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I shall finish more than I start
Here’s an incomplete list of projects I’m working on right now in my “spare time”, in order from least abandoned to most.
- This very blog you’re reading
- Migrating everything off LastPass, because it seems it’s very overdue
- Setting up NixOS on a new hard drive (this time it will stick, goddamnit)
- Advent of Code 2022 (I’m about half-way through; turns out it’s a lot harder to keep up when you have a tiny child)
- Improvements to my personal Mastodon instance
- Migrating my email and calendar from Google to Fastmail, in my quest to de-Googlify myself
- Shipping regular expression support in Smoke
- A build system as a DSL embedded in Haskell, called The Bakery
- A Firefox extension which automatically deletes cookies over a certain age, called Memory Loss
- Merging my other personal website, which is hopelessly out of date and therefore does not deserve a link, into this one
That seems to be about, I don’t know, seven or eight too many.
So my new year’s resolution for 2023 is: I shall finish more than I start.
Here’s to a shorter list this time next year.
I'm not fucking about, I'm internalising
I think I’m coming to terms with my procrastination.
A lot of the time, it looks like I’m fucking about, but I’m really just internalising the problem at hand, and clearing space for it in my brain.
It might look like I’m doing 8 other things. I need to do those 8 other things first, because they’re in the way. They’re taking valuable computation power and memory. Once they’re done, I have space to breathe, and then time to really get excited about the task at hand.
And meanwhile, there’s a background thread going on the whole time, musing over the problem, trying to understand it from a few different directions, decomposing and recomposing it while I answer an email.
Sometimes you have to go make a sandwich before you even start.
Of course, the other half of the time I really am just fucking about.
Which one is it this time? WHO KNOWS.
Twitter's doomed. What's next?
Last week, Twitter got new management.
Now, I’m not a fan of the new management. But then, I wasn’t a fan of the old management either. Nevertheless, this presented an opportunity to reflect on how I engage with Twitter.
About a year ago, I decided I was spending far too much time doomscrolling, and I deleted the app from my phone. I’ve done this before, but this time it stuck. I keep the browser signed out, too. If I want to check what’s going on on the timeline right now, I have to go to a computer. This means that I rarely check out the timeline. And I do not miss it.
So where’s the value? The value is in the conversations, the mutuals, the shared context we build over years. But at least for me, it’s been diminishing: the value I get out of Twitter now (or even a year ago, pre-deletion) is almost zero. I almost never receive a message from a friend that wouldn’t have been more personal somewhere more private. I see a lot of awful global news, but very rarely do I get some personal news that improves my relationship with someone.
This past weekend, I toyed with the idea of switching on Mastodon (with my own server, because what’s the point of joining someone else’s?) and trying to find my place in a community. I didn’t bother, in the end.
It’s not 2008 any more. The world has changed. It’s become more connected, for better or for worse, and I don’t think the evolution of communication platforms looks like Twitter. I think it’ll be very different.
As for me, I think I’ll keep my Twitter account around, mostly checking in occasionally to see if I have messages, but I’m done with the service. I don’t need it any more.
Perhaps I’ll join Mastodon, somewhere. Perhaps I’ll start my own server with microblog.pub. Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol under the hood, and it’s open. You can even write your own software if you want.
But for now, well, I have this blog. It’s not going anywhere. Maybe I’ll write more often. I enjoy it. You can subscribe, you know. The web isn’t going anywhere, and RSS will work until the apocalypse.
And if I want some conversation, perhaps I’ll add some server-side support and implement a Webmention endpoint (which is even simpler than ActivityPub), so your blog can talk to my blog. The way Twitter was meant to be, over a decade ago.
If you want to contact me, I’m sure you can find my email address. No doomscrolling required.
Maybe, just maybe, there are other ways
There’s this common trope in startups: “Hire fast, fire fast.”
Every time I’ve heard this, I think, “I could never do that.” And I’ve always wondered if I’m weak, or shouldn’t be in that kind of leadership position. (And, dear reader, I have been in that kind of leadership position, but maybe I shouldn’t have been?)
Recently, I read Rands’ latest article, The Coach and the Fixer. To spoil the article a little (go read it first), at the end, he talks about being unfailingly kind.
And he asks himself, “Is it kind to fire someone?”
Reading this article, it struck me that perhaps it’s alright not to believe in “hire fast, fire fast” as a mantra. Perhaps there are other ways. Maybe it’s perfectly valid to hire slowly, make a commitment to people just as much as they have to me, and only part ways after trying very hard not to.
And maybe that’s not compatible with the model of raising a lot of money very quickly from venture capitalists, and trying to scale before you even start.
If that’s the case, perhaps there are other ways to run a business, too.
In my last venture, I was a little too quick to set aside my values and defer to “expertise” on how to run a successful business. (And yet, the business was not successful.) If there is a next time, I think I’ll cling on a little harder, even if it closes some doors.
It’s possible that in doing so, different doors will open.
#OneEstimate
This started out as a Twitter thread.
#OneEstimate, or, why your estimates suck and why your stand-ups are boring.
Estimates have a pretty bad reputation at this point, at least in certain circles. (I am sure there is a much wider circle of Agile legionnaires or whatever they call themselves, shouting about how you must estimate every story using only powers of 7 or something, so that management can make plans stretching out to 2031. Fortunately, I don’t talk to those people.)
I agree with most of the arguments put forth by the #NoEstimates crowd and friends. However, while I find estimates pretty much useless for planning and prediction, I do find them useful for discussing a piece of work, with the goal of trying to understand a few things:
- Do we all agree what we’re working on?
- Do we vaguely agree on an approach?
- Can anyone see a simpler way to solve this?
- Is there anything we don’t know or understand very well?
- Are there compromises we can make to do less work?
And so, I like estimating, I just don’t like estimates.