Technology & Miscellanea
These are some of the links from all over the Web that I enjoyed the most this month: Ned Batchelder - People: The API User’s Guide . A long time ago I was taught that communication involves no less than three potentially fallible stages: what you mean to say in your own mind, the message as it gets transmitted, and what the receiver hears and interprets. This keynote from PyCon 2023 goes into…
These are some of the links from all over the Web that I enjoyed the most last month: Alex Komoroske - The Iterative Adjacent Possible . Big ambitious moonshots are taking on two huge risks: The risk of aiming in the wrong direction, and the risk of not getting there. Instead, incrementally feel your way toward the right solution, which lets you learn and chart new courses as you make progress —…
The problem with getting a pile of comments from a “360 feedback” peer review process with your coworkers is that whatever is written is usually not Truth (with a capital “T”). It’s not that anyone is lying , but rather that the feedback you receive is the final output of a sequence of multiple lossy steps. To discern the signal within the noise, we have to try to work backwards through those…
These are some of the links from all over the Web that I enjoyed the most this month: Noahpinion - Honestly, it’s probably the phones . I know the data are inconclusive, and the various studies show lots of complicating factors… but I can’t help but feel that we overestimate the impact of the big scary salient things (climate change! political polarization! everyone’s talking about it!) and…
Whether or not to regularly spend time and effort upgrading dependencies can be a contentious topic on development teams. Advocates argue that not doing the work allows tech debt and bitrot to accumulate, while opponents accuse them of chasing new-and-shiny novelties while ignoring what’s actually valuable to the product. Despite what feels like an unending amount of time spent on the churn of…