Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 27th September 2024

Consumer products have had growth hackers for many years optimizing every part of the onboarding funnel. Dev tools should do the same. Getting started shouldn't be an afterthought after you built the product. Getting started is the product!

And I mean this to the point where I think it's worth restructuring your entire product to enable fast onboarding. Get rid of mandatory config. Make it absurdly easy to set up API tokens. Remove all the friction. Make it possible for users to use your product on their laptop in a couple of minutes, tops.

Erik Bernhardsson

# 2:33 pm / usability, developers

Niche Museums: The Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection. DjangoCon was in Durham, North Carolina this year and thanks to Atlas Obscura I found out about the fabulous Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection. We got together a group of five for a visit and had a wonderful time being shown around the collection by curator Vincent Simonetti. This is my first update to Niche Museums in quite a while, it's nice to get that project rolling again.

More than a dozen varied and beautiful tubas, each with a neat attached label.

# 10:23 pm / museums, music

Themes from DjangoCon US 2024

Visit Themes from DjangoCon US 2024

I just arrived home from a trip to Durham, North Carolina for DjangoCon US 2024. I’ve already written about my talk where I announced a new plugin system for Django; here are my notes on some of the other themes that resonated with me during the conference.

[... 1,470 words]

Some Go web dev notes. Julia Evans on writing small, self-contained web applications in Go:

In general everything about it feels like it makes projects easy to work on for 5 days, abandon for 2 years, and then get back into writing code without a lot of problems.

Go 1.22 introduced HTTP routing in February of this year, making it even more practical to build a web application using just the Go standard library.

# 11:43 pm / go, http, web-development, julia-evans