Joy & Curiosity #13

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Rewatched Jaws again this week and, man, what a movie. There are no ten seconds in it that aren’t worth rewinding and analysing. There’s no filler. From start to end it’s all frames that have to be there in the way that only few things have to be.

Made me wonder: a movie like that, that’s a huge project, it’s many people over a long period of time working on a single thing that seems to follow a single person’s vision — what software, besides games, is like this? Software that feels as if it came out of a single person’s fingers and yet it didn’t?

• I’ve read a lot about async Rust this year and this is one of the best introductions to it: Async Rust in Three Parts. Also a good reminder that I still don’t understand Pin. My mind’s teflon and Pin is melted butter — just won’t stick.

• “A talented person can quickly become mediocre when you force them to be someone they aren’t.” Great Morgan Housel piece I came across. This sentence here — “You do your best work and have the most fun when you’re not burdened by fear that someone else thinks you’re doing it wrong” — made me feel naked.

• Time to share a classic: Performance Matters by Emery Berger. I think of this talk every. time. I’m writing a benchmark. Every time.

• Used it last week to debug a production issue and, my god, is it a life-saver. Ever have to do anything with Kubernetes? But not often enough to remember how to use kubectl successfully? In case you don’t know it yet, here’s my present to you: k9s.

• This interview with Wall Street’s Wisest Man is great. Consider just this bit: ”Because he will have a dreadful two or three years. I guarantee it. Every good manager does.” Imagine saying that in the world of software: this programmer will have a dreadful two or three years, that’s how it is. Two or three years! Also: I really liked that there’s "the smartest sons of bitches in the world working their tails off all day long." (A bucket list item of mine is to use “sons of bitches” in a business context.)

• Paul Graham on Writes and Write-Nots: “writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.”

• This Norm Macdonald Twitter Anthology is wonderful. “Smart man says nothing is a miracle. I say everything is.“ I discovered Norm really late, five years ago maybe, and it took me a lot of “work” to get him. And I really wanted to get him, since he was considered the “comedian’s comedian” and if there’s one thing that makes me interested it’s calling something a “something’s something”. Now, years and endless YouTube clips later, rewatching videos of him has become something of a meditative practice.

• Look at the size of this fucking display! wowowow! I’d never use something that big, but in all my years of using 27-inch displays I’ve been constantly wondering whether 32-inch wouldn’t be better. Michael Stapelberg’s posts on his 6K and 8K monitors kept that fire burning.

• Zach Tellman writing in the death of the architect: “And then, three years after the Manifesto, Beck released the second edition of Extreme Programming Explained. It had been rewritten from scratch. There was not a single mention of metaphors or system architecture. Nor, really, any discussion of the future. In this iteration of XP, you simply moved from moment to moment.” and “Decades later, software design has become something of a backwater. Most writing on the subject can only be called ‘post-design.’ It is defined by what it refuses to discuss.” It makes me happy to know there’s someone out there comparing first and second editions of Extreme Programming.

• Jason Fried on high problems and low problems. My prediction: I’ll keep thinking of this definition for years.

• Armin Ronacher saying “Software Should Decay and Lose Data”. Made me think of Trello cards decaying. Armin’s point is a bigger one, but to linger on just the visual decaying idea: what if you open your GitHub issues and you could immediately see (not by parsing a date or a relative timestamp) which ones are old and dusty and haven’t been touched in years? What if you could chuck them out just as easily as you can chuck out an old stack of magazines that you recognize by simply looking at them?

• Pleasant read: Do Hard Things Carefully.

• Antonio did some branchless bit twiddling this week and said he got some ideas from this Bit Twiddling Hacks page, which I didn’t know but feels like I should’ve. What a wonderful page! Man, I do love ctrl-f friendly pages.

• Not sure yet what I think about Dan Luu’s post on Ballmer: Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO. The HackerNews discussion around it was very interesting and made me again think that there just never is a single point of view. I also thought that the Acquired episode on Microsoft made a good point: don’t underestimate that one of Ballmer’s main jobs was to keep the company together after years of antitrust trial.

• “I like when the rain is misty and you get to feel like a grocery store broccoli for a little while.”