Time-Management
Valuable software is about letting people do new things
Today I released a dump of six months of flashcards I autogenerated from my tiny Finnish news archive to make the lives of my fellow language learners easier. The actual code which generates this archive is about 300 lines of Python . The basic value add for the user: What you want: Better fluency in Finnish. What you need: Practice. Lots of it. What this gives you: GOTO 2. This is emphatically not the kind of product, or use case, I would stumble upon as a brain-in-the-vat developer....
Layers of abstraction for me, not for thee
Consider the problem of “how do I run more than 1 terminal at a time”. At this moment, I have at least 5 different ways I can effectively solve this issue: I can, from a different physical computer, SSH in to a new session. I can, from the same physical computer, switch to a different tty session with … C-S-F2 through 6 or something. (Rare, but sometimes it comes in really handy....
OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon
Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a well-guarded id_ed25519.pub in case you end up in hot water during the (long - very long, stable cash flow for generations long) maintenance contract, and you’re in the ballpark....
Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal
There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online....
Some New Year experiments
Hyvää uuttaa vuottaa! As stated before, my TIL is up and running once more. Some things I’m going to be experimenting with this year: Self-hosted stuff, speficially on the Raspberry Pi. One of those fancy new split keyboards I keep hearing everyone talk about. Coding more, and thinking about coding less.
Pomodoros and leverage ratios
I love pomodoros 🍅. But I have to admit, most of the time when I reach for them, it’s because I"m already having trouble staying on task with whatever I’m doing. I generally don’t get a lot of value out of the ’longer break’ option, a steady beat of work and breaks is enough for me. In those circumstances I often find solace in the idea that a well-constructed pomodoro creates a certain lower bound on my work-to-play leverage ratio....