Some bits of wisdom--much of it about programming; much of it about software engineering and NodeJS--that I've collected and wanted to keep somewhere.
Have suggested reading? Open an issue! 🎉
- personal growth
- success
- fundamentals-oriented thinking
- problem solving
- software engineering
- hacking
- node & javascript
- the unix way
- open source community
- power structures in society
- technology
- productivity
- http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html
- http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html
Hamming, "You and Your Research" aggregation of marginal gains repititions, not goals plan for failure
"Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day." —Jim Rohn
Cutting through to what matters
This is not a general disdain for the new: they want to see innovation as much as anybody, but are skeptical of newborn frameworks, tools and technologies that fail to embody the timeless principles that they've found most valuable.
Frameworks descend and burn up in the atmosphere like meteors. Technology changes fast enough that today’s problems are never tomorrow’s problems. Historically, our greatest technologies have been created by those who kept digging until they hit bedrock; who understood foundational ideas and technologies well enough to improve upon them.
It's hard to get new developers interested in a software project if we force them to not just learn how it works, but also how it got there, because its process of evolution is so critical to the final shape it ended up in. [...] These kinds of clever tricks incur, not a technical, but a social debt that strictly accrues over time.
it's better for your tool to be dumb and work in predictable ways than to implement surprising "convenience" behaviors. The presence of magic numbers set by default is a good indicator that some tool is too "smart" for its own good and will cause you grief.
a note about git commit messages
How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters
"Applied Philosophy a.k.a. 'Hacking'"
Many Things; in particular:
When frameworks make your decisions for you, you very often won't even realize that a decision has been made at all so it's much harder to identify problems when the assumptions grounded in that technology choice no longer apply.
How to Capture an Open Source Project
Types of Anticapitalism & Real Utopias
'Teaching a man to fish' parable is a lie
The Tyranny of Structurelessness
Holistic and Prescriptive Technologies
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto
The Internet with a Human Face
no internet makes you significantly more productive than bad internet -- @feross
see also meta-knowledge