Blogs

Last week I was talking about how it’s easy to conflate debt and regret when it comes to technical decisions. Technical debt is the set of simple, shorter paths in software development that you follow intentionally. Regret is more about getting lost and following unsafe paths, often blissfully unaware that you’re lost. Technical debt will feel good in the long run, as it helps you get somewhere faster at a reasonable cost. Regret, on the other hand, feels bad, as you can see the wasted time and effort spent on a path that was clearly followed by mistake. It’s easy to feel unqualified to measure technical decisions, especially if you’re not technical. You may be disconnected from the planning process or you may not understand the jargon and details of an approach. How can you ask intelligent questions about risk when you feel so separated from what’s happening? How can you make clear decisions about risks with incomplete technical knowledge? Luckily, most regrettable technical decisions fail to satisfy even the most basic of principles, and risky debt is all about the poor ratios of cost versus gain. ...

The New Year came and went without much of a fuss. I read about the 2016 Maker Challenge shortly after the holiday, in the flood of annual self-help and 2016 resolution articles. The challenge was something I was keenly interested in, then promptly forgot about in the chaos of startup and family life. The 2016 Super Mega Awesome Maker Challenge If you haven’t heard of it, the Maker Challenge is a quest aimed at pushing Makers to make more. It encourages you to curate a list of your ideas, tracking your progress through the year. Folks serious about the challenge publish their lists too, which keeps them accountable to their goals. ...

I’ve noticed an interesting shift in computing over the last few years. It’s one of those changes that becomes obvious in hindsight, though while in the moment it was confusing and disorientating. It turns out I was blinded by my own path of coming up in the industry. I’m never surprised when a bias gets in the way of seeing something. It’s a constant of human progression and the fundamental reason we science. We’re aware of our limits, and we pursue knowledge from the perspective of disproving ourselves so that we can uncover the truth despite the limits of our ability to observe and think. Science is cool. ...

I’m not old yet, but I’m becoming a curmudgeon. I even love the word curmudgeon, it’s a word that sounds like its meaning, with a spelling that feels all pissy and annoyed. It’s a word of mystery, and we know very little about its origin. It’s an interesting word, and interesting is good. I’m not a writer by trade. I write of course (we all do these days), but I’m not a professional. Despite this, I feel a strong connection to our language, I feel a need to savour words and protect how we use them. I feel uncomfortable when I see writing that wanders into the safe, passive, and bull-shitty mess that I see regularly in marketing and business. It’s a lesser language: it communicates poorly, using more words, and with less inspiration. ...

I have tried to love podcasts for a few years now. There are several that I like, but I find it difficult to listen to any of them consistently. I’ll binge listen for a few weeks, but for whatever reason I get stuck and move on to the next show. There are a few things that podcasts do that frustrates me: Low quality production Shows that go too long or that ramble Shows that take long hiatuses Surplus of opinions and deficits of facts I admit that part of the problem is the way I find, consume, and collect shows. iTunes isn’t great for discovery or browsing. It does well enough at distribution, but the store is still too monochromatic for the social aspects (shut up, Ping). I end up hopping between sites to find shows, to check in on show statuses, and eventually I just don’t remember to do those things. I have lost contact with a few shows due to issues with iTunes or my podcasting apps. ...