Everything is Theory Building
Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote Don’t build it to explain why I habitually pushed people away from building software in the process of creating a business.
Thoughts, Rants and Epiphanies.
thoughts and rants.
Latest posts
Robot help for smol brain
Big brain wants to create perfect setup straight away. Smol brain knows: start simple, improve later.
on cobras and database schemas
Previously, I was at a company that had a large and somewhat problematic database. Questionable design decisions and blatant hacks had piled up upon one another to the point where any schema change felt like the penultimate move of a Jenga game.
Xcode devs: try this one wierd trick to reclaim osx diskspace
Started running low on disk space recently. Did some du -sh * around my volumes and came across this delight:
Don’t infer intent
We live our lives in states of highly imperfect information. We try to make sense of what we observe to be happening around us by relying on a series of biological hacks to turn stimuli into electrical impulses. This is flawed in numerous and interesting ways.
The elves are leaving an immoral maze
Steve Blank wrote a brilliant essay way back in 2009 about the metamorphoses that companies undergo as they grow. I’m not sure if it’s entirely attributable to this article, but the idea of free food has completely ingrained itself in our cultural zeitgeist to the point where every job ad for every aspiring scale-up boasts about how they spend their VC money on keeping the fridges well-stocked…
Don’t build it (yet)
As someone who nominally earns the majority of their income from writing code and building software, I spend an alarming amount of time telling people not to build software and/or not ask me to build software for them.
The Mind is a Wild Elephant
Recently, I went on a 10-day Vipassana course. My reasons for going we re complex and out of scope for this post. Likewise, the personal outcomes and the details of the journey are for another time and post. This post is really just to focus on some of the more mundane and practical aspects of the course, because there were a few things that I wish I had known or thought about before going.
The power of constraints
In A Beautiful Constraint, the authors make a compelling case that constraints can be a source of creativity and innovation. In my case, very tight constraints were the only thing that got me to finally publish a blog.
Apple, export regulations and toil
In my early forays into app store submissions, I found myself clicking through the same “Provide Export Compliance” questions every time I uploaded a new build.