Adam Keys is Thinking

A good email newsletter is like the conversation you may have had over coffee with an interesting pal. A surprising topic, a novel theory, perhaps an amusing tangent or two.

I’m feeling the trough of newsletter overload, like many folks. I’ve put my own on hiatus because it seems more useful to write broadly on the web than narrowly via email.

I suspect that email newsletters have evolved from interesting conversations to (mostly) yet another medium to build eyeballs to sell to someday. Or, newsletters were the mold that blogging reinvented itself from.

But, I still think good newsletters could still exist. But, they have to feel more like a conversation and less like a monologue.

Paul Ford, The Secret, Essential Geography of the Office:

Offices have their own mental maps. “Oh,” they say, “she’s moving to the 17th floor.” And everyone says: the 17th floor! And you know, being a social primate, exactly where you are in the organization relative to that floor. Offices all have their formal and informal maps, whether inside a bank, statehouse, cathedral, museum, school, or open-plan tech firm. I say “West Wing” and you know what I’m talking about.

I once worked at a company where the hypothesis behind customer acquisition was currently in flux. A couple times a quarter, a new concept would come along. With a new concept almost always came a change in the sequencing of handoffs between teams. This month, outside sales hands off to the onboarding team hands off to customer support. The next month, marketing hands off to outside sales hands off to onboarding.

It so happens this company had a large, somewhat raucous open office layout. All of sales, support, and marketing were in one big room. (With three different Sonos systems playing three different songs at any given time. Madness.)

It also so happened that this was a high-energy sales culture. (Are there kinds of sales culture? Someone tell me there are monk-ish sales people, making one call per day, speaking only a few quiet words, ringing a small bell, and going home for the day. 😆)

Thus, when the current concept of how customers were handed off from the top of the funnel downward, a few people would move the desks around so hand-offs happened across aisles of the office and not from one corner of the office to a remote corner sixty feet away.

The upside of all this apparent chaos was that on any given day, you could walk into the office and see the current hypothesis of customer acquisition. As long as you knew who was in sales, marketing, support, etc. or their typical posture (walking around talking on a headset, answering emails as quickly as possible, looking at marketing campaign mockups), you could tell what’s going on. One could literally walk through the funnel, from marketing to sales to onboarding (assuming that was the hypothesis of the day).

Besides the madness of open offices with multiple songs within speaking distance of each other, I think this is not the worst way to arrange a physical workspace.

I saw this BMW at Radwood in Austin last year.

In hindsight, I would kinda like to know the whole story behind this car and the custom plate.

QuakeWorld by John Carmack - the .plan notes (basically a Unix-local blog) written during the development of internet networking (not just LAN-local) for Quake. It’s amazing to read the notes of a super-sharp person inventing the foundations of the multi-billion dollar gaming industry as we know it today.

Of course there’s great technical details, like this bit that should be familiar to anyone who has mysteriously died in an online gaming match:

I am reining in the client side prediction to a fairly minimal amount. It has too many negative effects in different circumstances. The problem of running away from or in front of your missiles was so bad that I considered simulating the missiles on the client side, but that is the second step on a slippery slope. If just the missiles were simulated, then a missile would fire through an enemy until the server informed you it exploded on them. Then you consider simulating interactions, but then you have to guess at other player inputs (which is hopeless)…

And complaining about Ferrari ownership, which is always a rich-people tragicomedy:

My testarossa snapped another input shaft (the third time).
damn dman damn.

Fabien Sanglard’s website is full of this stuff, if that’s your jam.

The Voices Of Black Women Were Essential To Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound

Darlene Love began her partnership with Spector in 1962, when she came to the attention of Lester Sill, Spector’s business partner and co-founder of their label Philles Records. In a hurry to record the song “He’s a Rebel,” but unable to cut the song with the vocalists they had under contract, the New York-based group The Crystals, Sill and Spector turned to Love, who lived in Los Angeles. Spector was racing to release his version of the Gene Pitney-penned tune before a version recorded by Vikki Carr could come out and pre-empt his sales. Spector paid Love a flat fee and triple scale to record the song and to allow him to release it under the name The Crystals. The arrangement, made without consulting with The Crystals, was indicative of the power producers had over artists. Describing her experience recording with Spector in her memoir, Love recalled that Spector encouraged what Love calls “the low, growling side of my voice, the righteous indignation and in-your-face testimony that I usually saved for church.” Accentuating vocal Blackness in the early 1960s was a daring move in the segregated U.S., but it paid off.

I saw Darlene Love perform, oddly enough, at EPCOT Center. I wonder if they offer musicians a big vacation package for that, of it was just a price-is-right situation?

Between songs, she alluded to having worked with Phil Spector. She basically called him out for the shady behavior described in the NPR story. I’m guessing it was not for the first time. She concluded the retelling of her history by saying “I don’t care if he hears about me saying this! He’s in jail, can’t do anything about it!” 😆

Wall of Sound is one of my favorite maximalist musical styles and all, but I hope Darlene Love is updating her sick burns on (convicted murderer) Phil Spector to end with “don’t matter because he’s dead now!”

Austin Kleon - A working from home manual in disguise:

1. Make lists.
2. You can be woke without waking to the news.
3. Airplane mode can be a way of life.
4. Naps are a secret weapon.

David Perell - Beer Mode and Coffee Mode:

Creatives have two ways of working: beer mode and coffee mode.

Beer mode is a state of unfocused play where you discover new ideas. In contrast, coffee mode is a state of focus where you work towards a specific outcome.

The see-saw of beer and coffee mode is like breathing. Your best ideas emerge when you balance the inhale of beer mode with the exhale of coffee mode. Coffee mode rewards action, while beer mode rewards laughter. Coffee mode rewards focus, while beer mode rewards conversation. And while coffee mode rewards clarity, beer mode rewards serendipity.

What way of working is thinking big thoughts in the shower?

Mike Perham: Grouping Events for Later Processing:

But we see enough traffic that we don’t want to turn every single click into a background job. We want to aggregate the clicks and process them regularly. There’s several ways to do this; I’m going to show you how to implement it using a cron job running every minute.

Redis and some creativity scales really well. In other words: you may not need microservices, part 34.

Christof Damian, My thoughts on meetings:

I used to really hate meetings. As a developer they seem to just get into the way of doing real work…But at some point you specialise, teams grow and you need some way to sync up.

I’ve learned in the work-at-home times that it’s definitely possible to have too few meetings. After passing that threshold, the cart to play is creating better meetings. Lots of good ideas and guidelines in this article.

Annabel Scheme and the Adventure of the New Golden Gate - a short story by Robin Sloan. Fantastic world building for a short story. Highly recommended.

Nostalgia and the “this city used to be cooler” sentiment comes up (and is rejected). Funny that the sentiment in the story is about San Francisco, where many Austinites came from and was allegedly cooler when it had fewer former-San Franciscans.

Maybe cities are like Saturday Night Live: there are very few real stinkers, just casts or episodes or locales for which one isn’t nostalgic.

How Product Hunt does asynchronous work: everyone in their own swimlane, unblocked. I really dig how they haven’t siloed work between front-end/back-end developers.

Collaborative Single Player Mode:

A developer should be able to execute a feature from start to finish – from the database to the backend, API, frontend, and CSS. The goal is never to get blocked.

• If you are missing a design, mock the UI, designers can fill this in later
• If you don’t know how to do something technically, hack it or fake it
• If a product decision is missing, try to make this decision yourself - it’s better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission

Sounds like they use feature flags so they can move quickly and decisively, but safely. And of course, plenty of testing and code review automation.

The entire time I’ve been using FactoryBot, several years at this point, I’ve used it one factory at a time:

company = create(:company, name: "Acme, Inc.")
alice = create(:user, name: "Alice Smith")
posts = create_list(:post, 3, user: alice)

Do you see the mistake I make all the dang time? Spoiler alert, I forgot the company relation on Alice’s user, so she is either orphaned (unfortunate) or created on an entirely unrelated company. That’s gonna make my test fail in weird ways!

Lately, I’ve been trying something different: create the whole object graph I want to test on in one fell swoop:

company = create(
  :company,
  name: "Acme, Inc",
  user: build(
    :user,
    name: "Alice Smith",
    posts: build_list(:post, 3)
  )
)

The entire intent of the test scenario is made clear right here. And, the error I so often make is solved structurally rather than by vigilance.

Granted, that’s pretty chunky and way more lines. I feel like it’s a worthy tradeoff!

When I need to reference the models created by my jumbo object graph, I use RSpec let and ActiveRecord finders with a mind towards consistently finding the right thing:

let(:company) do
  create(...) # the whole company bit from above
end
let(:alice) { company.users.find_by(name: "Alice Smith") }
let(:posts) { alice.posts }