Negativity around people shipping is so exhausting. Never good enough, not what I expected, you should’ve done X instead, Y is still garbage, I prefer Z. Ship something better yourself or shut the f*ck up.
The problem with software is that we can’t visualize the edifice of its complexity in 3D space.
You’d never say “I can build the Empire State Building in a weekend”, but you hear versions of “I can write stack overflow in 2 days” on the regular 🫠
I guess what I’m saying is: don’t succumb to the industrial, mass-market aesthetic of what scaled up software looks like, and don’t take for granted what other people tell you computers are for and how they should feel to use. Learn to really deeply understand what computers can do for you and build out of them something that you can say feels like a reflection of you.
Build things that you are proud of, not just because it is valuable, but because you are proud to sign your name on it and invite it into your home.
AI should make something better and not serve as a marketing gimmick
I wonder if coding without the help of AI will eventually become an archaic medium that people engage in for fun or novelty, like film photography or risograph printing
One big issue with “AGI’s impact on jobs” as a framing is that it is not obvious that jobs are necessarily an institution worth preserving.
Imagine critics of capital markets in the 14th century warning of “the impact on serfdoms.”
“Impact on human livings” is more essential.
Questions are so much more important than answers. If all you have is answers, then you’re also probably depressed, having no fun, and doing uninteresting work.
Seriously, I think the statistics of tennis matches apply to most of life. You don’t need to hit the fanciest or hardest shots to win. And frequently, the one dominating the highlight reels are losing matches or losing in the long run from injuries.
The problem with quality is that you can neither measure it with numbers nor describe it with words. You can only feel it. That’s why it seems irrational to optimize for it even though it isn’t.
So many are trying to save the world without knowing the names of their neighbors.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that sharing unreviewed content that has been artificially generated with other people is rude.
Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term for it.
SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team.
Parse, don’t validate
you’re likely to live a happier life and achieve more if you’re default curiously optimistic vs default dismissively skeptical
search for why things might unexpectedly work as much or more as you assume why they can’t, won’t or shouldn’t work
Not all human knowledge is expressible through language. Arguably most of human knowledge is completely non linguistic. Which is why LLMs trained solely from text will never come close to Human-Level intelligence.
If you don’t have your health you don’t have anything.
They say “knowledge is power”. If pain is information, then pain can be converted to power. To do so, you must learn to control your suffering, accept that scars are beautiful.
… my advice is always the same. take one single concrete step. this can even be getting information. this can even be starting a list. anything goes!
Next time you’re building a feature, ask yourself, “Is this yet another tool for the user to learn and use, or is this a solution to a problem they have?”
For me, this is peak software making. Deeply understanding your users and generously spreading joy.
… is it that people are asleep at the wheel of their lives? they don’t realize their own agency? it makes me feel angrysad/grief to see people suffer needlessly when there is low hanging fruit all around them
“Nobody really knows what they’re doing” is a cope that will keep you mediocre forever.
i am a firm believer that a 1 hour walk outside 1x a day is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your mind
Has anyone else noticed software quality getting… worse? What is happening?
a metric that startups never pay attention to is what % of revenue came from customers you never had to talk to if this isn’t very high you are not building a tech company
Your competition isn’t your competitors. It’s people not giving a f*ck
There are only 3 phases of life where NYC beats generic suburbia:
- early/mid 20s either entering a high-powered career or with high-powered parental subsidies
- married, pre-kids with 2X professional income
- wealthy empty nester
what about your life do you feel like you have no control over right now? -> now imagine that you did; what would you do differently?
We think it’s important that API upgrades are
- Lightweight. Make upgrades as cheap as possible (for users and for ourselves).
- First-class. Make versioning a first-class concept in your API so that it can be used to keep documentation and tooling accurate and up-to-date, and to generate a changelog automatically.
- Fixed-cost. Ensure that old versions add only minimal maintenance cost by tightly encapsulating them in version change modules. Put another way, the less thought that needs to be applied towards old behavior while writing new code, the better.
Simplicity will be the next theme in product. If you ask any company what made them successful I don’t think anyone will say their advanced and complicated planning process got them there.
Make it your knee-jerk reaction to zoom out
1) start from the premise that they’re smart, thoughtful people who care about their families, communities, and country, and came to different conclusions about how to do that. (Largely informed by their bubbles. Just like everyone else.)
2) Engage in humble, mutual inquiry. To honestly try to understand how they arrived at their perspective.
3) Figure out how to find middle ground, even if that means moving closer to the center.
4) At no point sinking to insulting their intelligence or character, even if they do the same.