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Programming Affordances That Invite Mistakes

Many of my philosophies in work life, my volunteer life, and my personal life stem from experiences. As a developer, many of those come from being burnt by rough edges or mistakes, just as health & safety principles come from accidents.

With that in mind, here’s a war-story from my days running an R&D startup when we lost all the data we thought we gathered from a psychology study. Once they had an average response time within an acceptable range (in milliseconds), we would introduce some words that we wanted to measure the user's reaction on. No problem, we setup a laptop with a locked-down Linux install, and put the code on there to run locally just as had in development.

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