Great empathy tool: steelmanning. Opposite of straw man arguments. Find the best form of an opposing idea, test it, and see what you can learn from it.
Bridgy stats update
Another year down, another update on Bridgy‘s usage stats! We first announced these during State of the Indieweb at IndieWebCamp West 2020, then posted them here for posterity.
The most noticeable part of last year’s stats was losing Facebook and Google+. We made up for that this year by adding three new silos: Mastodon, Meetup, and Reddit. (Thanks Jamie, Will!) The real growth story over the past few years, however, has been GitHub. It has almost 400 users now, making it Bridgy’s third largest silo behind Twitter and Instagram!
Otherwise, growth continues apace, up and to the right.
We’ve also seen the all time webmention count continue to increase. By our best estimates, we crossed 1M total webmentions sent in the wild in December 2017, 95% of which was sent or received by Bridgy. It’s now handled over 1.6M, so if that same proportion has held, then roughly 1.7M webmentions total have been sent in the wild to date.
Also, this post has the ironic distinction of receiving the most webmentions ever (2441) from Bridgy, outside of home pages. Hmm.
Do any of you tech folk ever think about just quitting tech altogether? Opening a bakery, or retraining as a park ranger? I’d love to look after a forest for a living. There would be a far lower chance of a guy being in the forest and starting an argument due to his insecurities.
Data, methodology, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
“Software is eating the world” has an underappreciated corollary: tech careers are general purpose. You don’t just make software; you make it for something. You get to choose what. Entertainment, finance, science, health, etc. Not many careers have that luxury. Choose wisely!
Flow vs YAGNI
YAGNI – You Ain’t Gonna Need It – is a famous software engineering maxim. Predicting the future is notoriously difficult. When we guess at future requirements, we often guess wrong, so any code we write for them is usually wasted and makes the program more complex and less maintainable.
Another maxim is that flow is sacred. When you’re in flow, you’re a superhero. You hold the entire system in your head, code faster than a speeding cursor, leap seven layers of abstraction in a single file.
Flow is built out of context. When all the context is humming inside your head, that flow state is glorious, but getting there takes hard mental labor. Usually it takes reading code, lots of different code, which is harder than writing it. This is why we go to extra lengths to add comments and refactor and try to make code readable. They’re all context shortcuts. Continue reading
The year is 2040
Don McCullough
This is the first “homework” assignment for a Terra.do class I’m taking on the climate crisis:
The year is 2040. The world has figured out a pathway to radically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, while also rapidly developing local communities’ capacity for resilience to climate impacts….You feel happy, and proud, because you played a role in making this happen. Please write a blog post…telling your story.
It’s been a rough couple decades. The COVID-19 pandemic shook the world to its core, grounding it like a misbehaving teenager. The few countries that managed to get on top of it early emerged into an oddly balkanized world, with neighbors and trading partners still locked down, and economies and supply chains in disarray.
The demand shock cost the world trillions of dollars and decades of growth. ESG budgets were slashed worldwide. Carbon pricing schemes were postponed, neutered, and in some cases, rolled back altogether. COP26 in Copenhagen was delayed, delayed again, reluctantly moved online, and passed with barely a whimper. Delegates who’d based whole careers on body language and facial micro-expressions suddenly found themselves lost in a sea of pixellated heads and muted voices. Not a single resolution was passed. Continue reading