Every Pixel, Every Line of Code

Someone had to invent the Like button. It looks like a tiny feature in the grand vision of a product, but that has made all the difference for Facebook. Think what would Facebook be like, without the like button.

There are many such small feature additions that we often overlook in a lot of products we build and use. For example, take the Undo option in your favourite document editor, which almost every one of us take for granted now. “Ctrl/Cmd + Z” has saved countless hours of rework for countless users and probably has saved someone’s ass from getting fired just because she accidentally pressed Delete instead of Enter. Someone had to invent that!

When there’s an engineer restlessly writing code sitting in an office corner, sipping her coffee with headphones on, she needs to know how important those few lines of code are. A designer needs to know that adding the new accessibility feature is more than just a mere “feature”. She needs to understand that the new accessibility feature is helping a blind husband take a selfie so that he can send it back to his dear ones as to assure his well being. It’s just a few pixels and few lines of code, yes, but that’s what makes all the difference after all.

Every pixel by a designer, every line of code by a programmer counts.

Finally, we all need to understand why we do what we do. We are only getting paid for the “what” and “how”, not for the why. But the “why” is the most important of them all, and is the reason you will come to work every damn day, excited and pumped up, to change the world, one pixel and one tab (or two spaces, if you prefer 😉) at a time.

Fun fact: The engineer who created/invented the Like Button deleted Facebook from his phone and wants people to stop worrying about “likes”.

Thanks for reading.