🏁 One Million Checkboxes

Hey everybody,

This week we’ll take a look at the wild success of One Million Checkboxes, whether GPT-4o stacks up for web scraping, and why you should keep your codebase greppable.

Quick Links

☑️ One Million Checkboxes
On June 26th, 2024, EIEIO Games launched One Million Checkboxes, a site where global users shared control of one million checkboxes. The site struggled with massive activity, crashing often, but stabilized by day two, leading to over 650 million checkbox interactions before it was closed two weeks later. Let’s dive into how the site was (mostly) kept online!

🪛 Using GPT-4o for web scraping
Eduardo Blancas recently tested OpenAI’s API to develop an AI-assisted web scraper. Is GPT-4 good for web scraping? Well, it's powerful but costly, so, kind of. This post breaks down his insights.

🔎 Greppability is an underrated code metric
Moriz Büsing wrote a blog post about maintaining an unfamiliar codebase, highlighting how frequent searching is key. Here are some rules you can apply to keep your codebase greppable.

AI

💪 Building with Cursor
Cursor has blown up over the past few weeks, gaining massive attention, and people are already creating amazing things with it. This thread highlights 10 impressive examples—here are two of my favorites.

Matt Palmer built a tool that can remove the background of a photo in 20 minutes.

And, Riley Brown built a tool whilst sitting at a cafe which can analyze videos.

Blog Highlight

Engineering With Empathy
Lena Wang, an intern on Slack’s accessibility team, has been learning the ropes of designing for inclusive user experiences. Her journey reveals the importance of developing an intuitive sense for user needs, especially when building products that serve people of all backgrounds and abilities.

The Early Days: Hesitation and Deference

When Lena joined the team, she often deferred to product managers and designers, worried about making mistakes. This led her to focus primarily on technical skills like React, rather than engaging in team discussions.

The Turning Point: Embracing Empathy

Lena soon realized that her hesitance was holding her back. “Understanding our users—really understanding them—is key,” she says. She shifted her focus from just coding to truly understanding the user experience, particularly in accessibility, where eliminating barriers for diverse users is crucial.

Engaging with the Team and Users

This new mindset encouraged Lena to participate more in discussions and engage directly with users. Listening to feedback, especially from an accessibility consultant who uses screen readers, helped her gain valuable insights. “Hearing his perspective was incredibly helpful,” she notes.

Practicing Empathy and Gaining Confidence

Lena’s growth came from practicing empathy and sharing ideas with her team. She learned to:

1. Abandon Preconceived Notions: Stay open to new ideas, even if it means changing your work.

2. Engage with Users: Seek direct feedback to understand real-world challenges.

3. Learn from Colleagues: Observe and ask questions to understand decision-making processes.

4. Contribute Ideas: Actively participating in discussions helped her grow faster.

Make sure to check out the full blog post.

Programming Humor

Until next week,

Travis.