spantz.org

Indian Among Cowboys

Sun, 13 May 2012 21:41:01 +0200

A friend of mine had a separate set of clothes for school. I never asked why he had to change before we could play. It did not matter to me.

I remember when I was brought to a wedding for the first time. I also remember the first funeral I went to. My mother had me wear finer clothes than usual. I did not ask why, but had seen on television that you are supposed to. I remember feeling special, like James Bond.

At a country music festival years ago, I wore blue jeans, a cowboy hat, and a toy .44 Magnum. I felt like a cowboy, and my friends and I acted accordingly. There were no Indians to play with though.

Today I worry about wearing the wrong clothes. My mother gave me a book on the subject: how to dress, how to tie a tie, what business casual means, and so on. I still feel like James Bond in formal attire.

I spend my days in a co-working space with people from a dozen other companies. Some former classmates of mine just relocated to the same place. They wore funny shirts and such at campus. Today, in the office, business casual. I do not care, and they do not care that I wear the same worn-out T-shirts as usual.

My coworker wears a funny shirt except on days with important meetings scheduled. He visited a tailor before going abroad to speak with investors.

If I had a meeting with important business people, I would dress and act accordingly. I would feel like Harvey Specter in Suits and have a great time, but it bothers me that—maybe—my gorilla-fighting-a-kangaroo shirt would not be acceptable.

"All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed: finding..."

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 19:30:25 +0100

“All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed: finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where the human history began. As civilization developed, we suppressed it. We became ‘labor,’ because they stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we were all entrepreneurs.”

- Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner

Get Curious

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 17:34:00 +0100

Get Curious:

Recently, when Eliezer wanted to explain why he thought a certain person was among the best rationalists he knew, he picked out one feature of their behavior in particular:

I see you start to answer a question, and then you stop, and I see you get curious.

For me, the ability to reliably get curious is the basic front-kick of epistemic rationality. The best rationalists I know are not necessarily those who know the finer points of cognitive psychology, Bayesian statistics, and Solomonoff Induction. The best rationalists I know are those who can reliably get curious.

Being curious is important in software development.

In a project that I am involved in, we are evaluating technologies to use. We have different approaches to tackle this problem. This leads to heated discussions, which is good because it shows that people care about the product. However, too much arguing can be a demotivator and have a negative impact on productivity.

Here is the heuristic I use to design and build a system:

Find subsystems. Maybe you decide on a client/server architecture. The server needs to communicate with clients and be able to save data. Iterate. Focus on the server and find its components, then look at the client.
Find constraints. You may need clients for two or three platforms, maybe they need to work with a slow or missing connection. Fast feedback is important, and the only viable communication protocol is HTTP. You can get websockets to work on the clients, and it would be a perfect fit. So the server should support websockets.
Find third-party libraries and frameworks that solve your problems. Evaluate them. What are their benefits and drawbacks? Have they been put to the test? Is the community strong? Is the project being maintained? Would it be better to make an in-house solution for this or that part, and how long would it take?
Build prototypes. Test them. Find out if a solution built on these technologies would break or hold in the real world. Focus on the experience of your first users but keep scaling in (the back of your) mind. Think of possible maintenance issues.
Build. Ship. Refine.

appliedcoffeetechnology: The sad part about this is that it’s...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:19:48 +0100

appliedcoffeetechnology:

The sad part about this is that it’s plausible.

"Instead of asking ‘what problem should I solve?’ ask ‘what problem do I wish someone else would..."

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:12:57 +0100

“Instead of asking ‘what problem should I solve?’ ask ‘what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?’”

- Paul Graham

Oliver Segovia wrote a piece on the subject of finding happiness. He argues that instead of...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:25:23 +0100

Oliver Segovia wrote a piece on the subject of finding happiness. He argues that instead of following our passions, we should focus on finding big problems:

Like myself, today’s twentysomethings were raised to find our dreams and follow them. But it’s a different world. And as the jobless generation grows up, we realize the grand betrayal of the false idols of passion. This philosophy no longer works for us, or at most, feels incomplete. So what do we do? I propose a different frame of reference: Forget about finding your passion. Instead, focus on finding big problems.

Putting problems at the center of our decision-making changes everything. It’s not about the self anymore. It’s about what you can do and how you can be a valuable contributor. People working on the biggest problems are compensated in the biggest ways. I don’t mean this in a strict financial sense, but in a deeply human sense. For one, it shifts your attention from you to others and the wider world. You stop dwelling. You become less self-absorbed. Ironically, we become happier if we worry less about what makes us happy.

I think he hits the nail on the head. Humans are hard-wired problem solvers. Further, we get satisfaction from tending to the needs of others. A clear line of sight to the customer is important for job satisfaction and feeling passionate about what we do. Steve Denning expresses it well in The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management:

The meaning that we see in work resides in the responses of the people for whom we are doing the work.

And my personal favorite:

The meaning of the software we’re coding doesn’t lie in bits and bytes; it’s in the cool things that users can do with the software.

swedishproblems: cred: ticktockguy god jul alla fina :’)

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:53:26 +0100

swedishproblems:

cred: ticktockguy

god jul alla fina :’)

"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a..."

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:12:17 +0100

“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.”

- Robert M. Pirsig

Photo

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 00:12:19 +0100

startupquote: Every feature has some maintenance cost, and...

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:03:59 +0100

startupquote:

Every feature has some maintenance cost, and having fewer features lets us focus on the ones we care about and make sure they work very well.

- David Karp

"Profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don’t want to run out of gas, but neither do..."

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 20:43:57 +0200

“Profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don’t want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations.”

- Tim O’Reilly

ASCII art on steroids.

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 12:31:11 +0200

ASCII art on steroids.

"But I’ll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing..."

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:33:28 +0200

“But I’ll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.”

- Steve Yegge

I don’t always like music by a musician’s offspring. But when I do, I like Teddy...

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 16:35:46 +0200

I don’t always like music by a musician’s offspring. But when I do, I like Teddy Thompson and Damian Marley.

Decay of an Artist

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:13:52 +0200

Shane MacGowan, original singer of The Pogues. I would love to see this guy make a Facebook Timeline. Until then. Two songs (Spotify): long ago, more recent. I can’t be the only one to like the rough version better.

At my job, I'm the youngest programmer there

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 14:28:00 +0200

Youngest at 23 here. Then again, we’re four programmers and the oldest one is 25.

appliedcoffeetechnology:

Is it just my imagination or is that cat writing in lisp?

zombiechan:

They’re all in their 30’s while I’m 21. I’m pretty sure this is how they view me.

“Southeners love stories about cats, dogs, and swinging doors....

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 13:06:13 +0200

“Southeners love stories about cats, dogs, and swinging doors. They can use these three inputs and create an analogy for anything.”

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without..."

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 20:21:57 +0200

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.”

- Alfred North Whitehead

"As Apple stockpiles more money from product sales than is held by all countries combined, we..."

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:28:56 +0200

“As Apple stockpiles more money from product sales than is held by all countries combined, we eventually elect the be-polo-necked one as our Great iLeader, and are left with a single world government WITH ONLY ONE BUTTON!”

- The Apple-arity, Alternatives to the Singularity

"A ship in harbor is safe—but that is not what ships are built for."

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 19:57:49 +0200

“A ship in harbor is safe—but that is not what ships are built for.”

- John A. Shedd