If you've studied design at all, you've probably encountered Lorem Ipsum placeholder text at some point. Anywhere there is text, but the meaning of that text isn't particularly important, you might see Lorem Ipsum.

Most people recognize it as Latin. And it is. But it is arbitrarily rearranged and not quite coherent Latin, extracted from a book Cicero wrote in 45 BC. Here's the complete quote, with the bits and pieces that make up Lorem Ipsum highlighted.

Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci[ng] velit, sed quia non numquam [do] eius modi tempora inci[di]dunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur?

At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga.

But what does it all mean? Here's an English translation with the same parts highlighted.

Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.

Of course the whole point of Lorem Ipsum is that the words aren't supposed to mean anything, so attempting to divine its meaning is somewhat … unsatisfying, perhaps by design. Lorem Ipsum is a specific form of what is generally referred to somewhat cheekily as "Greeking":

Greeking is a style of displaying or rendering text or symbols, not always from the Greek alphabet. Greeking obscures portions of a work for the purpose of either emphasizing form over details or displaying placeholders for unavailable content. The name is a reference to the phrase "Greek to me", meaning something that one cannot understand, so that it might as well be in a foreign language.

So when you need filler or placeholder text, you naturally reach for Lorem Ipsum as the standard. The theory is that, since it's unintelligible, nobody will attempt to read it, but instead focus on other aspects of the design. If you put readable text in the design, people might think the text is important to the design, that the text represents the sort of content you expect to see, or that the text somehow itself needs to be copyedited and updated and critiqued.

(Regular readers of this blog may remember that I am fond of using Alice in Wonderland in this manner, when I need a bit of text to demonstrate something in a post.)

However, not everyone agrees that relying on a standard boilerplate greeked placeholder text is appropriate, even going so far as to call for the death of Lorem Ipsum. I think it depends what you're trying to accomplish. I once noted that it's better to use real content to avoid Blank Page Syndrome, for example.

There are quite a few websites that helpfully offer up the classic Lorem Ipsum text in various eminently copy-and-pastable forms.

Classic Lorem Ipsum

• The original site
• With bold, tags, lists, quotes, code blocks, etc
• With many HTML structure variants on a single page
• With choice of paras, words, sentences
• With download and gibberish options
• With non-repeating text and diacriticals/punctuation added
• With short/long paras and lists
• With English, tags, headings, bold and italic
• WordPress standard content oriented

Beyond that, if you just want a bunch of, uh, interesting text to fill an area, there a lot – and I mean a lot – of websites to choose from. So many in fact that I was a little overwhelmed trying to index them all. I've tried to broadly categorize the ones I did find, below. If you know of more, feel free to leave a comment and I'll update the list.

This is a lot to go through. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd say Fillerati because it's all dignified and stuff. But I think truer to the spirit of Lorem Ipsum are definitely the homophonic transformations, which consistently blow my mind every time I attempt to read them. Isn't that the implied goal of any properly greeked text? You were one deliciously perverse professor of romance languages, Howard L. Chace.

In today's Pinteresting world, images are arguably more important than text. But what is the Lorem Ipsum of images? Is there even one? I guess you could just slap some Lorem Ipsum text in an image, but where is the fun in that? Anyway, there are also plenty of websites offering up placeholder images of various types to go along with your Lorum Ipsum placeholder text.

Images

• Creative Commons images
• Flickr
• Kittens
• Dogs
• Bears
• Plain blocks of specific sizes, colors, text
• More plain blocks of specific sizes, colors, text
• Gray boxes
• More gray boxes
• Gray boxes on App Engine
• Local JavaScript generated gray boxes

I'm not sure the world needs any more Lorem Ipsum-alikes than we already have at this point. Like the market for ironic t-shirts, the Internet has ensured that our placeholder greeked text needs have not merely been met but vastly exceeded for the forseeable future. But after discovering all the creative things people have done with Lorem Ipsum, and text placeholders in general, it's sure tempting to dream yet another one up, isn't it?

The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012.

A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript code to do his job, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with politics in the state of New York. Even if Mr. Bloomberg did "learn to code", with apologies to Adam Vandenberg, I expect we'd end up with this:

10 PRINT "I AM MAYOR"20 GOTO 10

Fortunately, the odds of this technological flight of fancy happening – even in jest – are zero, and for good reason: the mayor of New York City will hopefully spend his time doing the job taxpayers paid him to do instead. According to the Office of the Mayor home page, that means working on absenteeism programs for schools, public transit improvements, the 2013 city budget, and … do I really need to go on?

To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic: can you explain to me how Michael Bloomberg would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the USA if he woke up one morning as a crack Java coder? It is obvious to me how being a skilled reader, a skilled writer, and at least high school level math are fundamental to performing the job of a politician. Or at any job, for that matter. But understanding variables and functions, pointers and recursion? I can't see it.

Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing. That'd be ridiculous, right?

The "everyone should learn to code" movement isn't just wrong because it falsely equates coding with essential life skills like reading, writing, and math. I wish. It is wrong in so many other ways.

• It assumes that more code in the world is an inherently desirable thing. In my thirty year career as a programmer, I have found this … not to be the case. Should you learn to write code? No, I can't get behind that. You should be learning to write as little code as possible. Ideally none.
  
  
• It assumes that coding is the goal. Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it's not. Their job is to solve problems. Don't celebrate the creation of code, celebrate the creation of solutions. We have way too many coders addicted to doing just one more line of code already.
  
  
• It puts the method before the problem. Before you go rushing out to learn to code, figure out what your problem actually is. Do you even have a problem? Can you explain it to others in a way they can understand? Have you researched the problem, and its possible solutions, deeply? Does coding solve that problem? Are you sure?
  
  
• It assumes that adding naive, novice, not-even-sure-they-like-this-whole-programming-thing coders to the workforce is a net positive for the world. I guess that's true if you consider that one bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. And for that matter, most people who already call themselves programmers can't even code, so please pardon my skepticism of the sentiment that "everyone can learn to code".
  
  
• It implies that there's a thin, easily permeable membrane between learning to program and getting paid to program professionally. Just look at these new programmers who got offered jobs at an average salary of $79k/year after attending a mere two and a half month bootcamp! Maybe you too can teach yourself Perl in 24 hours! While I love that programming is an egalitarian field where degrees and certifications are irrelevant in the face of experience, you still gotta put in your ten thousand hours like the rest of us.

I suppose I can support learning a tiny bit about programming just so you can recognize what code is, and when code might be an appropriate way to approach a problem you have. But I can also recognize plumbing problems when I see them without any particular training in the area. The general populace (and its political leadership) could probably benefit most of all from a basic understanding of how computers, and the Internet, work. Being able to get around on the Internet is becoming a basic life skill, and we should be worried about fixing that first and most of all, before we start jumping all the way into code.

Please don't advocate learning to code just for the sake of learning how to code. Or worse, because of the fat paychecks. Instead, I humbly suggest that we spend our time learning how to …

• Research voraciously, and understand how the things around us work at a basic level.
• Communicate effectively with other human beings.

These are skills that extend far beyond mere coding and will help you in every aspect of your life.

Fair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I'm also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don't blame you. I don't often talk about cats, but when I do, I make it count.

We've used automated cat feeders since 2007 with great success. (My apologies for the picture quality, but it was 2007, and camera phones were awful.)

I do not miss the days when the cats would come and sit on our heads at 5 AM, wanting their breakfast.

Me neither. I haven't stopped loving our fuzzy buddies, but this was also before we had onetwothree children. We don't have a lot of time for random cat hijinks these days. Anyway, once we set up the automated feeders in 2007, it was a huge relief to outsource pet food obsessions to machines. They reliably delivered a timed feeding at 8am and 8pm like clockwork for the last five years. No issues whatsoever, other than changing the three D batteries about once a year, filling the hopper with kibble about once a month, and an occasional cleaning.

Although they worked, there were still many details of the automated feeders' design that were downright terrible. I put up with these problems because I was so happy to have automatic feeders that worked at all. So when I noticed that the 2012 version of these feeders appeared to be considerably updated, I went ahead and upgraded immediately on faith alone. After all, it had been nearly five years! Surely the company had improved their product a bit since then … right? Well, a man can dream, can't he?

When I ordered the new feeders, I assumed they would be a little better than what I had before.

The two feeders don't look so radically different, do they? But pay attention to the details.

• The food bowl is removable. It drove me crazy that the food bowl in the old version was permanently attached, and tough to clean as a result.
• The food bowl has rounded interior edges. As if cleaning the non-removable bowl of our old version wasn't annoying enough, it also had sharp interior edges, which tended to accrete a bunch of powdered food gunk in there over time. Very difficult to clean properly.
• The programming buttons are large and easy to press. In the old version, the buttons were small watch-style soft rubber buttons that protruded from the surface. The tactile feedback was terrible, and they were easy to mis-press because of their size and mushiness.
• The programming buttons are directly accessible on the face of the device. For no discernable reason whatsoever, the programming buttons in the old version were under a little plastic clear protective "sneeze guard" flap, which you had to pinch up and unlock with your thumb before you could do any programming at all. I guess the theory was that a pet could somehow accidentally brush against the buttons and do … something … but that seems incredibly unlikely. But most of all, unnecessary.
• The programming is easier. We never changed the actual feed schedule, but just changing the time for daylight savings was so incredibly awkward and contorted we had to summarize the steps from the manual on a separate piece of paper as a "cheat sheet". The new version, in contrast, makes changing the time almost as simple as it should be. Almost.
• There is an outflow cover flap. By far the number one physical flaw of the old feeder: the feed slot invites curious paws, and makes it all too easy to fish out kibble on demand. You can see in my original photo that we had to mod the feed slot to tape (and eventually bolt) a wire soap dish cover over it so the cats wouldn't be able to manual feed. The new feeder has a perfectly aligned outflow flap that I couldn't even dislodge with my finger. And it works; even our curious-est cat wasn't able to get past it.
• The top cover rotates to lock. On the old feeder, the top cover to the clear kibble storage was a simple friction fit; dislodging it wasn't difficult, and the cats did manage to do this early on with some experimentation. On the new feeder, the cover is slotted, and rotates to lock against the kibble storage securely. This is the same way the kibble feeder body locks on the base (on both old and new feeders), so it's logical to use this same "rotate to lock into or out of position" design in both places.
• The feed hopper is funnel shaped. The old feed hopper was a simple cylinder, and holds less in the same space as a result. When I transferred the feed over from the old full models (we had literally just filled them the day before) to the updated ones, I was able to add about 15-20 percent more kibble despite the device being roughly the same size in terms of floor space.
• The base is flared. Stability is critical; depending how adventurous your cats are, they may physically attack the feeders and try to push them over, or hit them hard enough to trigger a trickle of food dispensing. A flared base isn't the final solution, but it's a big step in the right direction. It's a heck of a lot tougher to knock over a feeder with a bigger "foot" on the ground.
• It's off-white. The old feeder, like the Ford Model T, was available in any color customers wanted, so long as it was black. Which meant it did a great job of not blending in with almost any decor, and also showed off its dust collection like a champ. Thank goodness the new model comes in "linen".

These are, to be sure, a bunch of dumb, nitpicky details. Did the old version feed our cats reliably? Yes, it did. But it was also a pain to clean and maintain, a sort of pain that I endured weekly, for reasons that made no sense to me other than arbitrarily poor design choices. But when I bought the new version of the automated feeder, I was shocked to discover that nearly every single problem I had with the previous generation was addressed. I felt as if the Petmate Corporation™ was actually listening to all the feedback from the people who used their product, and actively refined the product to address our complaints and suggestions.

My point, and I do have one, is that details matter. Details matter, in fact, a hell of a lot. Whether in automatic cat feeders, or software. As my friend Wil Shipley once said:

This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.

This is still one of my favorite quotes about software. It's something we internalized heavily when building Stack Overflow. Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate.

Your software, your product, is nothing more than a collection of tiny details. If you don't obsess over all those details, if you think it's OK to concentrate on the "important" parts and continue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny little ways your product annoys the people who use it on a daily basis – you're not creating great software. Someone else is. I hope for your sake they aren't your competitor.

The details are hard. Everyone screws up the details at first, just like Petmate did with the first version of this automatic feeder. And it's OK to screw up the details initially, provided …

• you're getting the primary function more or less right.
• you're listening to feedback from the people who use your product, and actively refining the details of your product based on their feedback every day.

We were maniacal about listening to feedback from avid Stack Overflow users from the earliest days of Stack Overflow in August 2008. Did you know that we didn't even have comments in the first version of Stack Overflow? But it was obvious, based on user feedback and observed usage, that we desperately needed them. There are now, at the time I am writing this, 1,569 completed feature requests; that's more than one per day on average.

Imagine that. Someone who cares about the details just as much as you do.