I recently spent a little time helping out GitHub’s Andrew Nesbitt with First PR. I think I probably spent less than 10 hours on the project so far, but the response has been very positive.

I commented to my friend that it’s (a little) sad that a project I’ve spent so little time on has become the most talked about thing I’ve done. His response was pretty smart:

“I think the lesson here is how to figure out the Nugget of Awesome and only deal with that.”

First PR was so fun and easy because I spent a lot of time making one very simple interaction simple and enjoyable.

In my day job, I work on a pretty sizable app. It has a lot of moving parts, so I’m often spending a little time on a lot of different things. It’s really easy to forget that large apps are made up of a lot of small pieces, all which have the opportunity to be enjoyable, fun interactions (read: Nuggets).

So as we work on those large apps, we need to remind ourselves that there are a lot of places to craft enjoyable and delightful experiences. And if we’re not taking advantage of those, our users are missing out.