UX by the numbers
I recently came across this insightful medium.com article, pointing me to the UX research company Baymard. They approach UX in a very scientific way and generously share many of their findings on their website. The examples section points at dos and don'ts using real life examples and their blog has some nice long reads on specific topics.One article I especially enjoyed was the one on dropdowns, in my experience an eternal source of usability issues, browser specific bugs and all other sorts of problems. Main takeaways here: don't use dropdowns at all when you have less than 5 or more than 10 items and try to use the browser-native dropdowns unless you really need the additional styling freedom.
I like their scientific approach to UX/UI, giving me some good rules of thumb to create better user interfaces even without/before the input of a professional UX-er. In general this looks like a great way to convince back and front enders that some designs are objectively better than others.
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What's in a name? Or how to validate a name field in Java.
How to do basic validation of a name in Java.
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TODO, or not TODO
Rant about the uselessness of todo comments in source code.