Dave Rupert
Builds web components at Microsoft, after years running the Austin web shop Paravel and co-founding the startup Luro.
“What if Notion had a fonts dropdown like Microsoft Word? I think they'd be half as successful as a company. I really do.”
Shop Talk Show · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · August 2026
Rupert and Chris Coyier were talking about screen recording tools and the danger of shipping too many features to walk back. Rupert's example is Notion, whose refusal to let users pick fonts or arbitrary colours he reads as guardrails rather than a limitation. His follow-on line is that people have bad taste in documents.
Transcript
…when you edit in screen flow, it pretends like it's a timeline view, but there is not, you can't like drag other stuff in there and whatever. It's still pretty limited. But sometimes an app like this has to be really, they have to choose really, I don't know, be careful about the features. Yeah,
you have to, you have to be careful, right? Like you just can't do, yeah, if you do too much, you just get way in over your head. And then, yeah, and then you can't walk back features. I mean, I think
of little things like, what if this is such a, it's been stuck in my head forever. What if Notion had a fonts dropdown like Microsoft Word? I think they'd be half as successful as a company. I really do. Or if they had just a color pattern. Picker for documents instead of just like the seven colors they support or whatever. They've always been really strict about this is what a document looks like in Notion, and it's pretty freaking limited. And I think that helps them tremendously. It's like the stuff that they don't allow you to do is guardrails that is really helpful. You know, like maybe that's overstated to some degree, but man, people have bad taste in documents and they would make a bunch of terrible documents and people would know that they are terrible and nobody would use it.
Yeah, yeah. It's what I feel like there's something, you know, it's like you're not defined by what you do. You're like defined by what you say no to, right? It's like the stuff you say no to. I thought
Jim Nielsen was calling out people because you called it out in a blog post and then he linked to your blog post and said more people should blog about that. Talk about the stuff that you didn't ship.
Yeah, just talk. I would love to have like a, I wish there, I wish you could more, you know, there's client stuff and secret stuff, but man, like,
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