Comment by agar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by agar | Hacker News Reader

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It's been great fun to follow bradfitz's career.

I first learned of him from a post on Slashdot about a cool remote controlled door hack in a college dorm. His roommate posted and basically said, "this guy is brilliant, it's just the tip of the iceberg - he posts what he's working on at bradfitz.com, check it out." This was in...1998? 1999?

Seeing him start to post a daily journal, get frustrated, then write LiveJournal was fascinating. Posts on the problems he faced scaling it, open discussions on caching architecture (leading to a LiveJournal user suggesting he investigate slab allocation technique that led to memcached), identity (leading to OpenID), moderation, etc. were always illuminating. Moving to Go because he understood what problems needed solving just made sense. Rewriting Google's downloader because it sucked? Well, of course he would.

I don't know Brad other than occasional comments/responses from the early livejournal days (user number ~10K, after procrastinating actually joining for too long), but it's clear that he draws inspiration from overcoming roadblocks.

Taken in that context, leaving Google is completely understandable - having a trillion dollar organization there to remove roadblocks would subvert a key driver for his personal innovation and inspiration.

Good for him that he recognized this and is taking the leap into the unknown. Can't wait to see what he comes up with next, but I'm guessing the real treasures will be found in the process and not the final outcome.

Ha, I forgot about that door opener! I found the page: https://bradfitz.com/misc/projects/remotedoor/

How did you deal with people criticizing your masking tape construction? This has been a bane for me since I can remember.

I love prototyping but hate the instant terrible feedback. People often look at the construction instead of the results and/or can't/won't imagine it a first step or how awesome a final product it can turn into.

Do things for yourself, not for others.

Don't even look at the comments. Turn them off if you can. They're not paying you, so you are under no obligation to please them.

On the other hand, if you know that you're going to get undesired feedback, why post your stuff in public in the first place? You don't get the glory without the risk. Before the internet, people did things because they liked to, and because they enjoyed them. They didn't need the praise of a thousand random strangers to feel good about their accomplishments.

Something you didn't address, unwarranted critisim or just plain mean comments can just hurt or drain you emotionally. It can rob you of desire to work or entirely demotivate you from your original goal.

While you may argue "deal with it", and rightly so in most circumstances, but then you are only addressing an issue of grit. I have plenty of grit in _some_ areas of my life, but not _all_ areas of my life.

And, sometimes the negativity is unexpected like when you are just showing something you find cool or neat that you built. (ie, I have never once put my code out in public nor sought praise for it)

Everyone has a limit where they can't take any more negative feedback on something.

And with prototyping I have found it better to wait to show the client until it's in an "appealing" state. Hence my question about masking tape prototype. (my favorite material to build with as a kid because it was plentiful and easy to rip, but was unappealing visually)

Criticism doesn't bother me. It will generally come into three categories: 1. Insults and trolling with no valid content: this tells me nothing I didn't know already, that there are morons in the world 2. Valid criticisms, but things that I already know about and either can't do anything about or where I decided it wasn't worth the effort: again nothing I didn't already know 3. Valid criticisms that I hadn't thought of: these contain new information and are potentially very useful.

The masking tape criticism would come into category 2.

"That sucks" is valid criticism for many people, as well as "who would want that?" and "why did you waste your time?".

Your categories are all logical responses, what about the immediate emotional effects of the responses?

If you have never experienced an immediate emotional response from criticism I count you extremely lucky that you don't have to face it. But for those of us that do, we are looking for answer to the emotional side of things.

Is there some technique you have used to blunt the emotions and look at them only logically?

>what about the immediate emotional effects of the responses?

Our brain/body is good at adapting so you simply ignore it or rather embrace the pain, yes it will be painful in the beginning but the more you are exposed to it the better it will be over time.

I suspected someone may say something like this. Is jumping in the deep end the only real answer to issues of fear or emotional turmoil? (ie, get back on the horse...)

I don't disagree with you, I was just hoping there may be something else to consider.

I am not immune to misguided emotional responses, but I believe I can generally recognize them for what they are, and ignore them. Especially when criticism comes from somebody you care about, like a partner, the emotional response is the strongest. But this is also the time to analyse what they are saying rationally and establish whether there's any truth in it. The emotional response seems to me to be to mindlessly defend.

Is there a way to be strong without exercising ?

You are right, there may be a way, I am hoping there maybe something to consider...

To not give a fuck, like anything else is something that you can train yourself to get used to.

You might reflect on the fact that perhaps "you" are the one concerned about if it is appealing or not.

My reaction was, huh cool. I didn't even stop to think about the aesthetics. You were the one to introduce that into this thread.

Yes, and I wanted an answer from the guy who made stuff with masking tape and string (and seemed to get good feedback) and wanted to know how he took negative feedback from his prototypes.

What's funny is that people who are paying like the masking tape construction - they often just want something working.

> I'm not talking fashion, Mr. Fox, so much as function.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/976f8050-5fc9-4cbc-abf3-16cfaa4...

Ignore the incompetent haters. Problem solved.

That looks like the Mercer dorm at the University of Washington!

Yup. RIP.

Ha. Around this same time my friends and I set up a vaguely similar system across campus in Haggett Hall. There was a :CueCat at the bottom of the door outside and you'd scan your student ID to trigger a solenoid to spin the doorknob on the inside.

Oh wow, I remember reading this back in the day.

I thought the name sound familiar. This is the guy that got really mad the Nest smoke alarm.

It got mad at me first.

> having a trillion dollar organization there to remove roadblocks would subvert a key driver for his personal innovation and inspiration.

I don't think anyone would say that Google is too cushy and roadblock free when it comes to getting things done. Mo' money, mo' problems.

Embarrassingly, I completely forgot bradfitz wrote Livejournal. He’s done so much cool stuff since then.

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