Paul Lindner

I was reading one of the 2 newsletters I follow - The Grappler's Diary on Substack - and the author (Chris Wojcik) pointed out one of those "well, yeah, of course" kind of ideas that made me stop and think for a bit. Wojcik pointed out that it takes more and more effort to reach higher levels of skill in jiu jitsu. This is of course true of any skill. I've certainly seen that with programming. The easiest and biggest leaps are at the beginning. Going from zero to your first working program is pretty easy. Becoming a true professional developer takes years. Continuous improvement takes introspection, feedback, seeking out training and education, and lots and lots of work. And the noticeable improvements these days are small: cleaner code, improved readability, and better organization. Little things that matter. And the more time I spend as a "programmer" the less I write code and the more time I spend on related things: technical design, code review, stakeholder relations, project management, and more. Just as you get more skilled in martial arts, the more time you spend teaching, coaching, and advising, and the less time you spend getting beat up by kids.

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This product was practically built for me. I’ve been waiting for something like it for years, long after I gave up writing on paper almost entirely. Heck, if it wasn’t for having kids, I probably could have gone the last the past decade with the challenge of not writing anything down on paper. Which makes it all the more frustrating at the price point it’s released. This isn’t targeted for grade school students, college students, or young professionals. It’s targeted at prosumers which share the same space as an iPad Air, and the market is already dominated by prosumers who want that product. For those who can’t afford the iPad, Amazon releases tablet computers in the $100 range. I know Remarkable is a much smaller company, and can’t compete on price with Amazon, or volume like Apple. But waiting so long for something I can’t justify the purchase price just hurts. At half the price it would have been a no brainer. It checks practically every box.

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I am at the stage of my engineering career where I die a little bit when an engineer wants to add a new library or plugin to our product, and I get irrationally excited when they find one to delete. Building on the Web these days often feels like a game where you see how much weight you can put in a boat before it sinks, but you get $1 for every pound you add instead of how many days it stays afloat. Engineering needs leaders who can renegotiate that game. There are strong business cases for performance budgets, moving carefully, deleting features, and curating your dependency chain. But that requires really great communication skills and business alignment, because it means intentionally forgoing maximum speed short-term for lower maintenance overhead long-term. This is a core tension of all engineering. Anyway, I was just excited my team deleted a plugin and accidentally explained why promoting your "fastest" engineer to management will always put you in a deeper hole. Happy Monday!

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If you think that the Trump assassination attempt somehow only affects Republicans, know that for some reason Bernie Sanders also cancelled his rally in Portland, ME for this Friday. The problem isn't that there aren't other candidates with better ideas--there are. The problem isn't that people are dumb and don't want a better future for the planet--I think they do. The best candidates are seldom the ones on the ballot. The higher you go in politics this is true: it is often the richest and oldest that are eligible for Presidency, and those with archaic ideas and that support the status quo, and those that serve for self gain. So once again, I'll be voting for the US Presidential candidate, whichever one is on the ballot whose ideas are more progressive. I will vote for the candidate not trying to topple government as we know it, or shake the hands of the Dictators whose hands snuff out the life of dissent. It was a Historic Meeting when Donald Trump shook the hands of Kim Jong Un, because he shook the hand of a despot that murders his own people for consuming the culture of other people, like the 30 teens North Korea recently executed for watching South Korean shows. Similarly, we must express our outrage at China's treatment of the Uyghur population. The Chinese government has detained hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Uyghurs in what they call "re-education camps." These camps are nothing short of modern-day concentration camps, where people are held without trial, subjected to political indoctrination, forced labor, and even torture. The world cannot stand idly by as an entire ethnic group is systematically oppressed and their culture erased. I get that some folks think we should just respect their Vote, but look, even Hitler and Putin were elected and that's just shit to think someone would vote for that, yet alone enough to normalize it. So this November, Let's Vote! Let's vote not to become America the Scared and Punished; lets not vote for camps; Lets not roll back the clocks of social progress when the hands of the Science clock will not be turned back by such rhetoric. No, we must work together to accomplish the impossible, if we want a future for our Grandchildren and their children on this planet.

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