33 karma · joined May 16, 2023
More generally, it's one of the interesting things working in a non-big-tech company with non-public-facing software. So much of the received wisdom and culture in our field comes from places with incredible engineering talent but working at totally different scales with different constraints and requirements. Some of time the practices, tools, approaches advocated by big tech apply generally, and sometimes they do things a particular way because it's the least bad option given their constraints (which are not the same as our constraints).
There are good reasons why Amazon doesn't return a 10,000 row table when you search for a mobile phone case, but for [data ]scientists|analysts etc many of those reasons no longer apply, and the best UX might just be the massive table/grid of data.
Not sure what the answer is, other than keep talking to your users and watching them using your tools :)
I'm a fairly average pianist, but sight reading is a (relative) strength. Being able to play random notes is definitely part of it, but I think for me sight-reading is more about getting a sense of the gist of the music (a lot of pattern matching of common phrases, cadences, hand positions etc) - this is kind of subconcious, then my focus is on keeping my internal version aligned with what's on the page (spotting where the written music is doing something different or interesting and making sure you hit those notes). The latter part would definitley improve by practicing random notes, but the first bit is more akin to improvisation - you've got some lossy, distilled version of the music in your head (from memory or from your first mental parse of the full manuscript) and you're trying to recreate it (or expound on it).
I think what really helped my reading was having lots of cheap/free sheet music on hand and just trying to play it (simplifying massively if needed, but trying to get the sense of it, even if only playing 20% of the notes)
To be clear I'm just talking about the web interface, not implying the whole project is throwaway - on the contrary it looks like a lot of work (and a lot of fun :) ) kudos!
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pcorbett/yvfc.html
The author was a labmate, and the person who introduced me to python. Taking over one of his codebases was rather a formative part of my career. (That particular code was considerably more normal than the one linked above).
If that is the reason, it'll provide an (even more than usually) poor experience for those behind such a proxy