Daily Note - Monday, April 13th, 2026
3 minute read •
Articles
- The Seed Beneath the Snow
- An awesome write-up in a string of blogs talking about the difference between legible, illegible work, and the value of illegible work. As someone who honestly belives that if you need JIRA to understand my impact, I have failed as an engineer, I live for and in the illegible. I really enjoyed this article, if not for just affirming that others feel the same way. I’ve been privileged to work at orgs that prioritized illegible work. The earlier articles are also worth digesting:
- First: Seeing like a Software Company
- Second: Legibility is Ruining You
- The Perl of Laziness Lost
- Brian does an excellent job of explaining the beauty and power of the
virtue of laziness in programming. As a long time Perl programmer,
laziness, impatience, and hubris are core values. Outsiders might view
those as dangerous or irresponsible, but if you peel back the playful
and intentionally controversial language and examine the concepts, you
understand why they’re valuable. I suppose they could mean different
things to different people, so here’s what they mean to me:
- Laziness: Brian captures it pretty well. It’s about finding the right level of abstraction so you’re not wasting time on the abstraction or down the road. At some point, the “goldilocks” zone of abstraction becomes natural. I should write a longer post about this.
- Impatience: Being unable to suffer copious boiler-plate that drowns the core logic of the problem in uninteresting context. I’m thinking of Golang’s error handling, type conversions, memory management, and time spent compiling programs. These things obscure the intent of the program, and are the literary equivalent of filler and run-on sentences.
- Hubris: This took me the longest to understand as hubris is arrogance. But it’s not arrogance directed at others, it’s arrogance to think that you can solve any problem you encounter. This is confidence and willingness to jump into hard problems and to fail without it affecting your self-image. For me, Perl and the CPAN gave me that confidence and willingness to try.
- Brian does an excellent job of explaining the beauty and power of the
virtue of laziness in programming. As a long time Perl programmer,
laziness, impatience, and hubris are core values. Outsiders might view
those as dangerous or irresponsible, but if you peel back the playful
and intentionally controversial language and examine the concepts, you
understand why they’re valuable. I suppose they could mean different
things to different people, so here’s what they mean to me:
- How I run $10k/MRR on $20/mo tech stack
- I recently started working with AWS and Kubernetes after decades of bare metal, self-hosted infrastructure. Holy fuck is it expensive! And, there’s been more cloud outages in the past 24 months than I saw in self-hosted deployment across 24 years. What the fuck are you people smoking?
Videos!
Whee!