My favorites of 2021
Gotta sneak this one in under the wire, otherwise it’s just a sparkling list of things.
Movies
Summer of Soul - Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone. Heck yes.
Dune - loved the world building here and I’m willing to look past the decision to split this into two movies.
Somewhere You Feel Free - I didn’t realize Wildflowers was so pivotal for Tom Petty. Made me want to get in my car and listen to the whole thing, which I did and greatly enjoyed.
Shows
Only Murders in the Building - is there a greater showbiz duo than Martin Short and Steve Martin?
Hacks - inside baseball on standup comedy plus Jean Smart is 👨🍳
What We Do in the Shadows - a mockumentary sitcom expanding its world, taking chances with changing things up, and absolutely nailing the landing.
Albums
Funkadelic, Maggot Brain - hits more emotional points than I’d ever expect from a George Clinton thing.
Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain - nudging into Very Intellectual, nearly classical, jazz, Davis is at least as good as Mingus was at this.
Prince, Welcome 2 America - recorded ten years ago, but it absolutely works today.
Books
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon - I finished re-reading the whole Baroque Trilogy plus this one and they surpassed my recollection of how good they are.
Adrian Newey, How To Build a Car - a memoir on designing three decades of winning Formula 1 cars.
Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist - enjoyed the whole trilogy on writing motivation.
My best writing
“Rationalize and solve” doesn’t help someone who is venting
One priority is like wind in the sails
My best tweeting
On emerging from a winter storm
The Red Hot Chili Peppers vs. no shoes/shirt policies
Proof of work is a better idea for sustaining recurring meetings than for software currency
The Beatles 🤝 Timeless leadership lessons
The Economist, The Beatles and the art of teamwork:
Take the role of Ringo, for example. When he is not actually playing, the band’s drummer spends most of his time either asleep or looking bewildered. When the other three musicians bicker, Ringo smiles beatifically. To a casual observer, he might appear dispensable. But musically, nothing works without him, and as a team member he softens conflict and bridges divides.
More teams need Ringo(s), those who make it work without soaking up emotional energy.
Managers who think that building esprit de corps requires a separate activity from work—here-comes-the-fun time, set aside for axe-throwing or gif battles or something equally ghastly—are missing a fundamental point. The highest-performing teams derive the greatest satisfaction not from each other, but from the work they do together.
The Beatles weren’t excellent due to vacationing together in India. They were exceptional because of what they built together, both because of and sometimes despite each other. So it goes with teams.
A more evocative word for mega-corps
Kevin Kelly, The Third Way:
Huge monopolistic companies running platforms like Facebook and Amazon are not mere corporations, nor are they governments, even though they have many of the attributes of both government and corporations. They are a new third thing: platforms. We should not expect to regulate platforms like companies, nor expect them to behave like governments. We need a third category of rights and responsibilities for them.
Platform-principalities. Bank-states (which, oddly enough, includes airlines). Energy-sovereigns (British Petroleum, Exxon). Media-empires (Disney, Universal).
We require a better term for companies that have grown so extraordinarily. Those like Apple that run international diplomacy programs with China. Those like Amazon or Google, that regard their employees as de-facto citizens. Those like airlines that can print a currency (in the form of loyalty programs).
And, as Kelly notes, we should look at them in an entirely different way. We shouldn’t treat Amazon the same we treat a local retailer, just like we don’t treat your local HOA the same way we treat the European Union. “Platforms” is a good start, but a word that connects the tremendous influence modern mega-corps have with the power that Standard Oil or The British East India Corporation had at their apex would be even better!
Great albums: Endtroducing
Endtroducing is my canonical example of a revealing album. I heard “Building Steam With a Grain of Sand” completely accidentally in a college business writing class, of all places. A fellow student used it in their presentation, ironically. Afterwards, I asked “what was that?!”, my mind still blown.
I downloaded it and was immediately like “wow”. A whole new angle on music became apparent. I was vaguely aware that hip-hop quotes other music, but didn’t really understand sampling. I’m just old enough that hip-hop has always been a thing. But this was so different, like an other-worldly quote-fest. But, in a good way. A great way, even.
I later learned Endtroducing is notable in that it was made manually. Ableton didn’t exist, so if you wanted to change tempos on samples, you had to pitch correct them yourself. You didn’t have to tape splice anymore, thankfully. But it was still far tricker than making this album would have been today.
This album would spark many musical explorations. Mash-ups like A Night at the Hip-Hopera. The Roots, J Dilla, Soulquarians, and a myriad of other artists. “Building Steam With a Grain of Sand” sparked amazement, curiosity, and appetite for more music I was previously unaware of.
Great albums: Beethoven Symphonies No. 7 & 8
These are my favorite of Beethoven’s “more approachable” symphonies. Symphony No. 9 is my favorite, but it requires a bit more context to take in. Further, it’s a solid seventy minutes of music, ramping up the difficulty of attention span.
Symphony No. 7 (hereafter Seven, etc.) is my favorite outside of Nine, which is sort of its own pivotal thing. It’s a definitive no-skip symphony. Every movement is sublime in its own way. The first movement for its vigor and speed. The second for its solemn opening that builds and builds into a big, emotional moment. The third for its frolic. The final movement for feeling several minutes of emphatic, resolving punctuation and resolution.
Symphony No. 8 has a wonderful opening. The structure and melodic quality is closer to what came before Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1. It sounds like a nod back to Haydn or Mozart, Beethoven’s predecessors. But the harmony and orchestration is distinctly of Beethoven. It’s a great bridge from Beethoven’s Very Good symphonies to his Amazing Symphony Number 9, The One with Ode to Joy (not the official title as recognized by music historians).
These two symphonies fit together really well on CDs. So, you can find basically any conductor/ensemble you prefer performing it. I listened to the Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic version when I was playing music in high school. I’ve found this piece easy to hear little variations between conductors, so if that’s your thing, queue up a few interpretations and go hunting for little distinctions!
What makes a great album
There are four-ish kinds of great albums, in my mind:
- Pivotal albums: the artist or genre was distinctly different before and after the album came out. e.g., classical music was distinctly different after Beethoven, particularly Symphony No. 9
- Revealing albums: pivotal to my perspective or knowledge of music. e.g., my understanding of hip-hop was distinctly different after I heard DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing
- Consistent albums: no track justifies skipping, you can listen to the thing end to end, every time. e.g., Tom Petty’s The Last DJ
- Under-rated albums: albums that are outshined by their extraordinary peers or contemporaries. Most folks know that Born to Run is great, and all other Springsteen albums (generally) rank below it. But that shouldn’t let otherwise excellent and out-of-sequence later albums like The Rising or Human Touch go unnoticed.
The finest transit system you’ll ever find in a swamp
Imagine all the busses, boats, monorails, trains, and gondolas in Disney World as (quasi-public) transit system. Then make a transit-style map of said system. It’s fun, but a little dismal once I think about it.
Walt Disney World has significantly better transit than most cities in the US.
America’s fantasy world, it turns out, is a place you can get around without getting into a car.
Definitely a top 10 reason (but probably not top 5) I enjoy and find Walt Disney World so intriguing.
Adjacent: if the best transit system many middle/upper-class Americans will experience is a rigorously-top-down, corporate quasi-state, well, that’s a pretty sick burn on capitalism.
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation” — Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogotá
Better know a standard library
Read your current/new language’s standard library. Highly recommended for developers of all experience levels. You’ll pick up the idioms, you’ll discover something useful. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder if they’re making a sequel!
My favorites are prelude.hs (which, sadly, does not seem to be the file that Haskell bootstraps itself from any more 🤔) and Rubinius’ implementation of Enumerable in Ruby.
(The reference is from The Colbert Report, which is a fun-but-dated thing to know.)
Very famous white guys from history who were not famous for, but known to bite pianos: Thomas Edison and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Offloading fast operations in Ruby by data structure
Noteflakes: A Compositional Approach to Optimizing the Performance of Ruby Apps — the idea is to offload “inner-loop”-type operations from Ruby to C-extensions. The clever twist is this happens via data-structure-as-language. Ruby being Ruby, you can wrap a DSL around the data structure generation to reduce the context switch from Ruby to offloaded operations.
There’s precedent to the approach: if you squint, it’s not unlike offloading the math for computer graphics or machine learning to a GPU. That said, the speed-up is unlikely to be as dramatic.
I hope to hear more of this approach in the future!
Before the Porsche 911, there was the 356…and the 904. It a looker!
Back in the ’60s, you could buy a street-legal version of Porsche’s top racing car. And just, ya know, drive it on the road! They are pretty pricey today, but at least the auctions have great photos.
Don’t be spooky
It’s possibly the best advice for managers I've given so far. When you’re communicating with your team, lead with context and reassurance. Never message someone on your team, "let's talk when you get a minute". That's void of information and scary as heck!
I have to remind myself of this when I'm rushing. It's faster to ping someone to arrange a synchronous talk than it is to write out what I need to say and cover all the bases. But that doesn’t give me license to skip all the context. Broad strokes are okay. An information vacuum is not okay.
Accidental spookiness invites story-crafting. Minds race. Lacking information or context, we tell stories. They often aren’t happy stories, regardless of how good your relationship with the team. We humans are better at convincing ourselves to fear something (survival instinct) than the other way around.
Avoiding spookiness reduces the chance of people telling themselves negative stories. Context and clarity counteract reading the tea leaves and world building. Even more important, it prevents people from pre-gaming the conversation. That way, they don’t prepare for a conversation that happened in their heads, instead of one that’s about to happen. (Avoiding pre-gaming is important on both sides of the conversation, as it turns out.)
A corollary to “don’t be spooky” — deliver constructive but critical feedback as close to the “original sin” as possible. Receiving feedback that you did poorly weeks after the fact is disconcerting. It can lead the recipient to wondering what other things they’re doing poorly but won’t hear about until later. Which leads to story-crafting, and the whole negative cycle starts a-new.
Give your team enough context to pre-game conversation based on the real context, not conjecture. And don’t hold on to feedback for “that perfect time”.
Would you pay more for a noisy computer?
Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense, Matt Webb:
I kinda miss the days when I could hear the hard drive of my computer. If it was taking a while to response (say, when opening a big file), there was a difference between the standard whirr chugga chugga ch-ch-ch chugga seek pattern, and a broken kik kik kik. And you’d have an idea how long loading a file from disk should take, versus the silent “thinking” time afterwards.
…
The point is not the sound. You barely noticed the sound.
The point is that you felt you like were in psychic communion with the workings of the computer.
1.
Watch and car enthusiast/collectors go wild for these qualities. They go on and on about the shape of the Jaguar E-Type, the roar of an American V-8 engine, the howl of a Formula 1 V-10 engine, the smell of new watch strap leather, the classic looks of an Omega Speedmaster or Rolex Daytona.
And then there’s the “save the manuals” crowd! Despite knowing that modern transmissions are more effective than any human, they desire the involvement of controlling a major interaction between the car’s engine and the rubber meeting the road.
Another crowd revels in and/or yearns to own one of the “last analog” of some sort. The Last Analog Ferrari/Porsche/BMW/etc. It’s a desire for a sensory experience at the expense of outright speed/efficiency, a True Scotsman argument, and a lot of nostalgia. It’s also nice that “analog” cars can’t become haunted my misbehaving computers or software.
2.
Computers (and their distant cousins, the electric car and smartwatch) are left only to simulate these qualities. A smartwatch could display the same information as an Omega Speedmaster and replicate its design down to pixel perfection. It will never catch the light like a physical watch will. Porsche’s Taycan electric car makes its own kind of howl (if you pay slightly more for the option), but it pales to any era of their gasoline engines.
A lot of these watch and car qualities come down to nostalgia. On paper, a CO2 producing, endlessly vibrating machine full of moving parts that are going to break is inferior to the electric car designs of 2021. What we need is a new sort of romance as we transition from moving parts to entirely solid state machines.
Computers could make us feel something. They should tap us once if something works, or tap us a few times when something needs our attention. We should be able to tell they’re working hard, or hardly working, by the sounds of their insides clicking, whirring, or churning. Data and files that have gone untouched for a while should have a faded patina.
In particular, there’s room for moving from Apple Store austerity/minimalism to color and form-follows-function ornamentation.
3.
Cultured Code’s Things is my go-to example. They’ve gone to the trouble of re-implementing large swaths of the UI toolkit Apple provides on their platforms. The attention to detail shines through. Every action has the slightest haptic feedback. Swiping and tapping through the UI has a hint of physical heft, as though there’s a bit of momentum to scrolling around, opening up a task, or flipping over to the navigation “sidebar”. It’s the best use of animation I’ve seen on the platform. It’s still quite austere, but at least there’s a feeling that it’s not a UI floating in Jony Ive’s featureless, zero-gravity void!
I suppose the jury’s out whether patina, “this is my computer, none are like it”, and collectability are out the window too. Maybe this whole crypto-token thing will bear fruit without extending humanity’s use of coal power far beyond its past-due date.
4.
There’s another angle here. To continue the car metaphor, most people don’t want a sports car or muscle car. They don’t even want an SUV with a muscle-car engine. They want something reliable, convenient, and affordable.
Folks mostly want appliances. Solve this problem for me with a minimum of showmanship or drama. That is, they want a quiet and unassuming car or computer. Normal operation should make no sound at all. Worrisome noises should only happen if things worsened after warning the owner and the machine remained quiet.
Solid state computers and cars are unavoidable, as futures go. There’s no reason to go back to combustion, cooling fans, and extensively spinning disks. Computers as appliance are largely here and largely preferred. Watches are in the midst of that transition. Cars are next on the wave of change.
5.
Maybe this all comes down to computers-as-invisible-fabric-of-life vs. computers-as-central-tool. Glass walls that show off the mainframe/server/datacenter room (not unlike glass engine covers on McLaren/Ferrari/Lamborghini supercars!) vs. servers sequestered behind anonymous drywall or offsite completely “in the cloud”.
Someday, we’ll get past computers as we know them now. Then we’ll have “computer-punk”. Like steampunk before it, we’ll imagine life if we’d advanced in knowledge and ethics but not technology.
Probably, if I see that future, I’ll have some fleet of computers, mostly invisible, which I use as my “daily driver” for getting stuff done. But if current trends continue, I’ll spend a few hours a week enjoying a “weekend computer” that is clack-y, slightly anachronistic or nostalgic, and gets noticeably huffy when I ask too much of it.
Into the Miles-verse
I’m kicking off a new “listening project” - Miles Davis. Inspired by A Beginner’s Guide to Miles Davis, I’m going to grind my way through the Miles-verse in chronological order. For posterity, my favorites from before this journey are Sketches of Spain and Bitches Brew.
(I think Kind of Blue is properly rated but not noteworthy because it’s the jazz album that everyone knows and reveres, whether they like jazz or not. And, rightly so.)
Previously in listening projects:
Circa 2008, I got a little bored/annoyed with what I was listening to and decided to play through all the songs in my iTunes library, in order by artist. Discoveries (to me) lurking therein: Bruce Springsteen Born to Run, Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense. Getting through the B-artists was a real endeavor. I have a lot of Ben Folds, Beethoven, Billy Joel, and Brahms albums.
Circa 2016, I listened to all of the Radiohead albums in chronological order. I’d previously really only known them as “the Creep guys” and “the dudes who released an album of MP3s way before everyone else”. (But probably not before Prince, who also performed “Creep”, eventually.)
An exercise in CPU design, in the small
Welcome to the OPC series of CPUs, where everything fits on one page - one page each for specification, emulation, HDL. For details see the OPC Project web pages.
Computer architecture, Verilog code to implement the design, simulation and testing of the design, writing an assembler and assembly to test the system. All within my favorite kind of constraint - fitting each component on one page.
They’re not particularly useful machines, but they do de-mystify the bridge from electrical engineering to software engineering.
When I was an intern at Texas Instruments, the tools for this were enormously complex, slow, and expensive. Whole clusters of Sun machines set aside for simulating the upcoming designs and verifying they did the right thing in software. Not to mention the tremendous effort of verifying the design that was coded was possible to build in the company’s chip fabrication plants and processes.
That this depth of tooling is now available to hobbyists would have blown me away in 2002.
Math-y and/or word-y
I'm a developer who (formerly) recoiled at math, especially calculus and matrices.
Instead, I thought, I loved the language-y parts of software development. Programming languages, little languages, domain-specific languages. Designing the names, concepts, and relationships in APIs. Domain-driven design, jargon, modeling. I thought of myself as more of a writer-y developer than a math-y developer.
I suspect that I’m not alone amongst programmers in favoring liberal arts over sciences. Further, I suspect that over the past two decades the number of programmers with science-y backgrounds has steadily declined.
But, it turns out I do a lot more math than I thought! SQL is set theory. Layout is math (mostly about centering things 🤷). State machines reduce many kinds of logic problems to simple, but math-y, flowcharts. Almost every bit of programming one does is logic, which is, you guessed it, math.
And that only covers web apps! Computer graphics is a heck of a lot of trigonometry (and whatever is involved in calculating diffusion of light). Machine learning is lots of statistics plus a little calculus. Type checking in compilers is category and/or set theory.
The flip side is also true: developers who think they only enjoy the math-y parts do a lot more language/liberal artsy stuff than they think. They've got opinions about language constructs, whether a method name is good or not, if an API is easy to use correctly or not. All "soft" non-math-y constructs!
When it comes down to it, it's more likely that poor math education let me down than I am fundamentally not a math person. Related: Why Math Class Is Boring—and What to Do About It:
There are two types of people in the world: those who enjoyed mathematics class in school, and the other 98% of the population.
Following up on recommendations, for the forgetful
It’s hard to land music, books, etc. recommendations from friends because timing is everything. The best case is a recommendation for a thing I didn’t know of and it’s precisely what I need to read or watch at the exact moment. Beyond that, it’s likely I’m reading some 900-page book (humble-brag) or deep into a peak television series (humble-brag) that I’m trying to finish before my attention wanders.
I’ve come up with a couple of ways to more immediately act on recommendations, so they aren’t for naught:
- Download a Kindle/iBooks sample right away and read the first several pages of whatever they recommended. If I’m into it maybe I’ll stick with it. At least, it’s on my backlog of books until I forgot why it’s there and delete it (i.e., 2-3 times a decade).
- Watch the first several minutes of the thing on Netflix or whatever. See if it’s any good instead of watching random YouTube videos recommended by the algorithm.
For everything else, there’s always the long, scary list of things I’d read/watch/play/listen to if we stopped doing billionaires and gave everyone a living wage. 🤷♂️
Craig Mod’s simple search
Craig Mod, Fast, instant client side search for Hugo static site generator:
I believe Fast Software is the Best Software and wanted keyboard-based, super fast search for my homepage / online collection of essays. This method was highly inspired by Sublime Text’s CMD-P/CMD-shift-P method of opening files / using functions.
I love that this is a Gist, an idea floating around. Not to reuse wholesale but to adapt and make your own. More like a recipe, less Professional Software Development 🤵♂️. Not packaged software, almost a thought-experiment wrought of relatively-accessible code incantations.
What makes an excellent design doc
Replicache Detailed Design(https://doc.replicache.dev/design):
Replicache runs alongside your existing application infrastructure. You keep your existing server-side stack and client-side frameworks. Replicache doesn’t take ownership of data, and is not the source of truth. Its job is to provide bidirectional sync between your clients and your servers. This makes it easy to adopt: you can try it for just a small piece of functionality, or a small slice of users, while leaving the rest of your application the same.
Conflicts are a fact of life when syncing, but they don’t have to be painful. Replicache rewinds and replays your transactions during sync, sort of like git rebase.
I haven’t used Replicache, but this design document makes me think it has the qualities that excite me when I discover infrastructural software:
- it solves a tricky problem (distributed application state)
- by compressing the problem down to essential concepts
- those concepts are solved in a way that I can imagine “how would I use this?”
- and writing clearly about that solution
“Rationalize and solve” doesn’t help someone who is venting
If you’re doing the whole servant leadership thing, you’re gonna hear some people venting frustrations. Yihwan Kim, When a 1:1 turns into a vent session:
As an engineering manager, I’m learning that a big part of my job (perhaps my only job) is to help people solve problems. I happen to enjoy solving problems myself. So it’s only natural that when someone starts venting, I want to rationalize the conversation, correct inaccuracies, and discuss actionable next steps.
I always have to remind myself: don’t.
Relatable. It’s easy to react to someone venting by rationalizing and solving. As Yihwan points out, that’s not the card to play here. The win condition for these is to 1) hear your colleague out and 2) help improve the cause of the vent if your teammate wants you to.