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