I’d started some time ago, and just recently finished reading the first part of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Here, I will present my quick overview of each chapter.
Category: Life
Idea: news diversity
As with most of my mornings, they start with a coffee and reading the news on time.mk – news portals' aggregator.
At the time of writing this post, there are about 115 sources on the sources list on time.mk. As readers, we are mostly interested in unique content. Out of those 115 sources, a lot of them will generate noise. It may look something like this:
Even if you don’t understand Cyrillic, you can tell it’s definitely the same text.
So, how do we find the most unique sources and only stick to them, instead of wasting our time on copy-paste news portals that do not produce original content?
A8c team meetup Athens, 2019
During the first week of October, we had our team meetup in Athens, Greece.
We had a lot of projects going on, and one of them (which I was involved in) was working on the architecture of WooCommerce Services. It has wp-calypso as a dependency, and we wanted to move out of that and just rely on @wordpress/components. We have a PoC PR and wrote an internal P2 post about it.
Fun stuff, right? Now for the actual fun stuff. We did a lot of escape rooms. And I mean a lot.
Metapost: Tuply singleton – Freedom of creativity
I like puzzles. If it’s a non-trivial one, in order to come up with a solution I usually spend a few days (on and off) thinking about it. But it also has to be interesting to get my attention.
As an example, consider one of my earlier blog posts series: Tuply singleton, Tuply singleton v2, Tuply singleton v3. This is what I do in general, and blog posts are usually just the result of my thinking. Blogging (or pen & paper) is one of the best tools we have as humans – given the reliability of our memory.
But then another thought came. What if someone had asked me that same question on a job interview? Most job interviews usually have a time constraint, so there’s a high chance I would come up with the first (erroneous) version.
To me, this is freedom of creativity – to keep thinking about something that seems interesting and come up with a solution, without being pressured or constrained by time.
Customer-driven engineering
We’re in the process of renovating our house with my wife.
We have a bunch of “engineers” working on it: electricians, plumbers, wall painters. These guys have direct contact with the customers. What they are working on will be immediately visible to the customer. They must be thinking about the customer all the time, and satisfy their needs. There is no management, customer support, release dates in between (I’m sure there is for larger objects). What they are doing is visible at the spot and they must make sure it looks right, otherwise the customer will be mad.
This sounds very similar to what freelancing software engineers are doing. On the other hand, software engineers that work at big companies have huge layers before they reach the customers. As a consequence, most of them even rarely think about their customers at all.
Lately I’ve been thinking about our customers more and more. What we are building as software engineers are decisions that were discussed with other smart people at meetings, etc. But I think there is still value in constantly asking yourself: “what will the customer think about this?”, “what will their reaction be on what I’m building right now”, etc.
Do you ever think about your customers, or only your code like most of us? 🙂
bor0's reflective blog 