Rahul Vohra: commitment

Transcript context

…For any of us that are formally from Outlook land, the key concept that you just mentioned there is merging together. I've been a Superhuman user for years now, I did not realize you're doing that. In an Outlook land, I would search, local search would be relatively fast. And then there would be another button I could click that's continue searching on the server or something like that. I always felt like I am thrusting to this completely different new experience that, okay, cool, I guess while that’s searching now, I'll pop open my phone and do some task on there or switch open another application. I never realized you were doing both concurrently and stitching them together. It does turn out to be this ridiculously hard problem. It's actually a computer science hard problem, how do you merge two infinite lists on the screen without having things like pop-in? What if one email actually only exists in one of those lists, how do you stage them? It gets real gnarly real fast. The other example, David, that you may have been referring to is actually to do a typography and fonts. I'm a big typography nerd. I’ll avoid using too much jargon as I go into this example, but I really wanted everything to line up with the vertical rhythm on the page. This is really hard to do if you're just doing basic web programming. It is in fact impossible—if you have different fonts, you have graphical elements, things of different sizes—to have everything lined up on an eight pixel or a six pixel grid. But we figured out how to do it. We dove into the Chrome source code, reverse-engineered the font layout engine, and then built our own layout framework actually entirely in CSS because we wanted this thing to be super fast as well. Now, whenever we want to lay something out, we have a little tool but in just the font, it spits out all the metrics. This is the height of the ascender, this is the x-height, this is the cap height, this is the length of the descender. You really are a typography nerd.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.