects and about having the kind of the creative output beyond whatever you are compelled to do on a given day to also choose something to do. So I encourage you to take that little piece of advice, even if it's something extremely small, go and make something out of your own volition. You'll be very thankful that you did. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Thank you again to today's episode sponsor, Linode with Linode, you can create anything that you can create with Linux. And you can connect it into the cloud. So by the way, Linode runs only on SSDs. We haven't said that in the past two episodes, but it has SSD storage. It runs on a 40 gigabit internal network. All kinds of excellent stats that you can check out at spec.fm slash Linode and you'll get that $20 worth of credit for using that special link. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode and until next time, enjoy your tea.