Adam Keys is Thinking

Garrett Dimon, Organizing Rails Code with ActiveRecord Associated Objects:

At the simplest level, associated objects come in handy mostly by helping organize and compartmentalize related logic so we can better avoid the junk drawer or God object “patterns.” But that’s an over-simplification because the benefits can be almost invisible–it just disappears into the background and does its job.

Associated objects have an excellent effort-to-benefit ratio. The implementation is less than a few hundred lines of code. The docs, which fit entirely in the readme, may outweigh the actual code! From that, you get a multipurpose and surprisingly deep tool for designing and modeling your system.

I’m excited to tinker more with this one.

Nat Bennett, How to write:

• Write a lot
• Just Write
• Read a lot
• Write every day
• Walk
• Have a time and a place for writing
• Take it less seriously
• Have an audience

At least as good as any advice I’ve ever given!

There’s lots of reasons that this works but I personally believe that writing is a mechanical skill as much as it is a mental one. Sometimes you just need to run a bunch of words through your writing engine — practice the whole process, from forming a sentence in your brain down to driving the motion of your fingers — to reduce the friction to a point where you can do “real” writing.

As above for writing, so goes for any iterative, world-building creative activity. p.s. coding is an iterative activity wherein a world of thought-stuff is created (and sometimes checked against a computer by executing it and seeing if it all blows up.)

Ben Kuhn, Categories of leadership on technical teams:

More importantly, though, we often want to somehow split these responsibilities between people. Team leadership covers a huge array of things—as you can see from how long this post is—and trying to find someone who can be great at all of them is often a unicorn hunt. Even if you do find someone good-enough at all of them, they usually spike in 1-2 areas, and it might be higher-leverage for them to fully focus on those.

If you find yourself in a wholly new team, this might help you find your way to traction. If you find yourself confused by the (rapidly) changing nature of work and need to zoom out on the team/role you find yourself leading, this will help!

Even if you’ve been in your job/team/organization for a while, to paraphrase David Byrne, “You may tell yourself, this is not the job I signed up for! / My god, have I have I done?”, in which case this mental model is also helpful. (And, good luck!)

Herein, a napkin sketch on producing creative work, ideas on finding the spark(s) that consistently lead us to assemble new things, and the hand-wavy stuff in-between.

Production is connecting the dots

Extensively, manically, collect ideas (i.e., dots). Collect ideas, put ‘em in order. This is the tricky-but-fun part!

Boom, that’s something new! Like this essay. Collect, connect, write, post, again and again.

Austin Kleon, It’s not inside you trying to get out, it’s outside you trying to get in:

I never feel like I have a book in me. I always feel like there’s a book around me. It’s like I’m a planet and there’s all this space junk orbiting me, and all the junk starts smashing together and forming book chapters. My job is to grab that stuff around me and shape it into something.

Production is making social connections

So you’ve got a routine of journals and notes and active reading and such. You’re turning those into blog posts and thinking with the network, right?

In particular, using networked writing (hypertext, social media) as an attractor for ideas and likeminded folks. Repeatedly engaging with those folks until a new, boring status quo/local maximum is reached. Iterate and seek ever higher peaks.

Tom Critchlow, Small b blogging:

Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.

Henrik Karlsson, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox:

The reason I’m spelling out this dynamic is twofold. First, you can get out of this mess if you want to. You do that by writing online (or publishing cool pieces of software, or videos, or whatever makes you tickle—as long as you work in public). Second, if you want to get out of the mess the key lies exactly in understanding that you are not the only person who has no one to talk to about the things you get obsessed by.

Production is a second-order outcome from consuming/reading

Consider two sorts of people: “Really Into Notes” or simply “An Enjoyer of Reading”. Either way, making things and ideas comes from connecting an idea from what you read, enthusiasm for making, and the discipline to turn that enthusiasm into action. How and what you turn that action into is left as an exercise or implementation detail up to the reader.

Andreas Fragner, Writing Summaries Is More Important Than Reading More Books, if you’re a third kind, “Extremely Okay With Marking Up Your Objects”:

One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones. The ROI of spending 2h writing a synopsis is much higher than spending those 2h powering through the next book on your list. Reading is not about page count or speed [1]. What matters is how it changes your thinking and what you take away from it. Optimize for comprehension, not volume."

Production is doing the thing you can’t not do, a vocation

Maybe it’s writing, but it’s cool if it’s not. Putting all these ideas together yields something new in the world, literal creativity. That calling, no matter the ambition or profitability or fruitfulness, is different for all of us. But we can all work the skills that support that creation.

Jared Henderson, AI won’t replace you, unless you let it:

Similarly, there are men and women for whom being an artist if their vocation. It is what they most suited to do. I believe that determining and pursuing your vocation – even if your vocation is not your job – is crucial for a good human life, because it puts work in its proper place. Work ceases to be toil when you are pursuing your vocation.

Tools for thought are nothing without producing ideas and publishing them.

There are things you can only learn by negative experience. In these cases, you just gotta go out there and suffer:

• Lose your first 50 games as soon as possible (Go proverb)
• Struggle through your first 50 interviews (hiring or seeking)
• Awkwardly run your first 50 meetings
• Flail at leading your first 50 projects
• Bomb your first 50 jokes

I won’t keep you waiting or give you false confidence with a snappy conclusion. Get out there and make some mistakes!

Robert Fripp via Austin Kleon, The Meaning of Discipline:

The musician has three instruments: the hands, the head, and the heart, and each has its own discipline.

So, the musician has three disciplines: the disciplines of the hands, the head and the heart.

Ultimately, these are one discipline: discipline.

Bear with me as I try to apply this lively metaphor of emotion and musical creativity to dry-and-boring engineering leadership¹.

The leader’s hands gesticulate, often for the aid of the speaker more than the listener. Sometimes, the hands conduct the thoughts to written words through the keyboard. Not too dissimilar from a musician’s hands through which, crucial for (most) musicians to make their sound, but equally a bit of flair.

The head thinks, and overthinks. Sees patterns and connects the dots. Listens to what people say and answers their questions directly and honestly. Is convinced it sees patterns in randomness, or that folks are hearing and understanding a message that they find confusing but don’t know how to address the issue.

The heart, for the leader, is there to mediate the head. There are other people on the other side of the decisions and decrees leaders make. A process or strategy is only good if it does right by those carrying it out.

Discipline is our capacity to make a commitment in time.

Discipline, in leadership, is to make a decision and then support the people executing that decision. All the while, seeking new information by which you might update, revise, or set the decision aside, if necessary.

To have sitzfleisch means the ability to sit still for the long periods of time required to be truly productive; it means the stamina to work through a difficult situation and see a project through to the end.

✋🏻 management by walking around

👉🏻 leadership by sitting down² and engaging with the people doing the work

Even better: leadership by sustaining long period of assimilating what the team and meetings are telling you into a slightly better way of working. And sometimes, memos and slides, etc to send out and socialize ideas for you.

Mike Hoye, Fifty Years of Diff:

My friend Greg Wilson has argued, and I absolutely believe, that you can divide the entire computational universe into who has diff and patch, and who doesn’t. It’s the seed crystal of all workable open collaboration, and people living without it don’t even have the language to recognize how bad they’ve got it.

Re:re:RE:DRAFT-draft-V7-FINAL-FINAL2.doc is just no way to live, and if you live in word processors, spreadsheets, slides, art, anything without diff and patch you’re definitely feeling this pain, even if you don’t have a term for it.

Yep. diff, along with its trusty companion patch is a developer superpower. (Even though patch came 10 years later, apparently, TIL.)

diff made source control possible, so I have to think it’s in the top 5 accelerants to software development of all time¹. Let alone using diff or patch under the hood in systems to move changes around.

Even the concept of diff is a big deal!

Part of the superpower of being a developer is the idea that you can analyze two pieces of data with a common lineage, extract the changes, and work with/reason about the changes as first-class data. Were it only that more non-developer tools had this capability!

Writing from notes is a bootstrapping problem. Anything you can do to get started, overcome static friction, and “defeat” the first blank canvas is the best thing you can do.

I started with journaling. Don’t worry about the quality or quantity — yet. Just write. Start with recollections of your day(s) and branch out from there.

There is a trough of despair, at some point. It may feel like you’re just writing into a void. Don’t reach for a “crushing your notes” course on YouTube. You’re writing now, it’s not unusual for it to take a moment (days, even weeks) to click.

Next, I started reading actively and taking highlights. Tools don’t matter here. The outcomes you’re looking for are 1) getting more out of the reading than if you didn’t mark the passages that grab you, 2) coming back to the good stuff later. It’s nice that highlighting, even on mouse-and-keyboard computers, gets your hands moving and involved in the reading process.

Once I crested about a hundred notes/journals/highlights/etc., the next level was resurfacing past notes and revisiting/rewriting/reworking. I use random resurfacing of notes¹, “on-this-day” resurfacing of journals², and spaced repetition of highlights via Readwise. These generate insight, nostalgia, and (sometimes) the spark to connect the dots of enough ideas that a new draft comes into existence. That’s a big win! Honestly, even writing up a new note connecting some older notes or highlights feels like the system is working _for _me.

On a great day, the combination of resurfacing mechanisms and a bit of luck leads “a perfect post”. That is, one that connects old insights to new ideas, a quote that backs up the new insight, and a recently generated idea that ties it all together delightfully³.

Now I had a compounding loop of making new stuff (journals) and revisiting old stuff (highlights). Time to look for connections between them, and notice how the quality of the more recent stuff is improving over the older stuff. The temptation, particularly in a world of influencer media on note-taking⁴, is to get a Big System to Lead You Right To The Big Connections in Your Thoughts. You don’t need that, you’ve got one sizzling away in your noggin, right now.

The revisiting and revising and rewriting is how you end up making the connections. The last generic tool I’ll recommend here is a good-old blog. For me, the insights and connections first came to me in short form, link posts and asides⁵ if you will. Over time, my insights grew into a ton of notes, journals, and some short-to-medium length⁶ writing on this blog.

In other words, what you require is not just a blog, but a blogging habit. Not just a journal, but a journaling habit. Not just the desire to connect the dots, see your ideas compound, and point proudly at a volume of work, but the habit to make all those things happen.

Possible next levels in my process, use the blog:

• as an iterative series of first drafts (see 15 rules for blogging) and
• as a way to figure out _what I think_by writing my way through it.
• worrying less about writing down what I already know⁷

Slash pages:

…are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like /now, /about, or /uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb.

This sort of thing is what makes personal/humane-scale websites the greatest. So many adventures to choose from!

My favorites, already in place here:

• /about – “a page all about you”
• /blogroll – “a list of other sites that you read, are a follower of, or recommend”

And the ones I need to get off my butt and implement:

• /uses – “details of the things you use on a daily basis”
• /colophon – “a page that describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies”
• /hello – “a single page listing the ways that you prefer to keep in touch”
• /now – “a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life”

Adjacent: Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites.