Joy & Curiosity #8

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

After travelling and meeting and talking the previous week, this week was full of just pure coding. Wrote a lot of code at work and streamed about 5 hours of it, which was a lot of fun.

• In reply to last week’s issue, Muhammad commented with a link to github.com/charlax/professional-programming which contains a lot of links to great programming articles. It actually made me think that if someone were to ask me about how to start programming, I’d probably say: try to read most of what’s on here in the next 1-2 years (besides also actually learning to program.)

• Watched Andy Allen’s talk Serious Play and thought: I like the ideas, I like the approach, I like the “happy accidents”, I like the whimsical stuff, but at the same time I don’t want animations or sounds in the software I use. Software should be as fast and as immediate as possible.

• I haven’t linked to it yet, because I thought I’ll wait until they come out with a third episode, but I can’t wait any longer: if you haven’t, I highly recommend that you listen to the two episodes of the Acquired podcast on Microsoft: here’s Volume I and here is Volume II. Acquired hasn’t just become one of my favorite podcasts of all time in the last year (I seriously don’t know how they do manage to pull of the casual-conversation-style this well), but these two episodes on Microsoft (a combined 9+ hours) are fantastic. I’m saying this as a complete non-Microsoft-guy (I spelled it as “micro$oft” when I was 14 and switched to Linux shortly thereafter), but Microsoft is an impressive company and its history is also the history of the personal computer which is also… my — our? —  history. At least to a certain extent. These 9 hours probably had more moments that made me go “ah I remember that!” than a potential 9 hour documentary on the last 30 years of the state of Germany. I remember when Windows 98 came out, when the new Aldi PC came out, when I finally got a Pentium 3, how calm Windows 2000 felt, the license code for that one widely-distributed cracked version of Windows XP, using Frontpage to build my first website, using Paint.exe in my dad’s office on a Saturday, Windings, Word, Clippy, …

• This week a leaked version of a MrBeast company handbook, titled “How to Suceed at MrBeast”, made the rounds. I find that whole handbook incredibly fascinating. I’ve always had a thing for company handbooks, including the famous Valve handbook or Facebook’s Little Red Book or Reed Hasting’s not-really-a-handbook presentation on Netflix culture, and this one hits all the right buttons for me. That doesn’t mean I agree with all of its contents, but rather that I admire when someone in a leadership position writes down how they see the world. I think it’s one of the most useful things that can be done for a company’s culture.

• Some very interesting in this post on “What's Wrong With Journalism”. As someone who wanted to become a journalist twenty years ago, the difference between the world back then and now is stark. What stood out was the thought whether “we have returned to the word-of-mouth era.”

• I loved this post for sharing that Donald Miller quote: “Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.”

• After sharing a James Mickens talk last week, I now came across a piece of his writing which I totally forgot about but that’s still very, very funny: This World of Ours.

• Read this tweet today and thought it’s a fantastic summary of (and maybe a replacement for) thousands of thoughts I have around different types of programmers and programming in different contexts.