The Backlog
What Dark Mode and pink blankets have in common.
Ike and I have worked together for about 18 months. Lucas has been with us for most of that. Both are stellar developers, and we have a working relationship that allows us to give each other a hard time. One recurring bit is Lucas’s insistence on Light Mode. Inevitably he’ll start sharing his screen, my laptop lights up like a supernova, and by the time my eyes adjust, Ike has already dropped a GIF of Plankton’s singed pupils in the chat.
Last week I was preparing for an architecture review with Lucas and Ike when I noticed our diagramming tool, Lucid, was in Light Mode. Knowing I’d catch grief from Ike, I went to settings to switch it to Dark Mode. I couldn’t find it. So I Googled it.
It is the year of our Lord 2026, and Lucid still doesn’t have Dark Mode. Apparently I’ve tried to solve this before. Apparently they acknowledged the gap years ago.
I came unhinged. The first draft of this post was just that screenshot, rage-published. It felt absurd that something so simple could sit unresolved for years.
Around the same time, my ten-year-old was hand-knitting a blanket with pink and white stripes. Her goal was to finish one stripe per night. We had a busy week, and she fell behind. She brought it up on Friday night, and I told her that’s just like being a grownup: sometimes you don’t do things you really like because you’re busy doing other things you really like. It’s not a bad thing; it’s just life.
About that time, I started feeling sympathy for Lucid’s development team.
Lucid is a genuinely good product. Their team has clearly been working on good things, things that kept getting prioritized over Dark Mode. That’s a backlog. And if you are living a busy life doing things you really like, then you are practicing Agile, whether you call it that or not. Dark Mode is sitting somewhere on Lucid’s backlog the same way the blanket was sitting on my daughter’s backlog.
It also made me think about my own backlog. The improvements I’ve acknowledged to users and still haven’t shipped. I know what it feels like to want a seemingly simple fix that would meaningfully improve my day and to keep not seeing it.
This realization has helped me make my peace with Lucid’s (and only Lucid’s!) Light Mode. It’s a standing reminder that somewhere in my users’ days, there’s a workflow that lights up like a supernova. I’m doing what I think is right for the product as a whole, but I know I’m leaving some people unhinged in the process.
The good news is I have some of my daughter’s DNA. After falling behind all week, she hunkered down Saturday morning and finished her blanket.
She can work her way out of a hole! So can I.