What the hell is taste anyway?
“Taste has become as much of a Silicon Valley cliché as ‘disruption’ was in the twenty-tens.”
Every time I travel to Sofia (Bulgaria’s capital city), I pass by this typical Eastern European house that has a wooden porch, red roof tiles... and a mini Chinese pagoda in its front yard.
Has to be the most tasteless thing I’ve ever seen.
But what the hell is taste anyway?
“Taste has become as much of a Silicon Valley cliché as ‘disruption’ was in the twenty-tens.”
I’m convinced that the Rick Rubin memes are the reason we’re talking about taste so much. Every talk about the future of the software industry mentions it. Once technical ability is less needed, it’s your innate ability to recognize beauty that determines the outcome.
Taste is declining the implementation plan because it’s ill-designed.
Taste is removing the hover state from an element that’s not interactive.
Taste is avoiding the default LLM weights that appear everywhere (like italics in landing page copy).
Taste is knowing what to ask the genie so it doesn’t give you something messed up.
Matching the requirements for first contentful paint does not require taste.
Taste is unguided pattern-matching that teaches our neurons to fire when they see “good” work without explicit explanation as to why.
But how do you develop good taste?
Who decides that some patterns are better than others?
Why can’t you put a pagoda in your yard?
How good your taste is depends on how well it matches the economic, political, and societal environment.
A pagoda in your art is tasteless because it doesn’t match anything our culture is used to doing. There hasn’t been a need to match Eastern European and Chinese architecture before, and we haven’t figured out the best patterns to do this beautifully.
Taste is a recognition of the needs of the current time.
We don’t appreciate the SOLID principles in isolation. We think of extensibility as a sign of good taste because it contributes to maintainability. And maintainable software tends to be more efficient, cheaper to run, and easier to change. We value them because our heads hurt less when we have to modify smaller, focused functions rather than long ones. We value them because we sleep easier when the chance that our changes will cause a bug is smaller.
Taste in UI is not dissimilar.
We appreciate natural-feeling animations because they make an application feel like a physical product. A spring animation feels like pressing a real button on a keyboard with physical resistance and feedback.
Contrast makes for good readability. Symmetry and scale create order.
Taste is the qualities you are continuously exposed to.
Known is easy.
Easy is better.
When we find the patterns that work for our environment, we write and talk about them. We repeat them. This continuous exposure establishes taste (both good and bad).
But it creates a chicken-and-egg problem.
You need taste to recognize good work, but to build taste you need to get exposed to good work in the first place.
Yes, someone with more experience could give you a head start, but think about all these people who saw microservices as the pinnacle of architectural taste and put them to use at pre-PMF startups just because that’s the only way to build software they had seen.
Read code, but not the prototype you generated with Cursor. Look at open source software with high integrity that doesn’t accept drive-by PRs en masse. Look at interfaces that people use every day without hiccups. Not the ones on Dribbble. They’re portfolio material. The software you use every day doesn’t look like this.
You don’t build taste through books and courses, but from real-world examples.