We lost 54k GitHub stars
I really like this post.<p>While the author clearly feels bad about the fact that they've lost his community and that GitHub didn't restore it (which is honestly what any of us would've felt under similar circumstances), they're also focusing towards the future and using their personal experience as a parable all of us can learn from.<p>Lesson 1 on UI design I think is really important. I often think scary popup boxes are enough to get people to think about what they're doing, but this example clearly demonstrates that what's important is to use design not to scare (alone?), but to convey the information which makes a dangerous action dangerous as well. I also really like the fact that when the action isn't dangerous, the distractions ("Type this repo's name", etc) just go away. It's super intuitive, and (for a newbie designer like me) really helps build an intuition for various design principles put in action.<p>Lesson 2, which was to use soft deletes, is something I have more thoughts about. I assume that the cascading done on GitHub would be done on a FK constraint, but I'm not really sure how you'd do a "cascading soft delete" without making some kind of manual cascading logic? If anyone's aware of a standard way to accomplish this, please do let me know. Of course, the best way may just be to simplify the model so they aren't needed at all haha.<p>As designers and developers we've been given a chance to sharpen our toolkit. Thanks, HTTPie! You've gained a new star :)<p>Edit: Changed <i>GitHub couldn't restore</i> to <i>GitHub didn't restore</i>, as pointed out by @ncmncm (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033758#31034195" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033758#31034195</a>)