Robert Prehn's personal blog.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. -- James Zawinski, 1995 While feature creep certainly happens in non-commercial software, I have observed that this effect is more powerful in commercial software. My theory is that when your salary is justified by writing new code every day, you have a powerful motivation…
You wake up and pick up your phone. You scroll social media. Bad post. Bad post. Boring post. Good post! Jackpot. You get to work and sit down. Your boss is requiring everyone to find a way to use AI. The company tracks how many prompts you feed into the model. You prompt the model. It outputs garbage. You send the same prompt again. It outputs garbage. You send the same prompt a third time. This…
Lately, I've been feeling energized by a bunch of projects in the BEAM ecosystem. If you don't know, [the BEAM]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_(Erlang_virtual_machine) (Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine) is the original VM for Erlang, and its siblings Elixir, Gleam, LFE, etc. We use "on the BEAM" as a kind of umbrella term for code running in that VM and written in those languages. The thing…
Last year, while my family was on vacation, we were riding the gondola back to our hotel after a long day out. We got on, taking the bench on one side, and then another family of three took the bench on the opposite side. I realized right away that the family across from us was speaking Japanese. I had just started learning, and I was exhausted from the day's activities, so I didn't want to burden…
All over the little indie web, people are asking themselves the 40 Questions , a ritual originating with Steph Ango . Seems like fun! I'll give it a crack. 1. What did you do this year that you’d never done before? Learned some Japanese. Technically, I had learned some in the past, but this feels like my first real attempt -- the first time I've gotten to a level where I can have a (brief, rote)…
Lately, I've been thinking about how to explain tariffs to a five year old. Or a 78 year-old with the emotional development of a five year old. Here's a metaphor that I think is clarifying. Let's say you are a farmer who grows carrots. You have a little produce stand where you sell the carrots that you grow. One day, some of your customers come by. They want to buy some carrots, but they also want…
Bounded rationality is the idea that when people make decisions, their rationality is limited by various factors. As a result of these limitations, people may make a decision that is satisfactory ("good enough") rather than optimal. Examples of limitations include data, understanding, time, or energy, among others.
Politics without principles. Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice. ( Yes, I know. )
Stock is a quantity that is measured by its current level. Flow is a quantity that is measured by the rate at which it changes. I find it useful in life to think about whether things are stock items or flow items, and whether they should be stock items or flow items. For example, food is something I want to be flow , not stock, because effectively using food is to bring it into the house…
A rule of thumb I use in my consulting work is this-- the cost of replicate or replace a piece of software is about: H * ( Y + 1) * $100, 000 Where H is the number of software engineers on a project, and Y is the number of years since the project was initiated. This is derived from the following assumptions: The number of software engineers on a project scaled linearly from the start of the…