2024
- Fixing things that are transparently accepted pays off / “fix the gun that shoots you in the foot”
- Contextualising the trade-off between quality and pace
- Deeply knowing your tooling will always pays off / “sharpening the axe”
- Difference between real complexity and incidental complexity
- Understanding bugs one layer deeper
- Learn more from shipping imperfect code early than waiting for it to be perfect
Currently reading: The Iliad by Homer 📚
Taking a deep breath on my Xmas book (actually the translation is supposed to be super accessible)
Currently reading: Strange Labyrinth by Will Ashon 📚this is so good, especially for anyone like me who is interested in NE London/Essex, at once banal but also full of history and contradictions
Neovim makes me feel like a fresh young dev and at same time very old
Currently reading: The Shortest History of Greece: The Odyssey of a Nation from Myth to Modernity (Shortest History) by James Heneage 📚when in er, Greece
Highly recommend reading Programming Advice I’d Give To Myself 15 Years Ago by Marcus Buffet
Tasty morsels in here, including…
via the changelog newsletter (also recommend!)
Going to take a while to sink in that some normal people are in charge of the UK now.
Current obsession: everything sold on niwaki.com 🔪 🇯🇵
No wind so kids had a paddle boarding battle instead
Currently reading: Howards End by E. M. Forster 📚
Picking this up again after not finishing it many years ago
Something so satisfyingly traditional about a summer F1 race, in Europe, starting at 2pm.
Unspoken expectations are pre meditated resentments
Neil Strauss
Innovation is not linear, example #n
Absolutely loved this 2020 article about Acorn, once a British computer company in the 80s and 90s you maybe haven’t heard of, and how it went on to influence chip designs in the devices we use everyday.
Tickles the bones of any British developer of a certain vintage (such as myself).
How an obscure British PC maker invented ARM and changed the world
It’s nice to just take a moment and reflect: because the British felt they were being left behind by the computer revolution, they decided to make TV shows about computers. To do that, they needed a computer, so an underdog British company came up with a good one. And when that little company needed to build a faster CPU, because Intel couldn’t be bothered to answer their calls, they made their own. This in-house CPU just so happened to not use much power or make much heat, which got the attention of Apple, who used it to power what most people consider to be its biggest failure. From there, of course, the company went on to take over the world.
🍎 what an line (often misattributed to Leonardo da Vinci, apparently). I see the font everywhere in B2C websites now.
I love the smell of admin in the morning
Heroku - positive developments
Positive things coming from Heroku re support for cloud native buildpacks and rebasing on Kubernetes. Their emerging AI support also interesting.
Feels significant given the sense of bitrot over the last few years, especially around docker and slow dyno scaling.
Good luck to new CEO who is clearly on a mission to bring Kubernetes in, although please hide most of it from customers!
Pompidou, Paris
Progress is fixing the problems of the previous generation, while also creating new ones.
Except nothing is ever really new.
As in life, as in code.
This excellent post is a reminder of the merits of “boring tech” in most companies of the world who aren’t Big Tech or AI startups antonz.org/stupid