Musings

My wife and I went over to another couple’s apartment that we had recently met. We had a great time playing board games and eating pizza.

On our way home, my wife and I said to each other at the same time, “Did you notice their chickens?”

To gain understanding for the future, look at the past

“AI” is changing the way that people live and work. This is particularly true of my occupation as a software developer.

To try and predict the long term effects of AI on my occupation and on other creative fields, I think it’s helpful to think about times in the past when people’s jobs have been replaced by cheaper labor.

The creator’s niche dilemma and the curator’s dilemma

I don’t post that much to social media. I mean, I do compared to people who don’t post anything at all. It’s more accurate to say that I don’t post much compared to the average person who regularly posts to social media.

A big reason for my limited posting is that I stick to just professional content, which means I usually post about an article that I published or a project that I worked on. I also want my content to be relevant to my followers and fairly high quality.

However, I often have a desire to share more from other areas of my life. One example is sharing music that I found and liked recently. Another is dog videos, which I share privately with my wife, but I think some others might also like my highly curated dog videos.

But I think it would be pretty silly to post those things to my professional social media accounts, because people don’t follow me for that content. Furthermore, if people did want to see my music likes or dog videos, why would they follow me when I primarily make web dev posts? I call this the creator’s niche dilemma.

Relatedly, but on the other side of posting, there’s a lot of people who post high quality web development posts that I’d like to see. But many of those authors also post content outside of web dev that I don’t care about. In small portions, I don’t mind, but when they post non-tech posts regularly, I often don’t find it worth the follow. I call this the curator’s dilemma.

I’ve been thinking about these dilemmas for a while but don’t have a good solution for either of them yet.

Iteration > from scratch

I’m increasingly convinced that it’s usually a bad decision to start from scratch.

There are a lot of reasons behind this belief, but the primary one for me is: Usually the old way is doing pretty well. Rather than risk losing what is already going well in a full redesign, it’s usually better to focus on improving what’s lacking. Secondly, starting from something causes one to avoid the blank page syndrome.

This rule of thumb applies to product-level thinking all the way down to code implementation itself. Following this rule of thumb and avoiding redesigns may make you much more efficient and able to ship more.

I was skimming Hacker News and read this article about microfeatures. This blog already had several of these features, but one I didn’t think about adding until I read the article is an icon to visually indicate external links. As you can tell, I added this feature to my blog!