Things I Like
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The time not spent on me'ing has freed up mental space for me to do other things. You know, crazy shit like spending time with my family and friends. Wow, progressive thinking. The less I blog or market myself, the more time I can spend on my hobbies that wont interest anyone but myself, like infusing oils. Mind-blowing.
I've found the exact same thing to be true this summer. I've spent my time away from work not thinking about work at all and just doing the things I enjoy to relax.
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As long as we continue to think of the Internet as the place where you can creates sites and services that make other people laugh, argue forever, and encounter ideas they’d never have imagined, then the Internet stays true to the values its architecture embodies.
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We are all joined together globally in ways we have never been joined before, so if we fail, we all fail together: we have “just one chance to get it right.” This is not the way we will inevitably go, says he, though it is the way we will inevitably go unless we choose to invent and follow some less hazardous road.
I'm becoming more and more pessimistic about our ability to make any changes and prevent catastrophe due to climate change. We need to have a collective coming together, and not just by one country or a few countries, but by the entire world, to make this change happen. And I don't see the wealthy of any nation admitting this is even necessary. So while I try and do my bit, it feels quite hopeless, as so many around me aren't doing their part, or even thinking about it.
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It may indeed be a false dichotomy that “either you can have a performant website or you have a business model based on advertising” but it is also a truth that advertisers demand more and more for their dollar. They want to know what page you read, how long you looked at it, where on the web you went next, and a thousand other invasive things that make thoughtful people everywhere uncomfortable—but are the price we currently pay to access the earth’s largest library.
I really enjoy Jeffrey's perspective here. This is a really hard issue. We want an open web, we want information to be accessible, but that information, writing, and more have to be paid for somehow. We live in a society where people need to earn. While I'm starting to hate a lot about capitalism, it's what we've got right now.
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For such a young, supposedly-innovative industry, I’m often amazed at what people choose to treat as immovable, unchangeable, carved-in-stone issues. Bloated, invasive ad tracking isn’t a law of nature. It’s a choice. We can choose to change.;
Jeremy's piece made me think of my own thoughts on performance where I thought about how it is more than just the developers making things better, but a fundamental culture change that must occur at an organization to make it happen. And what Nilay Patel says about The Verge and so many other websites illustrates perfectly the issues that developers and anyone who cares about performance are facing. Sites need to earn money and that seems to be very much at odds with performance, unfortunately.
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While we’ve been streamlining our processes and perfecting our machine-like assembly techniques, others have been watching closely and assembling their own machines. We’ve designed ourselves right into an environment ripe for automation. Applications like Squarespace (and soon The Grid) are here and are clamouring for our jobs.
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Right now there's a profound sense of irreality in the tech industry. All problems are to be solved with technology, especially the ones that have been caused with previous technology. The new technologies will fix it.
There was so much to quote in this piece, I had a hard time to pull just one. And having been on the outskirts of the VC world for a while, I am tired of it. Tired of the idea that technology can solve everything and everything must scale at exponential rates to be worthwhile. I disagree with that notion. Small ideas, small things that help people, community, and more, are very much worth our time. But the piece is amazing. And I choose the web that connects knowledge, people, and cats.
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And that, in turn, is important, because humanity’s search for exoplanets—planets beyond the solar system—has just begun. So far, we’ve found 1,932 of them. Some are gas giants, a few seem to be rocky worlds in their star’s habitable zone. What seems likely, though, is that there are many worlds like Pluto: small, round, and distant from their suns.
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It is true: we will be able to do more stuff if we focus on managing our time, but in today’s business environment, we don’t need more repetitive, synchronized activity like we did in the Industrial Revolution. We need more thinking, more creativity, and more problem solving. A focus on time will undermine all of these. It will make you feel more overwhelmed and miserable too!
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For most people, the big question isn’t “when did you start drawing?” but “when did you stop drawing?” Virtually everyone drew and doodled at one point in their lives. For artists and non-artists alike, drawing is about more than art—it’s about the very art of thinking.
I just finished a project that got me drawing every day. It was the first time I had drawn daily since art school. And it was fantastic. I saw myself improving, experimenting, thinking as I looked back at each day and drew something. And, I'm just two days out from finishing the project, but I'm still drawing daily, just on a wider variety of surfaces.
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Our dominant operating systems, our way of working, and our common approach to developing, auditing and debugging software, and spending (or not) money on its maintenance, has not yet reached the requirements of the 21st century. So, yes, NYSE going down is not a big deal, and United Airlines will probably have more ground halts if they don’t figure out how to change their infrastructure (not a cheap or easy undertaking). But it’s not just them. From our infrastructure to our privacy, our software suffers from “software sucks” syndrome which doesn’t sound as important as a Big Mean Attack of Cyberterrorists. But it is probably worse in the danger it poses.
If you've worked on any large scale, older software, then you know that this article is dead on. We love building things in our industry, but we really don't like maintaining them very much. And that means, we have a lot of creaky software all over the place running our many of the things we depend on.
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So the team that started by performing bug fixes on a sprawling, struggling mass of code ended by writing critical, efficient infrastructure for the government. Yet what the MPL team accomplished philosophically may be even more important: It helped teach government bureaucrats how to think about building websites in 2015.
Really well written article that is mostly about communicating. A team of tech folks learning how government works while the government folks learned how to make software.
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A pretty funny comic about JavaScript frameworks, if you are a developer, you'll probably laugh.
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Early on, my mother exposed this myth — casually, just after piano practice and before dinnertime. Adults too were making it up. Adults were winging it. It has been an invaluable insight that’s guided me my whole life.
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Getting a puppy, the comic Louis C.K. observed, is a "countdown to sorrow." Inscribed in the act of welcoming this adorable fur ball into your home is the moment of its death a decade or so hence. Grief over a pet can equal or exceed that of a human family member, studies show. This is canine neoteny's cruel flip side: Yes, your dog gets to be an emotional adolescent into ripe old age. But when he dies, it will feel like losing a child.
I really love this article. I found it when I watched (and cried my eyes out watching) a video about a man and his dog at the end of the dog's life. I still miss my girl, every day, even after a year and a half since she's been gone.