The Software Ark: Issue 15
Quote of the week
Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily; even if you had no title or position.
—Brian Tracy
Articles
Paul Graham has some bangers! And his general thesis on writing is one I agree with: Putting ideas into words is a severe test, and you almost always discover new things in the process.
I remember talking to my friend Jacob about how he wrote so well and so quickly, and his quick response was that he read a lot. In that sense, reading is the trick to supercharge your writing.
I have friend, Seyon, who's really good at contextualizing taking risks. He once dragged me to a bar and we spent the rest of the night just walking up to random tables and trying to have a 5 minute conversation with each table. It was terrifying, and it's something I need to get better at. I understand the world is noisy, and a good bet could lead to bad results, but the unpredictability is scary.
It's also dangerous because it stunts your growth. If I choose to not work on risky projects and always play it safe, I'm minimizing downside risk, not upside potential.
The re-framing that Neel talks about is interesting, and I'm not sure if it'll work, but I want to give it a try. I need to remove that mental block between “things are not as I want them to be” and “I can actually do something about this”.
Links
- TDD won't solve everything
- Isometric pixel art is pretty
- Caching is hard and the SEV Netflix remediated
- I/O is not the bottleneck in Big Data
- Little Languages are the future
- The CAR framework for application monitoring
- Meta releases Static Analysis for SQL
