6 min
What an RSS feed is for
Somebody who has been building websites for two years asked me what the orange icon in the footer did, and I gave an answer that was mostly about 2007, which was no use to them at all.
Culture
All writing →30 posts filed under Culture, newest first.
6 min
The blogroll
I found a writer I now read constantly because of a link at the bottom of somebody else's post, and it took me a day to work out why that felt unusual, which is that almost nothing reaches me that way any more.
9 min
Whoever gets there
The alignment people and the stay-ahead-of-China people are both right. Inconvenient. I still land on keeping our foot down while building the safeguards into the same motion.
8 min
Things I unlearned
I read a post I wrote in 2015 and found the person who wrote it insufferable. That turns out to be the useful part of keeping an archive for 11 years.
7 min
Ask a question that gets answered
Two questions went into the same channel within about ten minutes of each other. One got a useful answer in four minutes. The other is still sitting there, and the difference wasn't the difficulty.
6 min
Dependable and boring
Everybody wants to build the new thing, but the web runs on old software that somebody unglamorous is keeping alive, usually for free and usually without being thanked.
7 min
Technical debt is a bad metaphor
Somebody asked how much technical debt we had, wanting a number. Nobody could give one, and not because we hadn't measured. The question doesn't mean anything; the metaphor makes it sound like it does.
7 min
Strangler fig
The pattern has a name and a literature, and the literature is about banks with 40 teams, and I have a 40-page site for a firm of surveyors, and the mechanics scale down further than anybody writes about.
7 min
The rewrite that shouldn't happen
This is the third proposal to rewrite the same system in five years, all three from competent people acting in good faith, and the interesting question isn't whether they're right, it's why the proposal keeps arriving.
6 min
Nobody's leaving now
Eighteen months ago it was six recruiter messages a week. This month I've had one, and two of the three people who left have been made redundant.
6 min
Where everybody went
The place where this industry has conducted most of its conversation for about a decade came apart over six weeks, and everybody scattered, and the thing I miss most is not the site.
7 min
Scope creep is mechanical
A project finished about 40% over and there was no change log at all, because in-house doesn't have one. That turned out to be the most useful thing I learned all year.
7 min
The tutorial trap
Somebody who had completed three courses, all the way through, all the exercises done, sat down in front of an empty folder and could not start, and was quietly convinced this meant they weren't cut out for it.
7 min
Deleting code
Three days on a retainer, removing things. The client asked what they'd got for it, reasonably and without any edge, and I did not have an answer ready.
7 min
Code review is teaching
I can still quote a review comment somebody left on my work in 2015, and I can also remember one I left last year that I'd like back, and neither of those is about whether the code was correct.
6 min
Everything is a video call
I added up last week's calendar and it came to 19 hours, and I'd estimate that 11 of those hours replaced conversations that used to take two minutes and happen next to somebody's desk.
6 min
The kitchen table
Two weeks and three days of working from a table that is also where I eat, and the thing I keep circling back to is that this was always possible and we were always told it wasn't.
8 min
200 things at once
A change delivered all at once isn't braver than the same change delivered in slices, it just makes you unable to tell what you broke, and the web platform itself is the best argument for the slow way.
7 min
Reading a codebase
I wrote a post a few years ago about the order I read an unfamiliar project in, and I've since decided the order was never really the point, and that the procedure's actual job is to stop me opening files at random and hoping.
6 min
Uses
Three people asked me last month what I use for something, and I gave three different half-answers from memory, so I've finally written the page, and the writing of it was more useful than the page.
6 min
The long table
The monthly meetup I'd been going to since I started didn't happen in February, or in March, and nobody announced anything, and I think that's just how these end.
7 min
Naming things
I spent 20 minutes on a variable name last week and felt bad about it for the rest of the afternoon, and I've since decided the 20 minutes was the only honest work I did that day.
7 min
The estimate is a distribution
Someone asks how long the checkout will take. What you believe is a lopsided curve with a long tail. What comes out is one number, and by Thursday it's a date in a plan.
6 min
Make it pop
Clients hand you a solution and call it a requirement, and most of the job is quietly working backwards to the problem underneath it without being a jerk about it.
6 min
A wall of green squares
A candidate apologized to me for their contribution graph before I'd asked about it, and I've been uncomfortable about that for about a month, mostly because I'd have done the same thing.
9 min
Everyone has a Brent
Not a good novel. I got more out of it than most of the good books I read this year, largely because of the one character everybody quotes the wrong lesson about.
7 min
The brief is not the problem
A brief arrives as a numbered list of features, and every line on it is somebody's guess at a solution to a problem that isn't written down anywhere in the document.
6 min
The channel for everything
Eighteen months on Slack. It fixed several real problems, and I still can't work out why my day feels more fragmented than it did when the tool was worse.
8 min
The redesign is a re-platform
The brief said refresh the look and feel, and the client meant it sincerely, and the reason that sentence is expensive has nothing to do with the look and feel and everything to do with the four years of decisions sitting underneath it.
6 min
Worth doing badly
Chesterton's line about doing things badly is the most useful thing I know about actually finishing anything, and it goes well past side projects.