Adam Keys is Thinking

We live in the most amazing time for ideas. They’re all over the place. It’s never been easier to share them, and indeed they are shared at a phenomenal pace¹.

It’s so easy to find ideas that it’s a little difficult to squeeze our ideas into the noise. Plenty of folks will tell you how to “build an audience”, but I want to make it personal.

Build an audience with yourself!

Make room for your thoughts to exist in your head despite all the noise that exists in our modern world.

1. Clear mornings

I’m a morning person. I do my best work early in the day. Look at my calendar, you’ll see this. One giant, defensive block to focus in the morning and get stuff done. Please — do not schedule me in the morning²!

However, I’ve come to think there’s more to a good morning than a clear schedule. Having a clear mind, with stillness and lack of lingering stressors, helps a lot! If I wake up with something bouncing around in my head, seize it or solve it. Write it down to think it through or solve tension³ my brain has dwelled on overnight.

Going deeper into a clear mind reveals the absence of others. A truly spectacular morning of creativity correlates to (almost) exclusively thinking my thoughts. My ideas in my head⁴ — great! Someone else’s idea, via social media, television, books; promising, but likely not as good.

2. Attention machines

Among books, television, podcast, radio, etc., ideas via social media are particularly hard to avoid. I have to put a lot of discipline/energy into “don’t open socials, chats, emails, news, etc.” before 11:30am lest another idea trample over my idea.

Modern social media has evolved, in form and function, to bypass the smart part of our brains and go straight for the emotional and often irrational part. It’s the upsetting and frustrating ideas that stick with me when I use social media. Rarely do I open my laptop, read social media for a few minutes until a good idea comes up, and then close the laptop to go think about it.

The doom-scroll demands more scroll.

The upside is, we may also live in a moment where the abundance of ideas surfaced by attention machines comes into balance as alternatives to hyper-scaled social networks come into play. I’m hopeful that to a smaller extent, Robin Sloan’s words on de-leveraging from Twitter will start to ring true as Twitter, in particular, fades from prominence:

The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.

3. No retreat

The previous is not to imply that attention machines aren’t useful! I don’t want to Waldenpond or go full digital luddite. When I squint at it with optimism, some forms of social media look like a networked/distributed system attempting to reach a consensus⁵.

There are less intense attention machines that aren’t built around hyper-tuned engagement loops. Basically anything where I have a list of things to watch/read/enjoy is an attention machine: a Netflix watch list, YouTube subscriptions, Substack subscriptions, and the humble/old RSS reader. These don’t demand that I stay in a loop, thinking other people’s thoughts and consuming the surrounding ads. Which is useful because I want to get other people’s thoughts, but only on my terms.

I find that my thoughts are more interesting if I prime them with idea from specific authors via various primary sources, social networks and otherwise. It’s thrilling to discover new scenes, folks self-organizing into web-rings and networks and chats to think about or share the commonality and challenge of their work or hobby. Having that kind of energy bouncing around in my head tends to improve my ideas rather than dilute them like hyper-scaled social networks might.

Bottom line: keep using the web to find fascinating people and scenes, participate in a few of them.

4. Seize your thoughts

I return to A Precious Hour from Rands in Repose, a lot:

Each day I blocked off a precious hour to build something.

Every day. One hour. No matter what.

Every day? Yup. Including weekends.

An hour? Yup, 60 full minutes. More if I can afford it.

Doing what? The definition of “building a thing” is loose. All I know is that I get rid of my to-do list, I tuck the iPhone safely away, and if there is a door, I close it. Whether it’s an hour of Choose yourownadventure Wikipedia research, an intense writing session, or endlessly tinkering with the typography on the site, it’s an hour well spent.

Make the most of the mornings (afternoons, evenings, whenever it is for you). Work the thoughts I find compelling, not merely upsetting or prevalent. Share it with interesting people. That’s how an exciting life of thinking my own ideas happens⁶.

1. For better or worse! 😬🤷 ↩
2. This is as much a message to myself as anyone else. Too many times I’ve scheduled an appointment in the morning thinking “surely it will be fine this time” and surely enough current-me regrets the decisions of past-me. ↩
3. Usually: think it through by writing it down. ↩
4. What a concept! ↩
5. See also: Graph Minds. ↩
6. I think! ↩

Only Solve One New Problem At A Time, Ben Nadel:

The example he gives in the episode is "learning Golang". Understanding how to use Golang was a new problem for the company. As such, in order to start integrating Golang into their work, they applied it in the context of an already-solved problem: sending emails. This way, Golang was the "one thing" they were solving—the email-sending logic already existed in Ruby; and, they just had to port it over to a new application server.

Good advice for any developer at any experience level¹!

The ability to focus on one concern at a time is possibly the mark of a senior developer. It takes experience to ignore other factors as noise. It takes time to learn how to avoid tripping on distractions/side-quests. Distinguishing useful, new information from distraction and noise is the mark of a focused senior developer.

The trick for juniors, is they’re always learning more than one thing at a time, often on accident. They want to build a feature, but it requires a new library, and it requires learning the library. They went to start up my development server, but then something weird happens with Unix. It's the essential challenge of being a junior – they’re just getting started, so they’re always learning a couple of things at a time².

If I could be so bold as to add a corollary to the rule of "one new problem at a time", I'd suggest that if it can't be done incrementally, don't do it. Over the last 6-years, feature flags have revolutionized the way that I work. And, a majority-stake in that change is the fact that everything I do is now built and integrated incrementally. Until you've worked this way, it's hard to even articulate why this is so powerful. But, I literally can't imagine building anything of any significance without an incremental path forward.

Working incrementally: absolutely, more people should do this. Even seniors. Especially myself!

Now, the tables can turn. I’ve observed juniors who are more adept at working incrementally than seniors. Because they’re tripping over other tasks all the time, the junior has to work in smaller increments to make progress.

Perversely, a senior who can see the whole feature/change in their head is sometimes tempted to push the whole thing through in one (large) change. Developers who have learned³ to avoid pitfalls and gotchas sometimes have to relearn how to work incrementally.

I speak from experience! Working incrementally is something I consciously have to work towards. Conjuring a masterpiece into existence in a fury of git pushes and one pristine pull request feels good. On net, a big bang of development is a detriment to my team. An early pull request, small tactical commits, and a write-up to describe why and how I got there are more useful to align the team and spread ideas.

Previously: one priority is like wind in the sails.

1. I’m looking a this sentence again, double checking it, and yes this is a global pronouncement about programming and developers and yes I think it carries its weight↩
2. Or even worse, accidentally learning things that aren’t relevant to what they’re trying to tackle. Sometime, ask me how excited I was about Tcl/Tk in 1998, arguably several years past the apex of that language/toolkit. ↩
3. Often through the luck/privilege of having lots of time to practice/tinker at programming outside the job! ↩

The Bird hit another inflection point on Friday. Now, many people, myself included, are looking at alternatives or actively decamping¹. It was quite a thing to experience.

Several days before, I read a post about the value one can potentially get out of Twitter. On one hand, it may not age well². Network-effects will cause Twitter to lose “value” faster than it loses daily/weekly/monthly active users. On the other hand, thinking about how I might get tremendous value out of the next network is a useful thought experiment.

Herein, allow me to riff on how to get a surprising amount of professional value out of publishing to and participating in Twitter-like³ social networks.

The value proposition is two-fold:

• the ability to publish into other folks' attention streams (i.e., reputation building)
• a high-quality stream of information to adjust my own world view/model

On the publishing/write side: note that folks like Patrick, Simon, and Laura are Very Good at Twitter. They’ve been writing there for years, building a reputation. In particular, they form thoughts such that they travel and evolve well on Twitter in particular.

With a lot of practice, I could reach this level of operation. Building the reputation, of course, is about showing up consistently for months and years. A few months of rebuilding my Twitter routine and ‘practice’ and I’m out networking with the best.

In other words, use Twitter as a big professional networking tool⁴. Instead, the networking happens at the idea level. Contribute and participate in developing ideas and the network comes to you.

On the read side: I'm guessing anyone who enjoyed Twitter in 2022 and gets useful signal out of it is equipped with:

1. a well-curated list of mute-words⁵
2. bespoke user lists which focus the valuable discussion and reduce the din of a global social/information network
   

Throughout its history, Twitter was often adversarial. There’s a “main character” of the day. Many folks come solely to build them up or tear them down. Disagreeing parties come to dunk on each other. Occasionally, they directly engage, but social bubbles/fortifications are the norm.

Anyone who gets professional value out of Twitter ignores that aspect. 🤷🏻‍♂️ In particular, they are using Twitter itself (or well-considered 3rd party applications) to automate filtering out the noise⁶.

I’ve dabbled in setting up mute-words and curated, high-signal lists. It worked pretty well at various points in Twitter’s history, particularly in combination. Perversely, now that we’re possibly in the waning days of Twitter’s influence, I’ve got a pretty good setup for finding interesting, new-to-me ideas. Sometimes those ideas put my work, or even the world, in a better perspective. That’s valuable!

Bottom line: you get out of Twitter-like networks what you put into it. The better I write, work the network, choose your sources, and manage the flood of information, the more likely interesting/valuable things will come my way.

1. I feel like this happened at least twice before, probably circa 2015 and 2018? ↩
2. This started off as a thread that ended with this caveat: “Assuming that Twitter doesn't drastically regress under New Management.” Reader, it did indeed regress. ↩
3. Tumblr, Mastodon, Micro.blog, Cohost, Fediverse, etc. ↩
4. Not in the way LinkedIn aims to do that around the resume. ↩
5. I started with this list, which is unfortunately paywalled now ↩
6. Mastodon in particular has community conventions around content warnings and requiring consent to see upsetting images or even posts about ongoing dramas. By social convention rather than software or regulation, this makes it a much better place for human brains to hang out. ↩

Previously: a long time ago, Dwight Eisenhower probably said something to the effect of: “Plans are useless, but planning is essential”.

Today, software development (and knowledge work writ large) are largely about speed in the service of more. Iterate faster, ask more questions, get more feedback, deliver more often. Success is less likely about having a good or well-formed idea from the outset, and more about how the idea evolves in the hands of people/customers.¹

Let’s update Eisenhower’s insight on planning to harmonize with speed and quantity of iteration:

Static plans are useless, but dynamic plans, developed and iterated as information arrives, are the essence of leadership.

You have to plan. Stopping to think a multi-week project through isn't Waterfall or a slow, bureaucratic process. It's how you get your head into a project.

Lacking a plan isn’t an option². If you choose not to have a plan, you’ll likely end up part of someone else’s plan. Their plan may not have the same outcomes or parameters in mind as you do. Better to have a plan.

Planning with your team is how you get everyone aligned and pulling in the same direction. The worst cases for a plan, that it’s tragically incomplete or wholly invalid, have a silver lining wherein the team that plans together pulls together. In the best case, you’ve front-loaded a bunch of coordination and collaboration, allowing teammates can work autonomously and efficiently.

The initial plan you or your team come up with is very much a rough draft. Surely risks will make themselves known and areas of unknown complexity/scope will present themselves. Don't worry about rigorously adhering to the plan once you're a few weeks into the project. Iterate and add to the plan until you’ve done all the useful work, and it's time to start planning the next project.

1. There is something to say about slowing down, seeking quality at every turn, and delivering a great, monolithic thing. Usually that involves some combination of internal iteration, auteur mindset, a strong creative scene, or harnessing lightning in a bottle. Everyone wants to fall in this category but counting on that is an unhedged risk. ↩
2. With apologies to Rush: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”. ↩

The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.

Peter Norvig, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Norvig's recipe, paraphrased:

• get interested and program because it's fun and continues to be fun
• learn by doing
• talk with other programmers, read other programs ("This is more important than any book or training course")
• work with other programmers and after other programmers
• learn several languages with diverse capabilities and philosophies
• learn the "computer" in "computer science"

And here I am, twenty-five years in, wishing I'd practiced more 🤷🏻‍♂️😆

Mitchell Hashimoto, Contributing to Complex Projects:

The first step to understanding the internals of any project is to become a user of the project. You do not have to become an expert user, but my personal graduation criteria for this step is to try to build something real using the project, even if it is small or simple.

Analog: here's a functional area. Set it up for yourself or on your localhost. Now, make a small, well-contained change.

Learn how to build the project and get a working binary (or equivalent). Don’t bother with understanding the build system, the dependencies, etc. Just cargo cult guides, websites, whatever you need to reliably and repeatedly go from source code to runnable binary on your system.

Analog: get to the point you can run the app, run (focused) tests, and see changes in the app. Then start trying to make functional changes.

To learn the internals, I like to use an approach I call “trace down, learn up.”

Analog: for your first several changes, read from the top of the call stack down as far as you can. Don't try to make changes, but do try to note all the landmarks (files) you visit and how they relate to each other. Note “side quests” to investigate later as you go.

Don’t be afraid of complexity. I think too many engineers look at stereotypically complex projects such as programming languages, browsers, databases, etc. as magic or as destined for higher-beings. I like to remember that all projects were started by other humans. If they could do it, I can do it too. And so can you.

You, too, can gain enough understanding of an eight-year-old system to work on it as though you were around when some of it was written. In fact, your effort will compound: the longer you're around, the more you will find curious code that, it turns out, you added in the first place. 😆