3 ms·

Something about the personality of a programmer draws us towards that ever-fleeting siren of The Infinite. Infinite scalability, infinite reusability, infinite

by _bxg1 7y ago

Something about the personality of a programmer draws us towards that ever-fleeting siren of The Infinite. Infinite scalability, infinite reusability, infinite growth. It's this lust for the Bigness that our code could theoretically reach that causes most of us to pass right by the myriad of opportunities for small, more meaningful, more human software.

bitwize 7y ago
Maybe, if you read a lot of Paul Graham essays and are seduced by the siren call of startups and VCbux. But I'm more captivated by the infinite possibilities of the thing sitting right in front of me. And I bristle at machines thousands of times more powerful than my old Commodore actively preventing me from exploring those possibilities without identity management, app signing, hooking up an even bigger computer to my small computer, et weary cetera. But what do I know, I'm just a lizard person. My small computer is really a phone, an inherently social tool. Its manufacturer didn't intend for me to easily hack it, therefore I've really no right to.
err4nt 7y ago
The opposite pulls of designing for a human, versus designing for all of humanity
zanderwohl 7y ago
I relate to the sentiments of this article. Smallness is a commodity we programmers forget the value of too frequently. After reading the article the other week about the person who had their entire life managed in a single text file, I felt inspired to start doing the same. I have a python script that crawls the file and then sorts it all by date, plus a little command-line interface for checking off items or aggregating things by person or topic, but not much more. A text file isn't a good way to store data for a big application, but I know the exact limits of what I want to do, so I'm not going to use a database or anything more advanced than a human-readable .txt file. So far I've spent more time writing the script than time I've saved by using it, but what else is new for a personal project?

by _bxg1 7y ago

bitwize 7y ago

Maybe, if you read a lot of Paul Graham essays and are seduced by the siren call of startups and VCbux. But I'm more captivated by the infinite possibilities of the thing sitting right in front of me. And I bristle at machines thousands of times more powerful than my old Commodore actively preventing me from exploring those possibilities without identity management, app signing, hooking up an even bigger computer to my small computer, et weary cetera. But what do I know, I'm just a lizard person. My small computer is really a phone, an inherently social tool. Its manufacturer didn't intend for me to easily hack it, therefore I've really no right to.

err4nt 7y ago

The opposite pulls of designing for a human, versus designing for all of humanity

zanderwohl 7y ago

I relate to the sentiments of this article. Smallness is a commodity we programmers forget the value of too frequently. After reading the article the other week about the person who had their entire life managed in a single text file, I felt inspired to start doing the same. I have a python script that crawls the file and then sorts it all by date, plus a little command-line interface for checking off items or aggregating things by person or topic, but not much more. A text file isn't a good way to store data for a big application, but I know the exact limits of what I want to do, so I'm not going to use a database or anything more advanced than a human-readable .txt file. So far I've spent more time writing the script than time I've saved by using it, but what else is new for a personal project?