Robin Sloan

i like this piece of thises and that­ses. “wee­knotes” it’s called, huh? nice. i started doing this too strangely, all shiny new from the first day of jan. gives me a real sense of accom­plish­ment. in other news, have you noticed how some peo­ple use ‘actu­ally’ in place of ‘yes’? (or is that only in india?)

like…
“her hair­cut is super ugly!”
“actually.”

funny.

It wouldn’t be much of a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage if it were easy, right? At least, it wouldn’t stay that way for long. 

I’m jeal­ous of your cod­ing abil­i­ties, any­way. I get frus­trated with code from a dif­fer­ent angle: I feel like my nat­ural skill set SHOULD lend itself to being good at cod­ing, but it doesn’t seem to trans­late. I was a mathematician/​logician, I’m detail– and design-​​obsessed, I’m good at research­ing and invent­ing solu­tions to prob­lems. But I’m still a hack as a pro­gram­mer. It’s like being tall and fast and a great jumper who just can’t fig­ure out bas­ket­ball, even though they’re good at other sports. 

Actu­ally, more than any­thing it reminds me of chem­istry lab. I hated chem lab, because it was SUPPOSED to be exact, math­e­mat­i­cal — but if you messed up one pid­dling detail or a com­po­nent didn’t work, the whole thing might not come out at all. 

To do things well, to have high stan­dards, and to NOT want to do things the way they’ve been done a thou­sand times before means they are going to be hard to get right. Experiment.

I think I’m going to love these wee­knotes, along with the projects whose cre­ation they are documenting.

I just popped in to say that I’m sym­pa­thetic to the temp­ta­tions of play­ing with code. As a tech­ni­cal writer (work­ing with Dar­win Infor­ma­tion Typ­ing Archi­tec­ture!) I’m sur­rounded by peo­ple hack­ing on cool stuff all the time, and I know just enough to be dan­ger­ous — enough to think, “Hey, I wish I could do some­thing awe­some with this.” I mean, I know how it works — my job is to describe that to peo­ple — so why not?

But there’s a gap between under­stand­ing enough to explain it to some­one who already has all the low-​​level knowl­edge in his head (or knows how to dis­cover it quickly) and being that some­one, for exam­ple, a devel­oper who’s used Exter­nal­In­ter­face often enough that he doesn’t trip over it any­more. I keep hav­ing to remind myself that my chief role is to cre­ate the doc and that it’s gen­er­ally more effec­tive for me to ask a devel­oper, “hey, give me a snip­pet that does this?” than to try to write it on my own.

For my own projects on my own time, though … if I had a vision of how to do some­thing just so, and didn’t have a part­ner in crime that I knew could do exactly that — I would likely give in to that temp­ta­tion! (How else do you get good at it? And get­ting good at stuff isn’t a zero sum game.)

I don’t think the musician/​pie anal­ogy is apt, unless they are some­how musi­cal pies, or he bakes them so that he can serve them at his gigs and he has sound-​​taste pair­ings worked out, so that the audi­ence is instructed to take a bite of a cer­tain pie when a cer­tain musi­cal phrase comes around … and if so, actu­ally (actu­ally) that would be a pretty cool com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. (The music aug­ments the taste of the pie which aug­ments the music. To say that the pies are not that great in a blind — or deaf — taste test is miss­ing the point.)

This com­ment is get­ting too long, so I’ll just say hooray for con­tent cre­ation. Plan­ning, brain­storm­ing, big-​​picture think­ing (which I tend to do more of at my job now than writ­ing) can be cool, but noth­ing beats cre­at­ing some­thing that was not there before.

Wow — no coin­ci­dence that you pulled out Go-​​go-​​main. But, I love what you have shared. 

Just before begin­ning one of my “to do” items, I always feel the need to clean every­thing up down to the kitchen floor, all draw­ers, stray cords, pic­tures arrange­ments on walls, search a few retail sites for the per­fect cof­fee maker and then take one trip to IKEA. Of, course I have highly devel­oped mas­tery in the­ses areas. 

And, is there a food and sleep break between the day and night projects?

tanushri: Yeah, that’s totally an Indian thing–and I love it. The sense of “actu­ally” that implies “this is a clar­i­fi­ca­tion” drops away, and instead it’s more like “FYI” or even “how about that!”

Kell­ska: Your music/​pie pair­ing sce­nario is amaz­ing. And I think you’re right.

BA: Hee hee… “search a few retail sites for the per fect cof fee maker”–hmm I think I’ll do that right now.

Kell­ska

“The music aug­ments the taste of the pie which aug­ments the music.” — Wow, I’m blown away! (Actu­ally, I only read this blog for the comments.)

And wee­knotes is a lovely cat­e­gory for my site, which will be born this week. Code­name suvrec. Twenty-​​ten, we are ready for you.

Next time I will put Kellska in [code], not [blockquote]. Lesson learned.

Very happy to see you writ­ing wee­knotes, and inspir­ing oth­ers to do so!

Also I love the source of your code-​​names — the crazy rapids at the begin­ning of the project, decid­ing which side of the water­shed to descend. The mean­der­ing in the mid­dle. The end where your project finally emp­ties into the ocean of the world… I could drag this out too far. I have already. I’ll stop.

I had a pro­fes­sor once who code­named his unborn chil­dren: river names that were also states. He felt these were both majes­tic and pretty while suit­ably non-​​gendered, I think.

Kell­ska, your musi­cal tast­ing idea is magic. 

Robin, I think you under­es­ti­mate the taste of your pies because you’ve made them your­self. Just like many expe­ri­enced cooks are hyper crit­i­cal of their own cook­ing, only you know what you *wanted* it to taste like, and so you are com­par­ing it to that unseen ideal. And only you expe­ri­enced the labor of mak­ing it hap­pen, and so its devi­a­tion from that ideal weighs on you more. We just get to enjoy the final dish, mag­i­cally pro­duced. Unlike many peo­ple, you are par­tic­u­larly good at get­ting stuff out into the world–I think I’ve told you, you’re my con­tem­po­rary hero on that front–so you’re advanc­ing past the stage where you’re just thrilled that it exists. (Again, as a cook I can relate: I still recall my utter delight with sim­ple dishes I turned out as an ado­les­cent, so thrilled to be finally cook­ing, and even far more com­plex pro­duc­tions now do not cheer me as purely on their own.) There’s this mid­dle stage when you don’t have enough exter­nal data on the feed­back (ha!) to be really con­fi­dent these new cre­ations are all that, but if you keep turn­ing them out—pies and all–you’ll get enough oohs and ahs from enough peo­ple you trust to know in your gut you’re hit­ting your mark. It’s a more com­plex kind of satisfaction.

very intrigued by Pil­grim. Sadly I won’t be at SxSW unless I can really finesse times, dates and travel (have to be in Vegas for a lot of that same week) … Hop­ing you’ll con­tinue to tease /​ reward the Com­mit­tee with more

On the music/​pie sce­nario, I thought that was Robin’s idea, not mine! Or at least, what I wrote comes entirely from the ini­tial con­nec­tion he pro­posed. But I have to admit I’m tick­led by the pos­si­bil­ity. Cre­atively tickled …

Kell­ska: I just sort of threw it out as a shal­low analogy—you actu­ally made it into some­thing that sounded, like, kinda awesome :-)