Yes Iteration is great. That is the reason I love TDD so much. You can iterate, nothing you write has to be perfect but continuous improvement soon creates something that is much better than what I would have made if I had set out to write something perfect.
For me the noticable distinction is between whether I want to create something to express myself (never works out) or for a practical purpose (works out more often than not).
This can likely be related to us using our websites as a portfolio and a resume, too. And it does indeed become paralyzing if you want to always make a good impression and you can't goof around anymore.
My solution will be: have 2 blogs. One strictly professional where you post HOWTOs, and another one where you post anything and everything.
I went for that solution. Got a main blog were I post more polished stuff and a microblog. On the latter I can just post spur-of-the-moment content. Also significantly lowered the barrier of posting to the microblog by just typing in a Notion page that's rendered to html and rss every few minutes.
Hey I read your notes on Dr. Yapko's lecture on depression which led me to watch the lecture and I found it immensely helpful. Do you have any other resources you would recommend?
I'm glad you found it helpful. I have some one-off articles like this one: https://www.davidsongifted.org/gifted-blog/dabrowskis-theory... However, in my case I mostly connect it with neuroticism on which I have an immense bunch of information piecing it all together. It seems to be sensitivity and neurotic qualities that are most connected with what led towards a rather strong depression.
Adding to this, I also did a summary of a book from Ernest Becker way back in the day, and the section on neuroticism, or how psychology is taking over from religion, and such broader societal topics you can read about here: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/notes/the-denial-of-death-by...
It's quite some brutal and heavy reading, but then again, if it helps you understand the condition better then it's for the best I guess...
I think adding a performative aspect to a lot of things sort of kills the joy in doing them.
For like a year I didn't really tell anyone I had a website. It was always fun to work on, because I did it for myself when I was inspired. Then it got out, and now there's a lot more pressure.
Writing because you feel you ought to because you haven't in a few months is about the least inspiring thing I know. That's just a chore.
I quite deliberately don't put like or comment features on my website to sort of prevent this. Means on average I don't get a lot of interaction, since the minimum bar to interaction is sending me an email.
This! Our society as a whole push us toward performing aiming to produce more, to consume more again and over again. We don't do things because we like them of we want to have fun. We do these things to perform, gain wealth, visibility, status. Such approach steer us away from the innate human need of exploring, playing and mastering for the sake of it, which, surprise surprise, it is what make human happy.
That so true but unfortunately it takes many freedoms to able to do this.
Freedom from financial worries, freedom from the worry of what others think, freedom from the worries of not knowing for what it will be good for (to explore).
We do this as children since all those freedoms are given. It is hard to do when one starts out in society that places so many expectations on one.
Yes, I think there is a risk in doing things publicly. You can get stuck in this loop of topping your last performance. We may need validation or criticism to improve. But improvement is not the only thing that matters. For me, enjoyment is more important; I can be quite happy making things that I never show anyone else, and obligations can quickly kill the joy. On the other hand, sometimes enjoyment falters because of stagnation. It is a tricky line to walk, with traps on both sides.
This reminds me of the pottery class parable from Art & Fear. At the beginning of a pottery class the teacher divides the class into two groups. One group is to be graded purely on the quantity of pots they create, the other group solely on the quality (or, make one perfect pot). At the end of the class the group that focused on quantity had produced better results.
Somewhat counterintuitively those that riff and just try a lot of different things get better over time - exactly what the author says makes them happiest. But perhaps we're all just a little shy about doing that in public, and pushing past that can a challenge.
Epictetus has a wonderful quote. He is talking about moral / philosophical improvement specifically but I find it more broadly applicable when overly high expectations paralyse me from doing a thing:
"What then? Because I have no natural gifts, shall I on that account give up my discipline? Far be it from me! Epictetus will not be better than Socrates; but if only I am not worse, that suffices me. For I shall not be a Milo, either, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property; nor, in a word, is there any other field in which we give up the appropriate discipline merely from despair of attaining the highest."
If you find a good modern translation (Robin Hard is good), I emphatically recommend reading the discourses. Don't cheap out and suffer through some stuffy 19th century translation.
At the other end of the spectrum, I've suffered through some overly-simplified/modernized translations of fiction (e.g. Dostoevsky's the Gambler) that was complete butchery, but I guess this is less likely to occur with non-fiction.
Stoicism in general has aged very well. When I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, I was amazed at how relevant the thing still is, even though it’s 1.8K+ years old at this point.
It's often claimed that the Meditations are actually Marcus Aurelius's own words. When I traced the lineage of the text, the best I could find was something like several hundred years back with the primary text being possessed by the church. None of this takes away from the relevance of the text—it stands on its own.
Does anyone know of an accounting of the primary text which shows that it wasn't written by a monk or priest of the Catholic church?
I'm definitely no textual criticism expert, but I do have a book recommendation.
The Inner Citadel by Hadot is a great analysis of the Meditations. It explains extracts from the Meditations – such as references to certain people in Marcus's life – with facts we know about Marcus from other sources.
For me personally... While it could be an elaborate imitation, it would raise the question why Marcus espouses views that don't necessarily tie with Christian doctrine. Obviously something about the Meditations appealed to Christians of the time, but if they were inventing it whole cloth, they probably wouldn't have included only one reference to Christianity, which is arguably negative. (Book 2, chp3)
Just because you were of the cloth didn't mean you were a raving fundamentalist. Who else was going to house, feed, and protect you and allow you to read and think all day?
He has some Epicurean influence as well. In the early days they were both popular, then changes in religious sentiment and denunciation of Epicureanism as sensualism changed that. Stoicism is ingrained with comparatively more spirituality and austerity.
It’s funny, I’ve always heard great things about Meditations but I found it to be one of the least approachable books on stoicism. Perhaps I didn’t like the terse note format. On the other hand Seneca’s letters are extraordinary
It gives you a really solid framework for not worrying about why things happen and who they happen to. A very valuable skill indeed in our world where everywhere you look there is preventable misery. Modern indeed! It's no wonder it's so popular with tech workers.
Hum... It didn't age any well before it got a chance to age well.
It's coherent with modernity because we have are in a time where that mindset is popular, and since there are only a few alternatives, we are prone into cycling between them at random and revisit each one from time to time.
Eventually, it will pass, and it will become old and unfit again.
Discipline meaning “branch of knowledge,” or “area of work/study,” in this case. In the other sense (obedience/adherence to something), motivation is often considered temporary or fleeting. “Motivation gets you started, discipline keeps you going.”
Oooooh, oups my bad, I realize now I am on edge and chose to interpret the word in such a way that it reminded me of another post and I triggered myself. Guess it's time to unwind for the week-end and call it a day :).
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2004: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." (The troops who got blown up due to lack of armored vehicles might not have fully appreciated his brilliance.)
Troops enlist knowing they may die, not sure what your point is. There is no army that fights a prolonged conflict without loses, no equipment is perfect.
At the time there was a distinct shortage of armored vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many troops were dying in IED and RPG attacks, and they were forced to improvise additional armor in the field out of scrap metal. There are always risks in combat and casualties are inevitable, but in retrospect the Defense Department leadership could have done a lot more at the time to accelerate production and deployment of additional armored vehicles and kits.
That quote is damning to his legacy, whatever it might have been: we went to a war we started, that was unnecessary, and which will taint every history of the Bush administration.
I'll add to this a general take I have about "improving" the world: there is a metric ton of stuff to do in the world, and there aren't enough people to do it, and being the best at what you do is in no way necessary if your goal is to be useful or to produce meaningful things that make people's lives better.
There are so many problems in the world that aren't solved literally because nobody has solved them, because the scope is gigantic and the people available who want to work on them or who are willing to work on them is very small in comparison.
Many of those tasks aren't sexy, and they might not have broad appeal, but... I mean, I ported another person's gameboy emulator to a format that worked in NodeJS and had basically one API change so that you could run the project headlessly without a graphics stack, and so you could advance the emulator frame-by-frame after inspecting memory. It's a garbage project, I have no idea how emulators work. And yet, I've had people contact me on Discord and ask questions about it and go through support chats and thank me for building it.
Was I the best suited person to do that? No. Could pretty much anyone at all with any experience build a better end result then I did? Yes. Heck, it would be trivial for someone to jump in, fork my project and improve it. And yet. The very specific niche case I coded it for didn't have a solution, and then it did have a solution.
Sometimes that's enough. People underestimate how easy it is to be useful and to make the world better in small ways. It does not require you to perfect a skill, it just requires showing up and putting in some work and doing the best work that you can. And sometimes it means not asking "what's the biggest impact problem in the world", and instead asking "what's any problem that's close enough to me to solve that nobody is paying attention to?"
> I used to love X, but now it's been a few years since I've done X. What changed? At some point, everything got serious. [1]
> I started to only want to publish the best things, so I didn't publish at all. ...
> When I try to make the best thing, I become less happy, actually I become paralyzed. ...
> When I try to make the best thing, it feels different. It feels like I'm trying to prove something to someone instead of trying to discover something for myself. ... I'm just me, so I should make me things.
Pleasantly surprised to have chanced upon this piece of writing which has, in a few short paragraphs, captured a series of complex emotions I'd think are common among creators.
Practically I think it helps to be in touch with a community of creators who can offer support, guidance and empathy.
Personally I am far from mastering my emotions to the point where I'm comfortable putting my not-best creations up for public criticism/discussion while simultaneously recognizing the need to build up courage and wisdom to do so. I think for some this aversion partly stems from their upbringing's (family, education system, peer expectations) lack of openness/encouragement to exploration and failure to tolerate failure (failure comes hand in hand with exploration).
While eschewing failure appears to be of little detriment to the "cog in the machine", cultures that have yet figured out how to discuss, accept, and tolerate failures are destined to avoid innovation. People who are serious about creating/innovating should find means of coping with people who are overly critical/ dismissive of "not-best" iterative attempts.
Footnotes:
[1] Took the liberty of generalizing the author's post by replacing the act of publishing which was the author's original focus to "X" with the intention of having "X" being any activity.
I feel this. Often I work on one thing for a long time trying to make it the best thing ever. Iterations get slower and smaller or take longer and require more effort. Nice to work on new things carefree for the simple love of doing the work and enjoying early progress.
This isn't totally unique to software engineering (and broadly speaking knowledge, science and maybe even content in general) but I feel it's better placed here than anywhere else.
We're in a near global, near zero-marginal-cost environment.
If you build a broom that's mediocre, someone can still sweep with it and it's worth something.
In this realm though, if you build a mediocre version of something that already exists in a better form, it's likely worth nothing.
That shouldn't keep anyone from enjoying building mediocre things - which might be the only path to get into a position to build great things.
But it does make sense if your goal is to have an impact with the specific thing you're working on.
> In this realm though, if you build a mediocre version of something that already exists in a better form, it's likely worth nothing.
That is technically true, though realistically, many companies will spend money implementing mediocre projects. Alternatively, a company might lose their edge and slip into a mediocre mode after gaining great market share.
In other words, while in long-enough run, you are right that such companies will not "make it," they will happily pay mediocre salaries for mediocre programmers in the meantime. Consequently, "being a mediocre engineer" and "building mediocre things" is a sufficient and realistic career goal.
Depends on the marketing and advertising budget. Plenty of mediocre products have made their companies billions of dollars, and become hugely successful in their specific industries. It's very true that software engineering is a near zero cost, global environment, but that doesn't necessarily meant the best products win every time.
Got on reddit and took my activity as a part of learning process. Getting things out, discussing with like minded people is something I strive for. It got me into much useful mindset than "perfecting the products"
This was me as well. For a long time I put off writing my blog because I wanted to write something impactful/meaningful/substantial.
However, I came across one blog which had numerous entries, starting from when the author was in college until today. The blog entries were about emacs tips and tricks, clojure, and other software engineering topics. I found it because I was trying to setup tree-sitter for clojure/clojurescript. I was grateful for the blog, learned a thing or two, and thanked the author.
Anyway, what stood out to me was how almost all the blog entries, at least the earlier ones, was full of spelling and grammatical errors. Then it hit me. I'll never start writing something if I don't accept that most of the things I write will probably suck and will be read by no one.
Since then I've written a couple of entries for my blog. And while I don't expect anyone to read them, it has been a cathartic experience for me. It's somewhat similar to meditation in that regard.
It's the blog equivalent of shipping an MVP. The sooner you get something out there, the sooner you can start improving. After writing 100 articles, you will absolutely have improved a drastic amount. You'll be much more fluent, have worked out the kinks in your writing workflow, and have built a habit. And that's before we even get into any benefits that may or may not come from people reading what you wrote.
It is like meditation because it is self reflection in the form of writing, which it is equivalent to maintaining a journal, which science tell us helps in improving our emotions, and well-being.
The point of this blog is not that it gets read rather that it gets written.
That's what I wrote at the bottom of my blog when I started. Once that was there, I began to write what I wanted to write and not what I thought people want to read.
Couldn't agree more. The last couple of years were the same for me: will not post until I have of something impact or will not share my art unless it is just the way I like it but this year, I have just started putting stuff out.
Whether it is of any use to anyone or whether anyone will find my art good is beyond my control. I have just started putting stuff out which interests me and which makes me fulfilled.
One of my favorite English words is: kakorrhaphiophobia
Abnormal fear of failure
Kakorrhaphiophobia is an abnormal, persistent, irrational fear of failure. In clinical cases, it's debilitating: the fear of even the most subtle failure or defeat is so intense that it restricts a person from doing anything at all.
The author made a mistake. They defined "best" incorrectly, as something that is polished or up to some specific technical standard.
In terms of making things, the best should be more in line with being able to express yourself fully, not in terms of some pre-defined metric such as views or approval from the close-minded. Thus, a random spontaneous post can be much better than a well-researched one if it fulfils that criterion.
191 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadI find this desire to create the ‘best’ solution often results in analysis paralysis.
Better is to strive to iterate.
My solution will be: have 2 blogs. One strictly professional where you post HOWTOs, and another one where you post anything and everything.
http://sentience.lostbookofsales.com
My main website hasn’t seen any activity lately because of what you mention, and laziness…
Ohh, and one absolutely huge website where lots of people share their experiences is the followjng: https://www.storiedmind.com/start-here/
Spend some time around there, and particularly if you're of male sex, you'll probably find it extremely useful.
It's quite some brutal and heavy reading, but then again, if it helps you understand the condition better then it's for the best I guess...
For like a year I didn't really tell anyone I had a website. It was always fun to work on, because I did it for myself when I was inspired. Then it got out, and now there's a lot more pressure.
Writing because you feel you ought to because you haven't in a few months is about the least inspiring thing I know. That's just a chore.
I quite deliberately don't put like or comment features on my website to sort of prevent this. Means on average I don't get a lot of interaction, since the minimum bar to interaction is sending me an email.
Freedom from financial worries, freedom from the worry of what others think, freedom from the worries of not knowing for what it will be good for (to explore).
We do this as children since all those freedoms are given. It is hard to do when one starts out in society that places so many expectations on one.
There's an easy way to avoid this.
Burma-Shave.
Does anyone remember that?
Somewhat counterintuitively those that riff and just try a lot of different things get better over time - exactly what the author says makes them happiest. But perhaps we're all just a little shy about doing that in public, and pushing past that can a challenge.
https://kottke.org/20/12/the-credibility-is-in-the-details
Another similar story revolves around graduates from Yale/Harvard that set goals vs. those that didn't. Again, that story is not true either:
https://ask.library.yale.edu/faq/175224
"What then? Because I have no natural gifts, shall I on that account give up my discipline? Far be it from me! Epictetus will not be better than Socrates; but if only I am not worse, that suffices me. For I shall not be a Milo, either, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property; nor, in a word, is there any other field in which we give up the appropriate discipline merely from despair of attaining the highest."
If you find a good modern translation (Robin Hard is good), I emphatically recommend reading the discourses. Don't cheap out and suffer through some stuffy 19th century translation.
Does anyone know of an accounting of the primary text which shows that it wasn't written by a monk or priest of the Catholic church?
The Inner Citadel by Hadot is a great analysis of the Meditations. It explains extracts from the Meditations – such as references to certain people in Marcus's life – with facts we know about Marcus from other sources.
For me personally... While it could be an elaborate imitation, it would raise the question why Marcus espouses views that don't necessarily tie with Christian doctrine. Obviously something about the Meditations appealed to Christians of the time, but if they were inventing it whole cloth, they probably wouldn't have included only one reference to Christianity, which is arguably negative. (Book 2, chp3)
It's coherent with modernity because we have are in a time where that mindset is popular, and since there are only a few alternatives, we are prone into cycling between them at random and revisit each one from time to time.
Eventually, it will pass, and it will become old and unfit again.
"discipline", hu, not motivation ? Duly noted and pointed out :)
edit: oops, no more internet for me today :).
Robert Watson Watt wrote in 1999: "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes."
Voltaire wrote in 1770: "A wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of the good."
Montesquieu wrote in 1726: "The better is the mortal enemy of the good."
Shakespeare wrote in 1606: "Were it not sinful then, striving to mend, to mar the subject that before was well?" (don't fix what ain't broke)
Chinese proverb says: "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."
There are so many problems in the world that aren't solved literally because nobody has solved them, because the scope is gigantic and the people available who want to work on them or who are willing to work on them is very small in comparison.
Many of those tasks aren't sexy, and they might not have broad appeal, but... I mean, I ported another person's gameboy emulator to a format that worked in NodeJS and had basically one API change so that you could run the project headlessly without a graphics stack, and so you could advance the emulator frame-by-frame after inspecting memory. It's a garbage project, I have no idea how emulators work. And yet, I've had people contact me on Discord and ask questions about it and go through support chats and thank me for building it.
Was I the best suited person to do that? No. Could pretty much anyone at all with any experience build a better end result then I did? Yes. Heck, it would be trivial for someone to jump in, fork my project and improve it. And yet. The very specific niche case I coded it for didn't have a solution, and then it did have a solution.
Sometimes that's enough. People underestimate how easy it is to be useful and to make the world better in small ways. It does not require you to perfect a skill, it just requires showing up and putting in some work and doing the best work that you can. And sometimes it means not asking "what's the biggest impact problem in the world", and instead asking "what's any problem that's close enough to me to solve that nobody is paying attention to?"
> I started to only want to publish the best things, so I didn't publish at all. ...
> When I try to make the best thing, I become less happy, actually I become paralyzed. ...
> When I try to make the best thing, it feels different. It feels like I'm trying to prove something to someone instead of trying to discover something for myself. ... I'm just me, so I should make me things.
Pleasantly surprised to have chanced upon this piece of writing which has, in a few short paragraphs, captured a series of complex emotions I'd think are common among creators.
Practically I think it helps to be in touch with a community of creators who can offer support, guidance and empathy.
Personally I am far from mastering my emotions to the point where I'm comfortable putting my not-best creations up for public criticism/discussion while simultaneously recognizing the need to build up courage and wisdom to do so. I think for some this aversion partly stems from their upbringing's (family, education system, peer expectations) lack of openness/encouragement to exploration and failure to tolerate failure (failure comes hand in hand with exploration).
While eschewing failure appears to be of little detriment to the "cog in the machine", cultures that have yet figured out how to discuss, accept, and tolerate failures are destined to avoid innovation. People who are serious about creating/innovating should find means of coping with people who are overly critical/ dismissive of "not-best" iterative attempts.
Footnotes:
[1] Took the liberty of generalizing the author's post by replacing the act of publishing which was the author's original focus to "X" with the intention of having "X" being any activity.
We're in a near global, near zero-marginal-cost environment.
If you build a broom that's mediocre, someone can still sweep with it and it's worth something. In this realm though, if you build a mediocre version of something that already exists in a better form, it's likely worth nothing.
That shouldn't keep anyone from enjoying building mediocre things - which might be the only path to get into a position to build great things. But it does make sense if your goal is to have an impact with the specific thing you're working on.
That is technically true, though realistically, many companies will spend money implementing mediocre projects. Alternatively, a company might lose their edge and slip into a mediocre mode after gaining great market share.
In other words, while in long-enough run, you are right that such companies will not "make it," they will happily pay mediocre salaries for mediocre programmers in the meantime. Consequently, "being a mediocre engineer" and "building mediocre things" is a sufficient and realistic career goal.
On one side, it is "just ship it".
On the other side, "internet is so full of outdated advice".
I would sum this up as: "Don't let perfect be the enemy of done."
Which is a really good advice.
For a minute I thought this is an article from the Ghost corporate blog. Would be super weird tbh.
However, I came across one blog which had numerous entries, starting from when the author was in college until today. The blog entries were about emacs tips and tricks, clojure, and other software engineering topics. I found it because I was trying to setup tree-sitter for clojure/clojurescript. I was grateful for the blog, learned a thing or two, and thanked the author.
Anyway, what stood out to me was how almost all the blog entries, at least the earlier ones, was full of spelling and grammatical errors. Then it hit me. I'll never start writing something if I don't accept that most of the things I write will probably suck and will be read by no one.
Since then I've written a couple of entries for my blog. And while I don't expect anyone to read them, it has been a cathartic experience for me. It's somewhat similar to meditation in that regard.
Note to self: Gotta do that, too.
That's what I wrote at the bottom of my blog when I started. Once that was there, I began to write what I wanted to write and not what I thought people want to read.
Absolutely. A great blog is about the thoughts and ideas it puts forth, not really about how well they are written.
And, perhaps paradoxically, what results when bloggers write this way is usually great reading.
Whether it is of any use to anyone or whether anyone will find my art good is beyond my control. I have just started putting stuff out which interests me and which makes me fulfilled.
https://youtu.be/WRS9Gek4V5Q
Abnormal fear of failure
Kakorrhaphiophobia is an abnormal, persistent, irrational fear of failure. In clinical cases, it's debilitating: the fear of even the most subtle failure or defeat is so intense that it restricts a person from doing anything at all.
https://joshkaufman.net/fear-of-failure/
In terms of making things, the best should be more in line with being able to express yourself fully, not in terms of some pre-defined metric such as views or approval from the close-minded. Thus, a random spontaneous post can be much better than a well-researched one if it fulfils that criterion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good
The answer.
Seth Godin: "Just ship it."