spf13

100% agree. These factors are generalized and without context. The context you bring is essential to making the right decision. The next post I'm writing is all about how to apply this framework to your specific context.

Hi HN, author here.

While reading Franklin's autobiography, I was completely struck by the systematic, almost algorithmic way he taught himself to write. He designed a process of compressing, reconstructing, and comparing his work against a "gold standard" to find and correct his "faults."

The more I looked at his 4-step loop, the more it resembled the modern training loop for a machine learning model (data collection, forward pass, loss function, backpropagation/gradient descent).

I wrote this piece to explore that parallel, how Franklin basically reverse engineered the principles of deliberate practice and error minimization 250 years before we had the formal language of AI to describe it. It's a fascinating piece of history, but also a practical model for how anyone can learn a complex skill.

Happy to answer any questions!

I never intended this statement to be taken as if I built these alone. Thanks for this candid feedback.

Perhaps a more accurate wording is:

"You may know me from helping to build the Go Language, Docker, MongoDB, and Drupal & creating Hugo, Cobra and spf13-vim"

I built and led the team that was responsible for the MongoDB user experience. We designed and built MongoDB's integrations with programming languages & third party systems (Drupal, Hadoop, Storm, Spark, etc). Our team wrote the MongoDB user manual too and we were responsible for the websites.

My blog has a lot of talks / posts about the work our team did if you want to read up more about it.

Thank you!

I can confirm it's quite accurate. I've been the person responsible for these metrics the entire time cited.

A couple of the Go authors did a lot of the initial coding and continue to code in Acme (rsc, r). The broader Go team use a wider variety: Vim, Emacs, Goland, and VSCode are the most popular from what I've seen.

I did this exact thing when I got frustrated with Jekyll (and friends) and created Hugo. Of course, at the time all SSGs were in dynamic languages and very VERY slow.

Happy to see some Hugo ideas made it into Zola.

This is the first. There have been several designs previously, each of which was refined based on feedback, culminating in this proposal.

I didn't. I'm shocked how awful these ads are. I've turned it off completely.