FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.

This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.

I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.

One of the big promises of software is composability. You can build rich, powerful experiences out of basic building blocks.

APIs add new things to the toolbox. For example: Treasury, which lets an app/platform store, move, and track a business’

I've been a small business owner and can talk at length about SMB banking, and will later, but let's put on the software developer hat right now.

Lots of software talks about money, keeps records about money, does calculations about money, but can't *touch* money.

This is extremely frustrating when you're building SaaS apps for businesses, because you have total control over your UX right until your app needs to touch money... at which point all data about it lives in a silo you can't access.

So you generally push work to the operator.

For example, suppose you’re writing a business-in-a-box system for electricians, including an invoicing feature.

You need to be able to read bank transactions to reconcile. You probably can't. The owner can. So you ask the owner to do mind-numbing work a computer does better.

It sure would be great if your business customers had bank accounts you could actually introspect and operate on their behalves! You could just get the list of incoming payments and match against the invoices.

There is some software to write but it is not rocket science.

Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.

I never thought of myself as a writer.

So why do I now write one million words per year?

Because I discovered writing is a superpower.

Here are 67 benefits of writing.

👇🏼

1) 🧠 Clear your mind.

Stop using your brain as storage.

Start using your brain as processing power.

2) 💬 Communicate better.

Clear writers are clear thinkers.

Clear thinkers are clear communicators.

3) 👥 Build community.

Attract likeminded people.

Help connect people with similar interests who would have otherwise never met.

To go fast, go alone. To go far, go together.

4) 👩🏻‍🏫 Teach what you know.

You don’t have to be an expert to teach.

Leaders are seen as experts BECAUSE they teach.

Teach the person one step behind you.

The closing keynote from @davidjalmond at @The_UKLA Writing for Pleasure conference was just so wonderful. I feel like i'm going to explode with inspiration and excitement. I was too hooked to tweet at the time but some key thoughts that stood out to me...

On ideas: 'Stories are everywhere, they are ordinary human things that happen to each one of us. Within the boringness are the most extraordinary tales.' Also, 'We are an imaginative species, even deciding what you are having for dinner is an act of imagination.'

On the writing mind: 'The terrifying thing about a book is that it doesn't look like a mind. They look at the book and think it's perfect but they don't see what comes before [the notebooks]. People think writers must have a special type of mind but we all have the same minds.'

On bringing writing out of the head: 'Stationery, notebooks and pencil cases make writing physical. Thinking through a problem in a story can make it harder. Doodling and playing [in a notebook] can help to release the imagination.'

'It's important to remember how close the written word is to the voice. If you can speak a sentence without stumbling it's probably okay, if you can sing it without stumbling it's probably really good. It accentuates that words are not just beautiful black marks, they are sounds'

Hello, writers! How about a thread on LITERARY AGENTS? How to get one, how to talk to one, how to keep one happy. Spoiler alert: I am 100% pro agent and can't imagine not having one on my side. 1/

Why would you want a literary agent?
* you want to be traditionally published
* you want someone experienced to help guide your career
* you want to learn how to edit like a pro
* you want to sell foreign and movie rights
* you want answers to your newbie questions 2/

Why you might *NOT* want a literary agent:
* you want to self publish
* you're not willing to compromise on your edits
* you don't think their expertise is worth 15% of your advance
I... can't think this way. Literary agents have been crucial to my career. 3/

So, how do you get a literary agent?
1. Have a finished, revised, edited, polished manuscript.
2. Write a query letter for your book
3. Send your query to agents who rep your genre and are open to submissions
4. Repeat steps 1-4 until you're offered representation. 4/

So, let's go through those four steps. First of all, you must have a finished, revised, edited, polished book, and it must be sellable. That is, you can't sell a 600k picture book or a 40k adult Fantasy, etc. You must read extensively in the genre you're writing. 5/

LARPing Our Way To Armageddon

The intense and present danger of fantasy

a thread

One of the interesting things about the scifi / fantasy writing community is that it contains many people who have much higher tolerance for fantasy than the norm.

People who can be around fantasy a lot, without losing track of reality.

Counter intuitive perhaps. But people who deal with fantasy at a professional level become expert at recognising its stench.

That's a useful skill in 2021, when the world, and particularly America, is being sucked into a vortex of unreality.

Because human beings do not, as a rule, have good tools for distinguishing fantasy from reality.

This isn't a bug of humankind, it's very much a feature.

Humans are what we are because of our ability to engage in the shared fantasy we call society / culture / civilisation.

Homo Sapiens are the species that LARPs

Which has always brought with it some structural issues

That just got waaaaaaaaaaay more serious

Writing scales, talking doesn’t.

If you're not writing, you're not making use of the simplest forms of leverage.

Why is writing important within companies, and how to do it well?

(thread) 👇🏽