I wonder what your take is on the current landscape --- do you see this approach still having an edge? If you wanted to outcompete for a current-day SaaS app, do you see an undervalued approach that would still confer an advantage?
I came back here for the comments after clicking through and my wifi was glitching, leading me to get a "can't find this site" message for a minute. Interesting experience.
> Was this physically difficult to write? If it flowed out effortlessly in one go, it's usually fluff.
Probably my best and most insightful stuff has been produced more or less effortlessly, since I spent enough time/effort _beforehand_ getting to know the domain and issue I was interested in from different angles.
When I try writing fluff or being impressive without putting in the work first, I usually bump up against all the stuff I don't have a clear picture of yet, and it becomes a neverending slog. YMMV.
my take on this book is that 1) it contains a lot of foundational knowledge/wisdom about design as interpreted broadly that is very useful across contexts, and 2) it is itself, ironically, an example of poor design. Not in the visual sense, but in that it's structure and writing do a pretty bad job actually conveying that knowledge to the reader and being navigable.
I tried reading it and hated it, then I came back knowing bits and pieces of its contents from elsewhere and was like "yup, this is the only place I've seen all of this together".
"Now, one day back at Data General, his weariness focused on the logic analyzer and the small catastrophes that come from trying to build a machine that operates in billionths of a second. On this occasion, he went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal:
I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."
— from "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder
I guess there's various reasons, ranging from "it's hard to make auto-layout algos produce stuff as dense as painstakingly handcrafted maps" to "let's make it harder to scrape/copy data"
I've been occasionally using futureme.org since ~15 years ago, in case you're a believer in the Lindy effect. FWIW I don't think I've ever used it for anything more than ~1 year ahead, that always seemed fun/interesting enough. Of course there's other considerations entering the picture if you plan ten years ahead, but then again this seems like the kind of fun/light-hearted thing where it doesn't really bother me that I might not end up reading it again --- life happens...
I used to work at an SME that ran ~everything on its own colo'd hardware, and while it never got this bad, there were a couple instances of the CTO driving over to the dc because the oob access to some hung up server wasn't working anymore. Fun times...
I find this hard to judge in the abstract, but I'm not quite convinced the situation for the modal company today is worse than their answer to "what if your colo rack catches fire" would have been twenty years ago.
This. I've started thinking of it like this — the iPad, in my case, has an absolutely abysmal cost to usage ratio. On the far other end of the spectrum (and in a similar form factor if you squint) is probably my Kindle.
That being said, _some_ people I know consistently seem to get lots of work use out of their tablets, and I can't quite put my finger on where we differ.
Tangential, but I was very surprised to learn recently that my country still has a more or less nationwide POCSAG pager network where only some users encrypt their traffic
whole-heartedly seconded, it helps with anything from "they want me to do something really bad" all the way to "I'm really not feeling it anymore here"
I'm quite firmly on the side of "don't do bad stuff", even way before crossing the line to wondering how you'd look in the proverbial orange jumpsuit. But two things about this are often under-discussed IMO.
Firstly, personal costs can be high even before full-blown whistleblowing, the struggles of which are well reported. The best case is usually that you're looking for a new job. It is clear to me that that's better than committing a crime or gravely unethical action, but not everyone always has good alternatives, enough financial safety, and no major economic responsibilities to cover at home.
This also goes for mental costs: I have previously come close to burnout spending months trying to rectify a clearly very bad and doomed situation. The only reward at the other end was the bitter vindication of seeing a project I deeply cared about crash and burn from afar after cutting my losses. And I personally know people who suffered far greater damage and took longer to recover from it, even in cases where they merely uncovered some big skeleton in the closet that was not even the fault of anyone currently in charge or clearly malicious. In many cases, management will be somewhere between actively complicit and themselves stuck in a bad situation with barely enough (perceived) agency to fix things the right way, which doesn't help.
Secondly, short of "going to war" and dedicating your entire life to changing something, saving yourself is usually the best you can hope for. That's obviously better than being complicit and possibly liable. I also like being able to sleep at night knowing I have principles. But if you have the righteousness to refuse to become complicit, it's quite frustrating to come to terms with the fact that you mostly won't be able to set things straight properly unless you are in a very influential position. I know that's often not really my responsibility if I'm not higher up, but it still doesn't sit right with me that I can't do more.