Knowing what books someone loves is to know their perspective and their journey, to have something special in common, to share a language.
The CWC Mellor-72 - I love the overall shape, but especially the arrow icon above the 6.
My law of music: there is no song that Aretha Franklin could not perform slower and therefore better than everyone else.
Newly discovered corollary: except possibly Pierre Boulez and Beethoven’s 5th. So slow, nearly belabored. Love it!
Drew Austin on high/low-brow music, how it fits into album reviews and club culture, and how all that has shifted in our current state of distance. Energy Flash:
“For Reynolds, “at home and at album length” refers to a process of decontextualization, the musical equivalent of the modern gallery’s white cube: a belief that any cultural product meriting serious appreciation must prove that it can survive outside of its native habitat by becoming a fungible unit of culture, fitting into the standardized format of Pitchfork album reviews and solitary, focused listening. If music sounds good in a packed nightclub at 3 a.m. but not through headphones on your couch, is it real in the same way that Kid A is real? Right now in quarantine, the contextualizing environments in which culture traditionally incubates are closed off and dormant, so everything has to sound good in the living room whether it’s meant to or not. We live in the white cube now; anything that relies on a specific source of external context is an endangered species. We’re one month into a worldwide experiment to learn whether the internet alone can produce sufficient meaning on its own, or whether we must keep mining our memories of an embodied shared reality to bridge this gap.”
A new cannonball run record set - a surprise and unintentended consequence of pandemic and shutting down the economy. It’s now much easier to drive a car really fast from New York to Los Angeles. The new record is just a few hours over a day.
Top of Mind No. 0
- Managing a backend engineering team at Pingboard.
- Managers can, and should, do deep work. What forms does that take?
- You can build anything from trust; how do you turn accountability into agency amongst teams?
- How can I get more writing/editing/publishing practice in?
- Meditating & reading
The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel - when a function of the monolith becomes unwieldy, split off an Outpost to service that need specifically. I like to call them sidecars, because that seems more fun!
Introducing Watchsmith - I love the idea of using customizable, bespoke complications to get a foot in the door of customizable Apple Watch faces. I’m trying it right now, so far so good!
I’ve been tinkering this weekend and MVP.css may be one of my new favorite tools. Drop in some CSS and then just use HTML elements as their name would suggest. No layout, no grids, no typographical system. No classes to memorize. Build now, worry about all the other stuff later.
This weekend, I’m revisiting some of David Perell’s writing on writing, thinking, and aiming high. My favorites: Why You Should Write, Learn Like an Athlete, Networked Writing.
Whiteboard, even if you're a distributed team
A lot of us are out here, amongst all the strangeness of the world, trying to figure out how to help our teams adjust to collaborating remotely. It’s long been my observation that nothing beats people in a room together communicating via ad-hoc scribbles on a whiteboard.
Seems like a good time to survey the landscape and see if the situation has improved!
On one end of the spectrum are Google Draw and Jamboard. The former seems better for attempting to draw technical diagrams. I think it's actually better for ironically creating WordArt. The latter seems like an honest, lo-fi attempt to re-create whiteboards online and collaboratively. I don’t think these tools cut it. But, they have the advantage of ubiquity: a lot of companies use Google Suite, so these could come in handy, in a pinch.
Another wild card is to use design software your team might have in place. Sketch or Figma are inherently about visual communication. If everyone has a license and some patience, this could work! If anyone can put some boxes, arrows, and text together, you can basically whiteboard.
I’ve used Whimiscal to create non-trivial visual communications. It works great, it’s easy to share with people, there is some multi-person editing. It's easy to get started in Whimsical and it has some depth, but not so much depth that it's intimidating or overwhelming. Pricing aside, this is where I’d start with my current team.
I have not kicked the tires on Miro, but the concept is intriguing. Looks like there’s real-time, collaborative visual communication/editing. They also brag a lot about their integrations with adjacent project/collaboration tools such that one can embed JIRA cards, mockups, docs, etc. in a whiteboard. If you’re already using this, I’d love to hear your experience with it!
Finally, you don’t need software to share ad-hoc scribbles. You can draw on paper, capture it with a camera, and share that image almost anywhere. You could use sketching/drawing tools to do a fancier version of that. If you have a whiteboard at home, you can draw on it, take a photo, and share it.
It doesn’t matter if the tools aren’t that great or if your company hasn’t adopted any of them. Taking the initiative to collaborate, or having the insight that communicating with words is not cutting it, is much more important.
Wherein the “good old days” are revisited
Remember secretaries and drinking at work? And land-line telephones? And smoking inside? Blech! And an even more unequal society with even more thumbs on the scales?
My wife and I, when we first watched Mad Men:
Oy, Makefiles! And weird preprocessor tricks! And file-scoped variables/memory ownership? And everything is an int, sometimes pretending to be a char.
Me, reading C code, having last written valid, in-anger C code during college
The 1960s and 70s had some nice qualities, but some of them don't hold up to the nostalgia.
That is a beautiful machine. I must have a soft spot for extensive air-cooling schemes. If Windows/PCs were a thing I could get with, I would get with this hardware.
Use as few rules as possible, mostly guidelines
Rules won’t solve your problems, but thinking about them might. To paraphrase a couple well-known quotes:
“Rules are useless, but thinking about rules is indispensable”
Dwight Eisenhower
“No rules survive first contact with a toddler”
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
😉
It’s folly to think we can generate the exact outcomes we want with rules. Every ruleset leaves more unstated assumptions than it generates clarity. The legalese found in contracts, and its absolute obtuseness, is testament to how hard it is to write clear rules.
That said, thinking about how rules, or a lack thereof, generate outcomes is an essential and worthwhile exercise. I like putting things through the lens of macroeconomic thinking to seek out second order effects, unintended consequences, and perverse incentives that emerge from a proposed rule set. Rules are trade-offs!
In short: humans + rules are a strange, not entirely mathematical thing. Think about how bad actors will abuse rules in their favor and how good actors will be constrained by rules in search of the outcomes you actually want. Then, if you must, write as few rules as possible.
We took all the dogs on a walk today. Even the sixteen year old one who walks janky. I have never seen so many people out walking in our neighborhood. So that’s nice! Add that to the list of things we should considering preserving once we reach the new normal.
Stop the Coronavirus Corporate Coup. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
The aerospace giant of course wants a $60 billion bailout. Financial problems for this corporation predated the crisis, with the mismanagement that led to the 737 Max as well as defense and space products that don’t work (I noted last July a bailout was coming). The corporation paid out $65 billion in stock buybacks and dividends over the last ten years, and it was drawing down credit lines before this crisis hit. It is highly politically connected; the board of the corporation includes Caroline Kennedy, Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, three Fortune 100 CEOs, a former US Trade Representative, and two Admirals, one of whom is the board’s only engineer. Using the excuse of the coronavirus, Boeing is trying to get the taxpayer to foot the bill for its errors, so it can go back to making more of them.
The jazz icon Sonny Rollins knows life is a solo trip. Seems like a surprisingly wise, grounded performer.
Keep in touch with friends, the littlest CRM that could
This year, I’m trying to better keep in touch with friends, family, and former co-workers. It came to my attention that this is, in many ways, a thing for which you would use a customer-relationship management application. This could work, but seems like a lot to me.
Most software starts life as a) a document/spreadsheet or b) a system of long email threads. In that spirit, I thought I might work backwards from what I normally do: build the littlest CRM I can without writing code or using development tools.
I’ve already got Things and Bear in my workflow. Turns out that duo solves the essential part of the problem. Things reminds me to contact a friend/family/co-worker periodically. I keep notes on what folks are up to, what we talked about, when the last time we talked, etc. as unstructured notes in Bear.
That’s it! I’m only one month into this experiment, but I’ve contacted, at least once, most folks I wanted to. 📈