blowski

Gerald Weinberg was a prolific author in the tech consultancy space, and most of his writing consists of anecdotes like this. He explains his theories by telling stories, the veracity of which isn’t the point.

On the specific note, I frequently make these mistakes, despite having read his books and knowing the problem to which he’s referring. I say “could you just…” and “we should really do x today”. In the abstract, we can all see the problem, yet it’s easy to forget in reality.

The winner in the “software with passionate users” has to be emacs.

I find this a vague, reductionist view. When I have dinner with my family today, there’s more than one nature, while my own nature has changed in the last 10 years. To say most people have had the same nature at least for the last 300 years is only true if you reduce “nature” to something so banal that it means nothing at all.

> we just have phones now

That’s a huge understatement. We have electricity, refrigeration, medicine, mass transit (including international), human rights, enormous increases in population, fast media, internet, nuclear weapons, universal literacy, factory lines, spaceships, cities of many millions of people. Anyone that’s played Civilisation knows how far the tech tree goes once you hit the Enlightenment.

And you can see how much internet and social media have changed society, so imagine the impact of all those things combined on the human brain.

Do you have any specifics on examples of the design being inferior?

Fixed

If you want ChatGPT to say nice things about you (or bad things about your competitors), then you'll need to give it your version of information - at least that will be the line peddled to us.

I've already received emails from SEO snake oil sellers now advertising themselves as being able to influence ChatGPT output.

I'd say this is exactly what the interviewers wanted. They're interested in how you break down the problem, the types of solutions you consider, your understanding of the trade-offs involved. For example, I interviewed somebody who was adamant they could prevent double-booking by polling an end-point and storing the state in Redux. Fantastic JavaScript skills, terrible knowledge of databases.

Good question. I suppose an existing plugin that meets the requirements, or the skills to build one myself.

Doesn't that seem a bit passive aggressive? See what I did there?

Also, there are many UI challenges solved easily by React plugins - e.g. multi-select boxes, datepickers, colour pickers, file uploads, etc. Yes, this is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. But I don't have a nutcracker, and I do already have a sledgehammer, so why not.

Don't we have that with Patreon, GitHub Sponsors?