Shiny Black Boxism

My project partner in college, Karl, had this really clever approach to project management called Shiny Black Boxism. We used this method for a few projects in final year, and we got excellent marks even though we didn't include as much functionality in our code as other groups.

Shiny Black Boxism is a strategy where you make your projects seem as polished and well finished as possible, like a black box, with no leaky abstractions. Providing that the outward facing parts of your work stand out in some sort of positive way, then the implementation doesn't actually matter that much. Figure out where these outward facing parts are and focus your efforts on them accordingly.

Examples of outward facing parts

• For college projects the marking rubric defines exactly what gets paid attention to, everything else is an aside.
• Your B2C startup's payment gateway is more important than the language your backend runs
• Giving your personal project a good story and some documentation elevates above thousands of others that are just collecting dust on GitHub.

Standing out

Swyx touches on something similar in his book when he talks about "Sparking Joy" - go the extra mile when you know someone is going to have to read or review your work, or even just stumble upon it online.

A lot of the time you can pleasantly surprise just by not screwing things up:

• Write the same way you speak, not like a HR office
• Don't make big UX blunders like making users load pages with massive slow images
• Include the steps required to setup and run your code in a README file

But if you can go beyond that...those are the projects that get remembered. Software with genuine style is rare, great documentation is priceless, and a user interface that just works is empowering.

Narrow your focus and try your best to work to a high standard, but if you have to cut a corner, hide it in a shiny box.