Joy & Curiosity #53

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

It’s been three weeks now since I got my new gravel bike. And not only did I learn how to ride it hands-free, but I also learned how amazing padded bike shorts are. I’ve heard “you should get proper bike shorts, padded ones” for years now, but something in me makes me want to ignore shorts-related advice from others. However, just like rubber and the road, my butt and the new saddle met and decided: padding would be nice.

So I’m now here to give you shorts-related advice: get padded bike shorts! Not only do they give you that look that makes you wonder “aren’t these too tight?” every time you stand in front of a mirror, they also make you feel like your wearing diapers. Amazing.

• This is a funny article. Interesting tone, interesting perspective. It’s not what I would’ve written about the topic, but I agree with the idea: you can try to like stuff. It’s very easy to dunk on stuff, to hate, to have “strong opinions”. I found it’s much harder and more rewarding trying to like things.

• We shipped a new Amp CLI. It’s now a full-fledged TUI. It’s “95% written by Amp” (and that’s a whole different, interesting tangent we could go on: Amp is really good at building with the Amp-generated TUI framework) and it can easily run at 120 FPS and… it’s a lot of fun, man. To use, to work on. It’s good stuff. I recorded a little video with thoughts on whether a TUI application is it or whether a desktop application wouldn’t be better — it’s a fascinating question and 6 months ago I wouldn’t have had an answer.

• I have, among many others, two niche reading hobbies: New Yorker articles about expensive art and New Yorker profiles of business people. This week I got really lucky: How a Billionaire Owner Brought Turmoil and Trouble to Sotheby’s.

• You’ve probably already seen this, because 213k likes and it made the rounds on every other network, but it’s worth pointing out again: “sky the time picker on iphones alarm app isn’t actually circular it’s just a really long list” I love this so much. This is proper software engineering to me. I like to think that if I had sat in the meeting in which someone proposed this, I would’ve laughed out loud and then said “you’re a genius, let’s do it!” Of course, what I like to think even more is that there never was a meeting and the genius just shipped it.

• Linear’s Conversations on Quality. I’ve only watched half an episode, the one with Jeff Weinstein, and I’m here to tell you: watch it. What Jeff says about solving problems that are big enough, problems that burn, problems that customers want someone to solve for them so badly that the problems pull, and you don’t have to pitch and push your solution. Man, that’s real stuff. “Polishing things that shouldn’t exist,” he says, and a thousand companies scream in agony.

• First you roll your eyes because it has a cliché-ness to it, but then you go “that’s actually neat” and then you keep watching: Eternal Struggle.

• At work we started talking about assertions, runtime assertions, and someone who hasn’t used them a lot was curious about what the advantages are and why one should use them. Immediately, links were pulled and posted. TigerBeetle’s Tiger Style is a good introduction to the mindset. And matklad’s It Takes Two to Contract expands on it, or puts some more meat around it. Tiger meat, I guess. And this one here, Jim Shore’s Fail Fast, is also a great introduction. And yet the first thing I said about assertions was: “it’s about accepting the Fallability of Man, that we won’t always get it right, and embracing that” And I stand by that.

• What I learned this week: “In South Africa, the phrases 'now now', 'just now', and 'right now' all have differing connotations: 'Now now' often means minutes later; 'just now' means hours later; and 'right now' actually means now.”

• Wonderful: 30 minutes with a stranger.

• “A good talk should entertain the audience. As I write this, I can already hear the ‘tut-tutting’: isn’t entertainment frivolous? Aren’t we serious academics? I’ve gotten reviews asking me to remove contractions from my writing—if ‘can’t’ isn’t okay, surely having fun is out of bounds! Claptrap! Balderdash! Utter nonsense. If the human has to be left out of the academic endeavor, then let me off the ride. I don’t want to be part of a PL community that that doesn’t value the humanity of its members. […] Talks are performances, and performances should entertain.” And it’s not just talks. It’s papers, RFCs, blog posts, Slack messages, demos — they need to be entertaining and entertaining here means: get your audience to give a shit.

• “every monday morning, the team would get on a call together, one of us would screenshare trying to sign up and the rest of us would write down what was wrong. for a good couple of months, this was excruciating and embarrassing. most of it was broken, a lot of lofty ideas we had for special details or clever animations felt awkward or silly. it felt pointless to do as a group because so little of the prod experience matched what we had in our heads, I think most of us wanted to go back to the drawing board and think of a better flow in our heads. but we filed dozens of tickets for ourselves, and then got back to work. all week eng and design would be running through the entire flow over and over again as they fixed those issues. rinse and repeat, for I don’t remember, maybe twenty weeks. until the real thing was as good as what we had in our heads. that’s it, that’s the secret. you have to actually use your product, more than your users ever will, and then fix everything that feels bad instead of letting it slide.”

• Sean Goedecke may well be the best writer today on what it actually means to develop software in a software company. Nothing but net for the past year and this isn’t an exception: seeing like a software company.