Sloan's Inbox: Should You Trust Developers Who Use Light Mode? 😝

Hey y'all! Sloan, DEV Moderator and mascot. I'm back with another question submitted by a DEV community member. 🦥

For those unfamiliar with the series, this is another installment of Sloan's Inbox. You all send in your questions, I ask them on your behalf anonymously, and the community leaves comments to offer advice. Whether it's career development, office politics, industry trends, or improving technical skills, we cover all sorts of topics here. If you want to send in a question or talking point to be shared anonymously via Sloan, that'd be great; just scroll down to the bottom of the post for details on how.

Let's see what's up this week...

Today's question is:

Would you trust a developer who uses light mode? Yes, this is purposefully a cheeky question 😋, but my real point is are there any surface-level quirks that you might judge a dev on (even if you're aware that it's a bit petty)?

Share your thoughts and let's help a fellow DEV member out! Remember to keep kind and stay classy. 💚

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Want to submit a question for discussion or ask for advice? Visit Sloan's Inbox! You can choose to remain anonymous.

Comments

[Tyler V. (he/him)]

I don't trust dark theme users - bugs hide in the dark 🐛

[sahra 💫]

But the light attract the bugs in the first place 🙂

[Michael Tharrington]

Haha, that was too good!

[Per Starke]

Damnnnnnnn :DD

[Shrijal Acharya]

Good one 😂

[Jake T. (Vampeyer )]

THIS WEBSITE USES DARK THEME , omg talk about hypocritical.

[Samuel Rouse]

As a user who switches back and forth between the modes for accessibility concerns, the number of tools that don't accommodate both appearance is far too high. And some don't do a great job either way – I'm looking at you, Redux DevTools, with your default color scheme that provides worse contrast ratios than a 1997 LCD laptop display.

One of the quirks that does catch me is leaving a large number of breakpoints in your browser. It's something small, but it slows down troubleshooting if you leave them active – both because you might end up clicking through them and because code runs slower when it has breakpoints active – and it clutters the breakpoint list and obscures what is actually being tested even when they are disabled. It's minor, but it's something I notice.

[Ben Sinclair]

This bugs me - the fact there's no way to clear all breakpoints in Chrome. You can turn breakpoints on and off individually or globally, but you can't hit a button to clear them all and start over.

[Samuel Rouse]

There isn't a button, but you can right-click one of the breakpoints in the list and choose to Disable all, Remove other, or Remove all breakpoints. I believe this only works for line-of-code breakpoints, not the other types.

[Ben Sinclair]

This isn't the case in my Chrome:

[Samuel Rouse]

Sorry, I should have been more clear. It's in the sidebar, not directly in the Source.

[Jake T. (Vampeyer )]

I just use bootstrap 5.3 , css and js , and use a bg-dark theme for each element.
Then you could make a button out of that selector if you choose too.
-- Don't let a browser slow you down, from developing on the browser. --

[Andrew Bone]

[Oscar]

I would say that there's always time for light mode users to come to the light side -- the light side being dark mode, of course.

[Jake T. (Vampeyer )]

facts

[Mosope (Deborah) Oduwole]

Hell no, same way I can't trust people who watch dubbed anime. Just weird behaviour.

[Michael Tharrington]

Lol, comment of the day right here!

[sahra 💫]

Always feels like I'm watching an abomination 😭. It turns the anime into basic cartoons which is so annoying. It's sub or nothing 💯

[Fyodor]

Don’t trust anyone. They’re all posers — either dark or light... Nobody should see your mode. This is the way.

[Jake T. (Vampeyer )]

facts

[Mike Talbot ⭐]

No.

[Brad Smith]

I’m 62. I use light mode.
Deal with it.

[grant horwood]

follow earned.

[Henry Williams]

You should. It makes perfect sense to use light mode since most of the websites and apps still don't have native dark mode support and light-to-dark-mode browser extensions aren't perfect.
The change between a dark page and a light page is very jarring... from what I hear. I'm not a light mode user (or am I?)

[Maximilian Lenhardt]

Funny enough, we had this discussion jokingly a couple of weeks ago because all devs in our team work with dark mode and I converted everyone to the dark reader browser plugin which does a pretty good job on most websites :)

What bugs me as a behavior:

• writing a todo/fixme in the code which could easily just be done in a couple of minutes. Just do it right away.
• not automating stuff which is repeated tons of times - e.g. if I write a todo in my code, I append the according story number. I wrote an ide script to do this story number adding automatically. I actually doubt developers who don't feel the need to automate this small stuff because it keeps your head free for your actual work. And you miss the expertise and the confidencd if you have to automatise something complicated/big. Not learning a new shortcut for your IDE every other day would be another example.

[Jake T. (Vampeyer )]

For a IDE in html , you can jsut add bootstrap CSS and JS at the top , and set a background theme to dark on the html class.
Try it and see how it works for you - getbootstrap.com/docs/5.3/customiz...