Aug 8, 2009
Bringing yourself to think about deathQ: Most people find
it morbid for someone young and healthy to think about their death.
me:
I can never understand that. I am accomplishment-oriented rather than
experience-oriented. I derive daily motivation much more from having a sense
of accomplishment and impact on the world than from experiential pleasures,
or even from having learned something. If you feel the same, it behooves you
to think about the impact you will have on the world after you're gone, and
how to best channel it. It's only experience that ends when you die.
* *
Jun 6, 2009
Coping with friendfeed's time-ordered torrentI've been increasingly using friendfeed, and the number of my subscriptions
has trended steadily down. The reason: ordering by time forces me to be strict
in who I let in.
Every new watering hole for conversation — facebook, google reader,
twitter, friendfeed — orders my reading by time to provide immediacy.
Ordering by time renders it susceptible to frequent posters. The
minute I subscribe to one, the diversity of my reading goes down. Other
voices become hard to find. My response to this: never subscribe to frequent
posters.
But this is a blunt heuristic. High-volume sources often have great posts. As
the need for other views grows, I find coping mechanisms. Sometimes I give up
and leave. Sometimes I build a replacement, and
sometimes I find others have
done so. Once I can get around pure time ordering, I heave a sigh of
relief and subscribe to the people I want to without feeling constrained by
volume.
So, friendfeed, please help me navigate this stage of my reading. Find ways to
keep my reading diverse, even if I subscribe to Robert Scoble.
* *
May 31, 2009
Designing for serendipityLu Liu:
How can we use serendipity to get out of homophily traps? I have a
serendipity friend list. But if I can define my serendipity friends, then I
guess they are not really serendipity friends by my expectation. In
reality, I seldom read articles from that list.
Me:
Yes, a serendipity list can't come from yourself. It must be an
external recommendation. Automated since that's my bias :)
Time is key. What is serendipitous today is not so tomorrow. That makes it
harder to 'define'. In practice, I suspect we must evaluate it like we
evaluate porn: not by defining it but by categorizing examples.
Perhaps it can't be a list either, just one recommendation, with pride of
place. I find I require time to appreciate something outside of my comfort
zone.
Since it must take prime real estate it must be high-confidence. If nothing
is good enough today, show me nothing.
Finally, it mustn't nag. Make it easy to dismiss, use the dismissal as a
signal to learn from.
* *
Oct 8, 2008
“ You’re going to have to rewrite code. All the time. You have to be ok with it. You have to be
willing. This is the secret of the great programmers, and the great stumbling block of those new to refactoring and TDD.
The bad news: Refactorings like extract object will require you to test drive a new class from scratch. All the time.
The good news: It’s much easier to rewrite when you have tests. You just haven’t noticed yet.
— me
* *
Jul 20, 2008
“ I will tolerate a buggy compiler, lack of editor/IDE/debugger/profiler support, crappy syntax, gotchas in semantics, pretty much anything, if a language easily and naturally supports automated tests.
* *
Apr 11, 2008
“ Be open to feedback, but keep justification off the critical path.
* *
Apr 6, 2008
“ The world imposes constraints on us all, employee or free-lancer. But employees get handed constraints from above, without the motivations that ground them. Worse, they
get used to the idea of constraints without reason.
— me in counterpoint to
Nivi
* *
Mar 12, 2008
“ When you add a developer to a team you incur at least two fixed costs. The first is in raw currency, the salary you have to pay out. The second is in
lines spent—the rate of codebase growth is certain to go up.
Both fixed costs increase your burn rate; only one increase is predictable.
— me
* *
Jan 11, 2008
“ Dreams are meant to be grown out of, not fulfilled. The path to transcendance can pass through the point of fulfillment, yes. But if you’re doing things right, you won’t notice when you pass that point. You’ll be too busy chasing new dreams you came up with along the way.
— me
* *
Nov 26, 2007
“ Hacker News is
now perhaps my favorite social network, even though it doesn’t look anything like one, and it doesn’t include most of my best friends in the real world. I think there’s a lesson here.
* *
