Swizec

> it is complaining in a satirical way about installation readmes, that maybe they could be made easier, that also non developers can follow some simple steps

See I missed that context :D

Installation readmes are an interesting example – they shouldn’t exist. Put that effort in an install script instead.

If you want me to mechanically follow some steps, perhaps with a decision tree attached … computers are really good at that!

Most tutorials are not for non-developers, they’re for other developers who are also in the ecosystem. They’re more like academic papers (peer-to-peer communication of new discoveries) than they are like a pop sci book or show meant for a general audience.

And that’s okay! Great even! As a fellow peer I benefit greatly from those tutorials. Sometimes even from my own notes published and forgotten years ago.

This is why courses and other structured learning materials exist. Beginners have to be nurtured through lots of context that builds up slowly. If every article had to start from scratch, we’d never get to anything interesting. By the time we got to the interesting bit after 30,000 words of preamble, you’d be long gone as a reader.

And the very next reader would complain that the 30,000 words were not enough introduction to the topic. They needed 40,000.

> It's reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the observer. (move a control up to aim your eyes up)

> It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object. (move a control down to "grab" the object and move it down)

I use opposite directions on my trackpad and my scrollwheel, take that! Ha!

Trackpad I’m grabbing with my fingers so I want the surface to move in the same direction as my fingers.

Scrollwheel I feel like is a roller that sits on top of the surface so I have to roll down to make the surface move up.

Unfortunately, at least in macos, you need 3rd party software to achieve this

> Idk, it sounds like you and your talented friends worked hard to get into Western Europe/US/Canada

Yes.

Up and left -> You’re an immigrant

Down and right -> You’re an expat

> How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries. That doesn’t happen at scale.

/me

I started in Slovenia, considered London, actually got an offer in Canada, but ultimately chose San Francisco. Figured that if I’m going to the trouble of moving abroad, I might as well go to the center of the industry.

Got lots of friends who chose various EU companies based on desired lifestyle/work/partner balance. You have lots of options as a good engineer. Especially before the last 3 years of market shenanigans.

I stand corrected. My memory garbled that. Thanks!

> "did we build a vehicle faster than a horse, yes/no?"

Yeah fair. There's also that famous human vs horse race that happens every few years. So far humans keep winning (because it's long distance)

> Firstly, automobiles are really impressive. Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses

Yes. That’s why cars don’t compete in equestrian events and horses don’t go to F1 races.

This non-controversial surely? You want different events for humans, humans + computers, and just computers.

Notice that self driving cars have separate race events from both horses and human-driven cars.

Croatia is in the EU so it's beyond unlikely that BiH and Serbia will cause any shenanigans.

I'm very happy that Slovenia is 9th safest. And wondering wtf I'm doing in USA which is rapidly falling to the bottom.

For the record, the TanStack name comes from the community. Eventually Tanner stopped fighting back and made it official

> Do you have any advice for accumulating and sharing relevant anecdotes?

For me blogging for the past 15 or so years has been the secret ingredient. I regularly sit down and distill things into an approachable form then send off to my audience to see if it lands. If yes, I mentally add to my reference list. If not, I engage in some clarifying back-n-forth and try again next time.

These days in a more leadership position I get a lot of reps of this synchronously as I work with younger or less experienced folk.

> I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.

As Winston Churchill once said when asked “what are you doing” –> “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”

I’m one of those weirdos who does public speaking sometimes. Even 8 hour workshops. You cannot prepare for an 8 hour speaking engagement. Not really. But you can accumulate a plethora of anecdotes, metaphors, and remarks that you weave into the narrative or in response to questions.

You can build frameworks that are similar to code. Prepared functions/coroutines/objects that you run in appropriate situations. Works pretty well especially in mentoring/teaching/consulting situations. This is also how comedians prep their sets.

The key is that things you say are new to the audience, but not to you. It can be the same metaphor you’ve fine-tuned over dozens of interactions. And the person you’re talking to thinks “Wow that guy is so quick on his feet, how did he come up with that so fast!?”

You can also spot this if you watch talks by popular presenters (Simon Sinek is a good example). You’ll notice the same 2 or 3 core stories getting polished and fine-tuned over years of talks and interviews.

> I generally agree, but they're focused mostly on 65+ age group

Another aspect possibly driving this: In USA a lot of people get divorced immediately after a cancer (or similar) diagnosis. That way only one of you goes bankrupt and you get to keep half your lifetime savings.

> The less new activities are performed the faster time is perceived when looking back. During the events it might be the opposite and actually feel longer.

There is another side to this: So much novelty that you have no time to consolidate memories and everything feels like it’s zooming by. I’m in that situation right now and it’s shocking to look back 1 year. It feels both like 10 years have passed and like it was yesterday.

> The Mini didn’t fail because it was too small. It failed because it wasn’t small enough.

The size is fine. But why they gotta handicap cameras?

All I want is a mini-sized phone with max's camera. Is that so much to ask for?

At this point I'm strongly considering ditching the iPhone and going Watch + Fujifilm Camera. Maybe keep an old phone at home to manage the watch.

> Spreadsheets don’t really have the ability to promote propaganda and manipulate people

May I introduce you to the magic of "KPI" and "Bonus tied to performance"?

You'd be surprised how much good and bad in the world has come out of some spreadsheet showing a number to a group of promotion chasing type-a otherwise completely normal people.

> Sorry, you jumped a little here. Who is "we"?

Right, this was in high school some 20 years ago in Slovenia and also in college after. Anything graded happened at school. All tests were open answer where you have to write 2 or 3 sentences. We also had oral exams in front of the whole class where the teacher asks you questions and you answer. In college the orals were more private because the classes were huge and the exam periods more condensed.

Homework was graded in that you’d get a + for doing it and a - for not doing it. Collect enough - and you get an F. This was more to make us do the homework than to actually check the work.

Afaik this hasn’t changed but I don’t know any recent school children in Slovenia so maybe it has.

> Are you referring to the Socratic Method?

I don’t know what it’s called. The approach where you challenge students to try figuring out the answer/explanation before you explain it to them because that has been shown to lead to better learning outcomes even though, or because, it’s harder and slower.

> Because that results in less education time. If you do homework in class then you have to give up lecture time.

Homework is the real education time. The lecture is less than half the ingredients. You can't learn without engaging with the material. The best lectures follow a question-trytoanswer-getrightanswer pattern where students are basically doing homework as part of the lecture.

We wrote all graded essays during class. It was great. Nice and timeboxed. When you're done you're done. Also forces you to keep it short enough that the teacher doesn't drown in stuff to grade because how much can you really write by hand in 2 hours?

> By pure construction memory is always going to be faster than disk, right up to the point where disk is inplemented as memory

You can get servers with terabytes of RAM these days. How many startups’ and small to medium businesses’ entire production database could fit in memory on 1 server?

Hint: the answer is “a large majority” (numerically, not by market cap)

Yes RAM is faster than Disk, but for most people it may simply not matter anymore. Put everything in RAM, sync to storage periodically in the background.

That’s the best part! Making decisions that keep you in good shape until 89 are also likely to help you live until 100.

At that age if you can avoid cancer the rest is stuff like “Strong enough so you don’t break a hip when tripping on the stairs”

> I think anyone that thinks mudball is OK because business is messy has never seen true mudball code.

I’ve seen and created some pretty bad stuff. Point is not that it’s okay, but that that’s the job: managing, extending, and fixing the mess.

Yes a perfect codebase would be great, but the code is not perfect and there’s a job to do. You’re not gonna rebuild all of San Francisco just to upgrade the plumbing on one street.

Much of engineering is about building systems to keep the mess manageable, the errors contained, etc. And you have to do that while keeping the system running.

What about quality of life adjusted life years? I don’t want to live to 100 and be miserable for the last 30

But if you can get me 90 years where I feel like a spring chicken until 89, then that’s just fine.

> People are using them [LLMs] for everything

Yeah and when I was in college, StackOverflow was full of questions like “how do I add 2 numbers with jQuery”. This is normal. The newbies don’t know what they’re doing and with time they will get enough hard knocks to learn. We’ve all gone through this and still are in areas that are new to us.

LLMs aren’t gonna solve the fundamentals: Seniors still gotta senior and newbies still gotta learn.

> So, is pile-of-if-statements the best we can do for business software?

You’ll enjoy the Big Ball of Mud paper[1].

Real world systems are prone to decay. You first of all start with a big ball of mud because you’re building a system before you know what you want. Then as parts of the system grow up, you improve the design. Then things change again and the beautiful abstraction breaks down.

Production software is always changing. That’s the beauty of it. Your job is to support this with a mix of domain modeling, good enough abstraction, and constructive destruction. Like a city that grows from a village.

[1] https://laputan.org/mud/mud.html

[2] my recap (but the paper is very approachable, if long) https://swizec.com/blog/big-ball-of-mud-the-worlds-most-popu...

> Does anyone read blogs anymore?

Yes. We call them newsletters now. Podcasts, if they're audio. Many are both.

> while I’d love to go to conferences, taking time out of my own PTO and my own wallet to see them isn’t worth it

I’ve been using PTO and my own dime for conferences this whole time! It’s been super worth it career-wise especially as a speaker. Lots of fun, meet great people, have a bunch of “sawdust” to show for it.

The biggest impact has been that people in the industry generally know of me and that lends itself to creating opportunities / opening doors that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Question: How much is this impacted by people who read for pleasure but fool themselves into thinking it's useful?

Many books are closer to edutainment than practical applicable advice. To a certain type of person these are easier to read (spend time on) than reading purely fiction. And even then it's easy to say you only read fiction that is totally giving you something more insightful than entertainment.

See also many YouTube/Instagram/TiKTok channels and most if not all Substack (et al) newsletters. Yes of course deep diving into <niche subject> at 2am is super critical to my life!

> It's rough watching kids try to multiply when they don't have their times tables memorized

As someone who never learned my multiplication tables – it’s fine. I have a few cached lookups and my brain is fast at factoring.

8*6? Oh that’s just 4*2*6= 4*12 = 48. Easy :)

> In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.

In Slovenia, back when I went to school, we all learned with fountain pens and cursive. From 1st to 8th grade you were required to write in fountain pain. If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).

As soon as high school hit, the restriction lifted and we could use any utensil and whatever font as long as it was legible. Everyone switched to ballpoint pens and some bastardized combination of print and cursive.

I still use my specific combo of print and cursive today, it's like encryption. Very fast to write, very slow sometimes impossible to read. And that's okay, it turns out that anything I write down by hand gets etched into my memory forever. Just seeing the rough shape of the letters brings it back. Sometimes just seeing roughly what page of my notebook it's on is enough to remember what I was thinking.

> For all the interviewee knows, you're going to ding them and ultimately fail them for asking too many questions and not exhibiting knowledge and experience.

I start the interview with “I am here in the role of PM and co-engineer so you can bounce ideas off of me and ask any questions”

Stakeholders won’t start their asks with “Please ask me questions to make sure you’re building the right thing”. Asking clarifying questions is a baseline expectation of the role