Here is a collection of stuff I have some thoughts about, grouped by category.


🌱 Seedlings: things I jotted down, some of which I eventually wrote more about:

  • It feels like there is a point at which your job becomes less about doing something than it is about knowing the reason behind things that were done in the past.
  • There is a lot about having a baby - and the lead up to having a baby - that isn’t very well explained. (Which parental leave should you take?; A gotcha for sharing parental leave)
  • I think that what people don’t like about bad service at restaurants, stores, etc., is the feeling of being unsure: not knowing where to go, standing there looking like a doofus, with others watching.
  • Someone could probably run for national office on the sole platform of diminished airport security, making flying and travel simpler.
  • “We can’t make it any simpler”: You really can’t make your process simpler? Think about this: the Red Cross officially eliminated the pulse-taking step from its CPR courses because people kept screwing it up. If lifesaving techniques can simplify, so can you.
  • Wikipedia (well, the internet) has killed the ‘cool offhand knowledge’ thing, since everyone knows interesting tidbits now.
  • Balancing focus and attention: I think remote work - in particular a reliance on virtual meetings - is a tradeoff between focus and attention. Working from your own private space can (can!) be a boon for focus, but you will never have others’ attention in the same way. Everyone is multi-tasking.
  • Saving pennies: The best investment is not-spending. But this transaction benefits no one, so no one is going to be envouraging you to do it. Instead, it’s where to invest your money, buy a high quality thing, or eco-friendly thing, but buying nothing. (Not-doing as an investment strategy)
  • Work about work: how pervasive is meta-work (para work?); business services that help businesses do business with businesses, ad infinitum; it’s hard to see the root of where things come from.
  • Why on earth are there so many SaaS business service companies? Is this all we can think of, or are we solving the ‘easy’ problems?
  • It often feels like the current yardstick for ‘this thing is good’ is ‘this is comfortable’. This is probably a laudable goal but seems to result in a lot of nonsense.
  • Is it even remotely possible that the absolutely batshit rise in real estate prices reflects actual value in some way? Between the real lack of housing and increase in immigration to having a stake in a large, resource-rich country, and some people are just far more strategic than others?
  • Microservice observability is costly, good Lord. I’ve had some experience now with both Datadog and Graylog (Taming your Datadog bills) TO-DO: why software developers should care about SRE/logging/observability, etc.
  • WHy you should put your data scientists/analysts in charge of observability: they are detail-oriented people who look for patterns; not within standard software team lines; tools are basically BI tools; graphics, etc.
  • LLM * rise of AI: the first worry will be “what can be subtracted” - or things that were never really useful, but were just done anyways AND can be easily/credibly done by a model. It’s like if we all ‘knew’ a cake took 45 mins in the oven but that’s onyl bc the baker we hired liked to take 30 min breaks before .Maybe it will hit knowledge work especially hard, say if it’s proportional to the amount of plagiarism, or more copying-influence like technical articles and policy analysis. Regarldess, if a large proportion of your job was summarzing things you read somewhere on the internet, this could be big trouble. This thing can read more than you, talk, faster and generate text that sounds impressive and can be tailored.
  • resilience: we probably need to build out networks of support at the neighborhood or civic/municipality level for power outages, floods, etc. Practices/drills maybe?