Mateusz

Where Does Bad Code Come From?

I never had a real in person mentor that I would take from piles of knowledge and in times of trouble I’d think to myself “How would he approach this problem?”. Casey Muratori has been to me - code-wise at least - the closest thing to a mentor I ever had. Being curious about the world view someone has on a given subject shows that you respect that person. And I have nothing but respect for Casey and what he achieved with the Handmade Hero series. For me he’s the person we - young generation of programmers - need to show us that most of the pretty talk around is just fluff that does not walk the walk. This talk might be the amalgamation of all the things that are preached by Casey. And most of this boils down to the fact that we should strive to be engineers and our choices should have some support other than “He said that it’s better that way”. If you can’t measure it, it does not exist. Saying that SOLID has to be seen for what it is, a king without pants.

With all the stuff I just said it’s effectively like instead of giving them something like a compass we just give them tools that don’t make any sense. We give them like a hammer and a tape measure or something like that. And we’re like “Here you go. Set off on this journey, here’s a hammer”. Now the worst part about it is it’s not even as bad as giving someone a hammer because the real world person would know that the hammer is useless and throw it away. We’ve told them that this hammer is critical for navigation so they’re like trying to like hold it up to the sun or something and figure out which direction they’re going. They have no idea that we’ve given them tools that are not even relevant to the problem that they’re solving. They’re not actually tools that measure anything. They’re just arbitrary. We just gave them to them and said here you go.

The 36 Questions That Lead to Love

Given how suggestive the title might be, it’s not necessarily about falling in love. It’s about being vulnerable around someone and them being vulnerable around you. Your partner, family or close friends are good matches if you just want to see how these questions allow oneself to slowly but surely open before someone. The deeper you dig inside yourself the more things you find that you thought were inconsequential turn out to be the building blocks that make you-you. In the deepest parts of your psyche there is nothing, you have no personality. You have fears and desires. Everything else is just built as an abstraction around the core of your emotions. What you thought was you is just an outward facing facade that allows emotions to flow from the core but keep it safe in the event of danger.

Black Country, New Road - ‘Concorde’

Sharing art in the place where I talk about rocks that do basic math requires me to reveal my vulnerabilities. But we all have them and what are we without emotions if not the same carbon-based calculators doing basic math and multiplying in numbers.

Concorde, I miss you
Don’t text me till winter
I can hardly afford
A second summer of splinters
This staircase, it leads only to
Some old pictures of you
Through an a-thousand-mile-long tube
What’s a city boy to do?

Antoni

Zettelkasten

This idea came to after almost a year, during last summer I came upon a podcast called Second Brain. It was about personal knowledge management, especially the focus was put on embracing the digital technologies. So the brain is used at what its best at - creating connections between ideas, and the computer is used as a store of ideas. Perfect combo, so every time you start a new project you never start with a blank piece of paper but instead you ask your second brain for the references. This idea really resonated with me, I still remember the moment when I was riding my bike during sunny summer day listening to the podcast and thinking - yeah, it maybe it, I found something of a real value that will change my life.

But it didn’t, at least for now. I left the idea. I don’t have the exact explanation. Probably my perfectionism prevented me from even starting because I didn’t have a clue how to do it correctly. And I was 100% in my thinking, there is no correct way of doing it. End of the story, we can all go home, right? Not exactly.

Zettelkasten is the very interesting perspective on knowledge management. You don’t focus on structure itself, but rather you collect knowledge and the structure reveals itself to you. Thanks to interlinking and tagging you start to notice connections between the notes. It seems really interesting, but the question is probably: why?

To make as little friction as possible while noting, you don’t focus where to put it, you just sit, take a note and thats it. Most likely you will reference your other note or later tag it correctly.

I am really intrigued by the zettelkasten idea and the whole second brain movement. That is definitely one of my top summer priorities, to learn how to handle my knowledge more efficiently, because right now I feel that I am reaching the boiling point, where my knowledge will no longer fit my brain.

Life from plant’s perspective

This article achieved its purpose - to encourage me to watch “The Green Planet” episode. It has very well structured flow of thought. Starts with describing David Attenborough who is the narrator of this series. Given the context of his work and his personal accolades I am guided to the next section when we focus on the problem that he is trying to solve. To be honest I didn’t even read till the end, I immediately went to watch one of the episodes (I hope that was the author’s goal :-D ).

Show focuses on plants, which until very recently were considered dumb and unconscious, and boy we couldn’t be more wrong. Plant are living organisms, they feel, they communicate with each other and even plan ahead. Main idea behind this TV series is to show the world from plant’s perspective.

Show starts with the opening words from David Attenborough, they are a great summary of what is yet to come: the word of appreciation for plants and at the same time awareness of our dependence on them.

Plants, whether they are enormous or microscopic, are the basis of all life, including ourselves. We depend upon them for every mouthful of food that we eat and every lungful of air that we breathe. The plants of our planet live remarkable lives, yet for the most part the secrets of their world have been hidden from us – until now.

I have watched only one episode and I surely recommend watching it (I am going to continue watching after writing this blog post). The level of cinematography that we are pleased with is astonishing, in such moments one can truly appreciate the technological advancements, they indeed open us for new perspective. Utilising time-lapse photography, drones and specially designed camera rigs called “Triffids”, the series aimed to show plant movements over prolonged periods, but sped up into real time.

And when it comes to narration we can experience David Attenborough greatness ourselves. His voice is really pleasant to the ear and puts life into plants. Having this dynamism of human voice and the human perspective really allows us to look on the world from plants perspective.

The ending phrase is really inline with the whole series goal, to change our relationship with flora for the better, because we still can.

Our relationship with plants has changed throughout history and now it must change again. We must now work with plants and make the world a little greener, a little wilder. If we do this, our future will be healthier, and safer, and happier. Plants are, after all, our most ancient allies, and together we can make this an even greener planet.