Bookmarks

There’s an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web...Then there’s the tech-savvy web.

We humans have little short term memory, and tend to forget things over time. Our screens offers only a small window, and even the smartest IDE can’t give us instant access to everything. It’s easier for us to act upon code that we’ve just read. It’s even easier to act upon code we can see right there on the screen.

The next time you start on a major project, I want you to write code for a couple of days and then delete it all. Just throw it away...And you should probably have some of your best engineers doing this throwaway work. It's going to save you time in the long run.

What I’d really like to share with you more than anything else is my sense of wonder at the storage systems that are all collectively being built at this point in time, because they are pretty amazing. In this post, I want to cover a few of the interesting nuances of building something like S3, and the lessons learned and sometimes surprising observations from my time in S3.

...any time someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse for their abilities. And that means misleading a bunch of people into (potentially) wasting their time, or worse.

My first hype exposure was 'use the Extensible Markup Language for everything'. Learning from it allowed me to live through the front end stack explosion, the micro-service overdose and many, many more silly trends.

Same with programming and software engineering: I really, really don’t like greenfield projects. There are too many options. Too many tools to chose and decisions to be made. All of the code has to be written, including the boilerplate and the boring stuff.

Some hurdles are impossible to overcome, sure: I will never play in the NBA. But more often we fail to realize that a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept.

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

One of the most powerful ideas I’ve been thinking about recently is this: Bringing your ideal future into the now. That is, dedicating time to the lifestyle you will be living, but performing the same actions on a smaller timescale.

I just laugh because everything is technical debt, eventually. My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated.

Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business truly is, focusing on one metric — one truly noxious metric — over all else: growth.

...this means is that there is no 'one true way' to deal with state, and that each programming philosophy is useful and important in the correct domain. It also shows how important minimizing state is.

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

We need purpose, whether it’s the Silicon Valley notion of “changing the world” or to be a great-grand-parent. To be useful, to be needed, even to be wanted, one person to another, is already a higher purpose.

I'm so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference.

Velocity as a single number only makes sense in 1-dimensional space. And software is a many-dimensional problem. It has possibilities we haven’t thought of yet.

I will try to motivate how we came to defining the WebAssembly standard and VM, and how they are all about providing a multi-platform, portable low-level compilation target for multiple programming languages.

The IKEA effect describes how people come to overvalue things in which they have successfully put effort into. This cognitive bias can pose risks to organisations in the form of sunk cost effects and “not invented here” syndrome.

To counteract the to-do flood is to discern it is happening. When I realize how many tasks I have and how scattered they will be throughout the day I get motivated. There is this tiny bit of anger arising. I am better at prioritizing, clearing my schedule and avoiding the less important.

I’m a big fan of 'advice posts' and productivity guides. A small, but meaningful, upgrade to your daily routine is worth a lot in the long run. So here’s my contribution to the genre.

The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable. —Seneca

What is ignorant about not wanting to consume useless information, but rather consuming science, history, literature, and long-form writing, or even pursuing other hobbies and interests? Who is more ignorant of the world: a social media news junkie, or someone that spends their time studying history or particle physics?

The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to inviting and copying people into things that add no value to them, or you... The involvement of more people doesn’t automatically mean more diversity of thought, or guarantee any productivity gains.

We live in a golden age of software reuse. We’ve never before had such a wealth of freely available code, in so many languages, so easy to find and install. And yet, we’re drowning.

Values should cost something. They’re a trade-off. What are you giving up for your value? What’s your anti-value?

If you think about it, who better to be completely honest with about what you want from your career? Who else has real and direct insight into how much money any given role pays? … and what better time to enter a negotiation than when you perfectly happy to walk away if you don’t get what you want?

I remember thinking in the early 1990's that the Internet was a fabulous invention, but websites were hard to find and small with not much content of general interest. My expectation was that corporations moving onto the Internet would improve it by adding much more interesting content. At that point, I was too naive to see the downside of corporate involvement.

...you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.

If you know that you are not going to change your mind then stop wasting everyone’s time. The best thing to do is to just say no thank you.