Let me tell you about what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity I had last night.
It was Friday night and I went out to a little seafood bar with two friends. A small bar with nice food and good prices, nothing fancy.
At around 22:00 pm the place was packed, \approx 20 customers and three staff members behind the bar. We arrived early so we managed to secure a place at the end of the place with stools, which happens to be the part of the bar with the “kitchen” (just a griddle).
Working at that griddle there was a waiter. And what fascinated me was that she was able to not only run the griddle, but also take care of the orders of we customers sitting on that segment of the bar. As if her time was magically orcherstrated by an invisible process manager, she would spend some time moving the seafood when needed, then turning to check on customers to see if another “botellín” (a small 20cl beer glass bottle, IMHO the best beer serving size since it never gets warm) was required, taking new orders and moving to the POS to register them, back to the griddle, etc. I’m sure you all know this kind of people, you don’t notice them at all and that’s what make them superb at their job.
I was marveled at how good she was at her craft. And then I had that moment.
I currently work as a frontend dev at a company that runs a video AI SaaS; our typical customer is a TV channel that uploads content and our site generates a transcription, subtitles, translations, highlights, short reels for social media, etc.
Yesterday I was working on an issue to allow users to upload an image overlay (which tipically is the channel logo) and position / resize it for all our available aspect ratios (9:16, 3:4, 4:5, 1:1, 4:3, 16:9). It would then automatically generate a PNG for each ratio and upload it as a new overlay.
My backend pals are quite busy at the moment, and they had already done what management required from them: API CRUD endpoints for overlay images. Nothing more and nothing else.
So, without any proper way of creating what we would call “overlay collections”, I realized that when creating these overlays they all had the same name structure, something like Summer logo - 9:16, Summer logo - 3:4, Summer logo - 16:9, etc.
And I used that to detect this pattern in the overlay names and, in the branding form where users can select overlays for each aspect ratio, create a “X overlay collections detected” button that allows users to click on one “collection” and automagically fill all aspect ratio overlay combos with the proper overlay.
Now ok, this may not seem a big deal, but I think it is a great way to improve user experience without backend support (which of course I have requested, but may take a long time). Just by analyzing data on the frontend side.
And I felt as if that was the right thing to do at that moment for that feature. And I felt a bit like that waiter.
I felt a bit proud.