andkon

I’m a philosophy grad who learned to code a couple years out of school.

Philosophy gives you a set of meta cognitive skills that help everywhere. It teaches you how to think. It shows you what class of problems are soluble, and which are things where we just have to accept tradeoffs. And it’s really focused, in a funny way, on economy: does your argument actually do something? Does this theory offer clarity and bring us closer to truth? If not, well, why are you wasting your breath on it? Philosophy teaches you to see that some avenues are fruitless or just kinda not worth the effort.

Also, non-practically, it shows you the full depth of wonder in the world. Wherever there is capacity for thinking to be done, philosophy says, you can elucidate something important to our human condition.

As an engineering manager, I read and agree with this guy's critique. Coding is creative, uncertain, and vulnerable work, and if engineering managers are responsible for whatever leads to results (as he reads Drucker as saying, and which I agree is really our job), then yeah, everything he describes as hampering us in doing that job (tools like OKRs, the need to quantify results, etc. etc.) are all indeed real issues!

And if you look at how engineering management happens, at really any org big enough to have even one manager of engineers, I think you'll see this stuff really is a problem. But it's a problem because, well, organizations need to find some way to scale accountability over all of their members, which, when it faces the really tricky vulnerable and weird work of engineering, runs into these problems because of how incommensurate that work is with the tools it has to understand how it's going at scale.

When EMing is a bullshit job, it's because the engineering manager is so constrained by the bureaucratic needs of the organization that she cannot actually do the work that matters between the lines. Like when you've gotta manage up so much that you cannot find the room to support an engineer grappling with a novel and uncertain task? Well, the engineer suffers, rightfully blaming engineering management -- we were responsible for supporting them, and failed to do so.

As EMs, we have to ask ourselves what we wanna do. Do we wanna fit with what the org asks of us, or do we wanna do what we're responsible for: delivering results by supporting engineers as they do the scary, vulnerable work they do? When those things diverge, I think good managers discover ways to keep the people above them happy, while delivering on their responsibilities to their team. But they often do it despite, not because of, the organization they're serving.

I'd like to say it's as easy as just always focusing on results, as when they are delivered, the rest of the org will see that you know what's up! But no. If you just do that as an EM, you'll be fired, or passed over for promotions, or have your team cut from underneath you, or be told you're a better engineer than manager and demoted. Ultimately, your job is to do both: to deliver what the people above you say they need, and to help those who report to you.

The coda to this is that the people above you are also human, and also probably realize what they're asking of you is bullshit (if you're lucky). So if you're capable of dealing as humanely and vulnerably with those above you as much as your direct reports, you'll also win them over, and you'll win the cover from them to be able to do what matters with your team.

This was like five years ago that I had one, but as far as I remember, OP-1 isn't grid-based (though maybe some of the instruments are?). It's basically like a four track tape mixer. You can loop bar-by-bar, and then copy from bar to bar. And you can stretch time in the same way that you would with a reel-to-reel tape deck. But as far as I remember it won't transpose / warp the sounds along with the change in BPM.

From wikipedia:

> A logic gate is an idealized or physical device implementing a Boolean function, a logical operation performed on one or more binary inputs that produces a single binary output. Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, one that has for instance zero rise time and unlimited fan-out, or it may refer to a non-ideal physical device

As long as it implements a boolean function, which this clearly does, it sure sounds like a logic gate. What difference does it make whether the control and output have the same form of energy when the real thing that matters is the information it captures?

One thing that can make it fun, speaking as a former kid who grew up playing fiddle, is to get to play with other kids and connect with other kids through music. Maybe that's tough with piano, but youth orchestra, band, fiddle circles, all sorts of things offer them the chance to find other people with whom they can make their instrument their own thing, and not just yours. Though there is always a helpful role for parental encouragement in practicing – because damn is that part not fun.

Oh man, you gotta charge more! This is insanely cheap. The average substack charges $5 a month, and you usually get an email a week at best.

I think you're right that the services themselves break, but more often than not, the failure mode is that what page you're monitoring changes its structure, and then every refresh gives you data that is incommensurate with what came before. It's why we version APIs, but there's no such versioning we expose on websites.

I think that also points to why what you propose would be very hard to do: in HTML pages, even if the page structure (a new div level) changes, it's hard to say if that's actually a fundamental change to how they've architected the information hierarchy you're trying to get notified out, or if that is indeed the information itself. It's ambiguous.

Maybe that's okay? Like, if all you want is a notification about every time a thing changes, regardless of the meaning of the change, then what you're describing is possible. But I think the meaning of the change is important, and that's ultimately what shifts over time in ways computers cannot grok.

I will give you one breadstick (real)

Also it would be nice if this book could do all the deploying for me.

You've never put a number of elements together in a div, and added a class and styles to that div rather than each individual element? You should try it out.

Don’t forget to count all the cruise missiles, too!

This is really helpful. I love the idea of reaching out on long-running and getting feedback directly - that seems a great qualitative way to get a sense of what's going on, and fits well with my own experience about how to talk to early-stage customers who seem to have some value from a product I've made, but which probably isn't quite meeting people's needs yet. Turns out that's often enough to figure out the biggest, most helpful changes. Thank you!

Wowwww this is lovely! Have you written anywhere about what you've done on the projects you've maintained along these lines? I think we'd all benefit from hearing more about what you can do in a project to make contributors more capable and helpful.

After all, it seems like their incentives should align? Like, why wouldn't they want to make a contribution that actually helps? Making that easier to actually do seems like time well spent for everyone.