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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.

...'buy experiences, not things' is less a bold new philosophy than a mere rationalization of life choices that people have already been forced to adopt.

The best part of free software is it sometimes produces stuff you never would have been willing to pay to develop (Linux)...The worst part of free software is you get what you get, and the developers don't have to listen to you.

For decades, popular imaginings of the future have promised difference, but delivered more of the same: not only by recycling technical functions (the self-driving car, the robot housemaid) but, more perniciously, their underlying social relations.

I hate the expression “best practice”, it’s so, so often used by someone to justify the application of cargo cult without actually understanding why.

I realized a new process will not be sufficient. We got Scrum and ended up with Scrumfall. It is not the process that brings waterfall, but drivers beyond the process that forge our environment. How does that work?

We persuade our minds that liking pictures and joining virtual groups gives us a sense of belonging...In reality, we hire social media to distract our minds from our unpleasant, average life. And, by faking photos, to convince others, including ourselves, that our life is amazing while internally we are in pain.

Before my life after quitting social media, there was a chapter in my life where, I, too, thought that every meal and outfit had to be posed, captured, and tagged.

Actually writing about the topic you’re supposed to be writing about is strictly optional.

You see, relational databases aren’t dinosaurs. They aren’t lumbering prehistoric relics doomed to extinction by a changing world. They are sharks. Apex predators honed by millions of years of evolution into a perfectly adapted creature that is just as effective today as it was eons ago. There is a reason they are still around, and their supremacy in their domain hasn’t been questioned.

I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success. There aren’t many, really, but this secret — being willing to do something so terrifically tedious that it appears to be magic — works in tech too.

...there’s much more to deliberate practice than 10,000 hours. Read this to learn how to accelerate your learning, overcome the “OK” plateau, turn experience into expertise, and enhance your focus.

the biggest difference between an occasional contributor and a core developer lies in the knowledge about the physical architecture of the project. Roughly, it takes 2x more time to write a patch if you are unfamiliar with the project, but it takes 10x more time to figure out where you should change the code.

Cryptography can be a hard subject to understand. It’s full of mathematical proofs. But unless you are actually developing cryptographic systems, much of that complexity is not necessary to understand what is going on at a high level.

Say, the first generation works on thing X. After X is done and becomes popular, time passes and the next generation of programmers comes and works on Y, based on X. They do not need to know, exactly, how X is built, why it was built that way, or how to write an alternative X from scratch.

On a spectrum from Homer Simpson to Albert Einstein, how much of a genius-level move was it really for Carmack to add binary space partitioning to Doom?

Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest...It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction.