🛬Back from Spain. Vermouth de grifo, Hieronymus Bosch and Matisse, old buildings, and public green spaces are pretty great.
📚Still at it with Power Broker and the first six Dune novels. Larry McMurtry essays are making me a little nostalgic for the idea of Texas (but not contemporary Texas itself). Contemplating adding the giant book of all the Montaigne essays to this list.😎
🎥 Hoppers was fun and feels like possibly a return to form for Pixar. Mandolorian and Grogu isn’t the best or worst Star Wars, but it is fun and hits all the expectations.
📺 Rooster is great if you’ve ever fancied becoming a sharp-witted author and visiting professor in New England. Widow’s Bay is great if ever you’ve wondered what being the mayor of an obscure but definitely cursed island in the northeast might look like.
⭐I should call out Hacks here. That is how you end a series, a comedy in particular. I will now enthusiastically recommend this show to everyone as The Ideal Comedy television series. If you haven’t, go watch it. Five seasons, no skips or lulls.
Fits on a floppy, great idea:
Software has lost its way. Apps that once shipped on a single floppy disk now demand gigabytes of your storage, minutes of your time, and far too much of your patience. We accepted this gradual bloat, but that’s not progress.
Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline. The floppy disk is the measuring stick: 1.44 MB. If the software that ran entire businesses could fit in that space, then a modern, focused, single-purpose tool certainly can.
Yep, these criteria make the good stuff:
Launches instantly. Faster startup, nothing unnecessary to load.
Does one thing well. Focused features, fewer bugs, software that lasts.
But, I disagree on some details:
Native only. No dependency bloat, every line of code earns its place.
I usually don’t feel like “native” is crucial these days. Whatever your definition of native is, it’s not a prerequisite for building great software. Even for desktop/mobile platform development using the vendor-intended language and frameworks, the downsides are…a lot, lately.
You can create software that is fast and focused with any language or stack if you’re careful. So, I might replace this one with something about attention to details and care for the craft.
Runs on older systems. Older devices deserve love too.
I love it when this happens. It’s easier to make it work outside native environments, too!
I think the applications are less important than the data. I’d change this one to something about the ability to store one’s own data on a floppy-sized local file instead of in an opaque cloud or a row in a SaaS database somewhere.
Maybe the big idea is that the application and data should fit on the floppy. 🤔
Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger is underrated. Twenty five years later, still no skips.
Previously in tech, the joke was that Microsoft’s org chart was a bunch of divisions in a Mexican standoff.
Fast-forward to now, instead of pointing guns at each other, every division at Microsoft is yoked to the other via KPIs and bonus allocations. None can maneuver freely enough to ship excellent software. They all have to prioritize “synergy” (Copilot everything!) and integration instead.
In retrospect, at least the drama of a standoff yielded the turnarounds of distributed systems and open source work in the 2010s.
