Details Matter
I have been thinking about small details lately.
Not the kind people add just to make something look polished. I mean the tiny things we do again and again without really noticing them.
One extra click. One awkward shortcut. One small movement that feels slightly wrong.
Each one looks unimportant. But after doing it a hundred times, it does not feel so small anymore.
Kobe and Detail
Kobe Bryant had a series on ESPN called Detail.
He would watch game film and slow everything down. A step before a shot. The timing of a pass. Where someone stood. Where they looked.
I really liked watching him talk about basketball that way.
Most of us would just see the shot go in or miss. He saw all the small things that happened before the shot. Sometimes it almost felt like he was being paranoid about them.
Maybe that is part of being great at something. You keep noticing the things that other people stop seeing.
The cycling story I half remembered
I also remembered a story about a British cycling team. In my head, their coach asked them to improve by 0.001% every day.
That was not quite right.
The team was British Cycling, and the person was Dave Brailsford. He called the idea the aggregation of marginal gains. The basic thought was to look at everything that goes into riding a bike, improve each part by 1%, then let those small gains add up.
Some of it was training. Some of it was equipment, recovery, food and the way the team worked.
The story is often told as if this one idea changed everything. Real life was messier. The team also had great riders, coaches, sports science and a lot of Lottery funding.
Still, I like the thought behind it. Not every improvement has to be a breakthrough. Sometimes there are just lots of small things that could be a little better.
Why I like Vim
Vim is another small example for me.
It is full of shortcuts, key combinations and macros. I can press . to repeat my last change. I can record a group of actions and play them again.
Saving one keystroke sounds almost silly. It probably saves less than a second.
But I write and edit text all day. That tiny shortcut may happen hundreds of times. Eventually I stop thinking about the editor and just do what I wanted to do.
That is the part I like. One shortcut does not change much. Lots of good shortcuts change how the whole thing feels.
The same thing in software
LLMs make it much faster to build an app now. I like that. I use them all the time.
But making an app quickly is not the same as making something I want to keep using.
The first version may work, but then I start noticing things:
- Why do I have to click this again?
- Why did it forget the choice I just made?
- Why is the common action hidden over there?
- Why does this simple job need four steps?
None of these problems looks very exciting. Fixing them may not make a good screenshot or a big release note.
But they are often the difference between an app I try once and an app I keep on my computer.
The apps I made for myself
This is how eaShot started.
I often want a screenshot of one part of my screen, usually one half. I do not want to capture the whole screen and crop it every time. I just want the part I need, quickly.
It is a small problem, but it kept happening. So I made a small app for it.
eaSplit came from the same place. I often want a few apps arranged in the same layout. Moving the windows by hand is easy, but I do not want to keep doing it.
These are not big, world-changing ideas. That is fine with me.
They each try to remove one small interruption:
- capture the part of the screen I actually need
- put my windows where I actually want them
- remember enough so I do not have to do the setup again
I also want to be the first real user of the apps I make. Not because every other person works the way I do. I just want to know how the app feels when I use it for real.
If it annoys me, I know. If it saves me time, I know that too.
And if I would not keep it on my own computer, it is hard to ask someone else to give it a chance.
That is really it
When I say details matter, I do not mean everything has to be perfect.
I just mean the small things are often the real reason I like using something.
A tiny app does not need to solve a huge problem. If it removes one repeated annoyance, saves a little time and feels natural to use, that can already be a good app.
That is what I am trying to build.