Joy & Curiosity #58

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Light issue after this busy, busy, busy week. We launched Amp Free on Wednesday. Monday already had excitement in the air, Tuesday the last-minute fixes, Wednesday the double-checks and this-really-is-the-last-minute fixes and the launch, Thursday the very positive feedback (people love good looking ads in the terminal!), Friday was back to building. Yesterday I was barely online, but on my bike. Great week.

• “It takes a while for this to sink in, and your first reaction is always to lead with the counter-argument. I know it seems like this app has just gotten buggier but that’s not what they’re trying to do. I know it seems like we’re producing features no one uses but that’s not what we’re trying to do. I know that it seems like we’re just adding headcount here with zero impact but that’s not what we’re trying to do. But the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it’s trying to do. And if you evaluate the world around you like that, you’ll come to clarity quicker.” From Des Traynor, one of the co-founders of Intercom. I also really enjoyed his Cheeky Pint appearance.

• Nine short paragraphs and I don’t think I’ll ever forget this thought: “When I started Bootcamp — and was, for the first year, everyone’s mentor — I didn’t teach the culture as it was. I taught the culture as I wished it were. The new engineers didn’t know the difference. They had no baseline for what was ‘true,’ only for what was taught. And because the company was growing so fast, within a year more than half of the engineering team had learned about the culture from me. By then, the story I had been telling about our culture had become the culture.”

• Zed for Windows is here. Impressive effort. And, man, what a nice piece of software.

• v8’s GEMINI.md: “Some hints: You are an expert C++ developer.” Some hints! Oh, btw., you are an expert, make no mistakes. Man, what a world we live in. And then there’s, of course, the plea to not waste tokens: “Make sure to pass the quiet keyword unless told to otherwise, so that you don’t waste tokens on compilation progress. Errors will still be reported.”

• Did you know the Bloomberg terminal has ads?

• But you do know about the history of Bloomberg terminal keyboards, right? No? Enjoy!

• Interesting: Cognition trained their own model to be faster at search.

• “Reminded me of a software tournament in 1999, a high school student showed me a stunning Civilization clone, complete with shiny ui, simple but working AI, isometric tiles, and sprite animations... All in one massive Pascal program, thousands of lines between a single begin and end, full of gotos and labels, not readable at all, but just working. When I asked why he didn’t use any procedures or functions, he replied they slowed him and the main loop down on his 386🤯 In early crazy expensive internet days, with coding books too costly for most students in Turkey, he taught himself coding through trial and error on an offline school computer. I wonder where you are now, Turkish Carmack.”

• Bill Gurley wrote a book: Runnin’ Down A Dream. I linked to it before, but if this isn’t the chance to relink, I don’t know what is: watch the talk he gave with the same title!

• You think you know command palettes (I mean: who doesn’t use them every single day by now?), but then you read this and realize how much detail goes into it: how to build a remarkable command palette. Great post.