11 ms·

That’s not why I did it

209 points by MaysonL 6y ago

MaysonL 6y ago
This is my sister-in-law’s blog, and it’s about weaving,and somewhat technical. But the lessons it teaches cam apply to a lot more than weaving…
- peter_l_downs 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing this, very good story.
3pt14159 6y ago
This is one of my favourite posts on Hacker News of all time. There are so many obvious lessons for the very definition of a programmer of any skill level to learn in this metaphor that it feels hollow in comparison to how beautiful the story is to life itself; even though that secondary comparison is quite valid in its own right. Thanks for sharing.
- exmadscientist 6y ago
  And for anyone who doesn't realize why your mention of "programmer" is completely appropriate here in discussing an article about weaving, I can only suggest a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
  - rektide 6y ago
    Mariko Kasako had a lovely talk on weaving, punch cards, & her own neat DIY work. Fun talk, some good history there too, with a bit of the modern too. The Jacquard loom is featured! https://youtu.be/e7wwuZnnM9k https://youtu.be/e7wwuZnnM9k
    - tworingsoft 6y ago
      Shameless plug for an essay [0] I wrote a while back comparing looms and computers (which also has some of the best other videos I could find on looms, for those who want to learn more about them specifically). Wish I had seen this video back then, thanks for sharing! I find this comparison so fascinating to contemplate. [0]: https://tworingsoft.com/blog/2017/08/29/looms-and-computers.html https://tworingsoft.com/blog/2017/08/29/looms-and-computers....
- greenyoda 6y ago
  In particular, this passage about asserting control over chaos resonated with me, as a software developer: > I sort of think that it has to do with creating calm in chaos. There is so little in the world that we have any control over. But what happens at our looms, that thing, we have control over. And if what happens on our looms becomes total chaos, then patience, tenacity, and time will make it work. That’s why I did it. Also, here are explanations of some of the weaving terms used in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving#Process_and_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving#Process_and_terminolog... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_and_weft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_and_weft
  - aceBacker 6y ago
    I've never been able to articulate why I got good at coding when I was very young. Growing up in a chaotic household coding gave me an area of life that I could control. This seems obvious to me now.
emilecantin 6y ago
Archive.org link as the site seems hugged to death: https://web.archive.org/web/20201125175036/https://weaversew.com/wordblog/2020/11/07/thats-not-why-i-did-it/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201125175036/https://weaversew...
draw_down 6y ago
A fun read. I do think it's possible to learn this lesson too well, though. Sometimes it really is better to just cut your losses, and the only thing stopping you is pride.
- yobert 6y ago
  I see why this got downvoted because it seems rude at a superficial glance. I vouched for it because I think it's worth discussing a very important distinction here. What's important isn't that you tilt at windmills or beat a dead horse. Notice that nowhere in the story does either her or her daughter suggest the other do the work to fix it. The importance is in recognizing what you truly want. Sometimes people don't have the self reflection, perception, or foresight to realize the joy they might get out of some damn hard work. Also this comment has an interesting vibe in the classical "pride is bad" sense. I think it can be bad in the sense that it usually describes like a narcissist kind of pride when it's used negatively. But this is clearly a justified pride in oneself-- pride in not only overcoming adversity, but enjoying it immensely.
  - draw_down 6y ago
    Well, I used the word "sometimes" for a reason, not to say that this story was one of those times. It does feel good to do this kind of involved work sometimes, I completely agree. My admonition is that just because it feels good doesn't always make it the right move. And yeah, I think it's bad to let pride get in the way of doing what makes sense. Just crazy like that I guess!
- bonkabonka 6y ago
  I think it might depend on your goals - the old, "The Journey is the Reward" chestnut. She mentioned a couple of times that she went into the tangle because she wanted to, that she hadn't had to "bail a loom out of a major temper tantrum" in a while. To be sure, recovering the 1 1/2 yard Shetland warp and other materials would in no way compensate 10 hours of labor - but that presumes there's nothing to learn from the process. I want to say something surly about how accountants have driven software development to losing its soul in pursuit of dollars but ... that's not going to end constructively. =D So instead I'll just say I really admire the attitude of, "I can fix that. It will take more time than it's worth but screw the economics of it all, I'm going to do it anyway. Fsck you, entropy."
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CarVac 6y ago
This reminds me of a time when I was working at Target and my manager let me spend an hour to straighten out the shelves for spices, which were horrendously disorganized, with incredibly incorrect inventory counts. That was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done, sorting every tiny container, counting them, backstocking the excess, marking the empty shelves, straightening the guides… Pure bliss.
- ericmcer 6y ago
  That sounds great. When I worked grocery we used to joke about getting everything perfect on the shelves and then just sealing the store up. After long enough the empty shelves, spills, and broken items sort of blended together and the customers who caused them did not matter, like the store itself was alive and we were tending to its habitual needs.
- bvcvbuiy 6y ago
  I love this feeling as well. Reading this I actually realized that is a big part of what I like in my role as a data scientist. You are given a ton of messy data and during months you get a very intimate knowledge about how your data reflects the business processes, you understand every edge case, and end up building a nice data model that allows to answer many question that had previously no answer with a simple SELECT FROM WHERE statement. Very satisfying.
  - ksenzee 6y ago
    That description makes me want to be a data scientist.
- iamdbtoo 6y ago
  This is the same feeling I get from playing Satisfactory.
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    Playing it like this, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg (for those who don't want to click: guy constructs horrible factory monstrosities and tests the limits of the game's physics)
legerdemain 6y ago
Yes, it is very easy to get absorbed in a mindless, repetitive task. You'll feel superficially productive afterwards, but what did it all amount to? I once spent several hours grepping and changing every instance of `if (foo != true)` in a multi-million LOC codebase. Was it a good use of my time? Not at all.
- yobert 6y ago
  I think it can be good for you to do this kind of work once in a while. I like to sort my M&Ms. But! From a technical perspective, I would never ever do this. It's likely to causes merge conflicts on every single pending branch anyone has. I would recommend only changing the area you are working on. Leave it better than you found it, but don't rock the canoe so to speak.
  - legerdemain 6y ago
    This is one good purpose for video games. If you have an uncontrollable urge to do something mindless, at least do it safely in a simulated environment.
- rzzzt 6y ago
  What did you change it to?
  - muricula 6y ago
    This is pure speculation, but they may have changed it to foo==false. In C a boolean is just a byte which conventionally has the values 0 or 1, but an attacker which controls a boolean can give it the value of 2, and 2!=true and 2!=false. This has lead to real exploits: https://windows-internals.com/exploiting-a-simple-vulnerability-in-35-easy-steps-or-less/ https://windows-internals.com/exploiting-a-simple-vulnerabil... When writing C or C++, never compare against true.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
      I'm not sure that's right. Too lazy to look it up right now, but my recollection is that in C, 0 is False and anything else is True.
quickthrower2 6y ago
> One of the samples Brianna decided to weave, was exploring what happens when you use differential sett with really slippery rayon, warp and weft, and then slippery rayon warp and a dragging kind of weft like Shetland wool. The sample with the slippery rayon warp, though challenging, was completely successful. She then wound a warp with the Shetland wool, and the idea was she would tie into the rayon warp and repeat the experiment with a rayon weft and a wool weft, producing an additional two samples. The jargon! Is this what tech talk sounds like to outsiders?
- bonkabonka 6y ago
  Ayup! Totally like that. And I'm sure they have their own sort of correction-reflex for "My computer has 1TB of memory!" - "Oh, you mean you have 1TB of storage." - "Same thing." - "No. It's not. eyeroll"
  - korethr 6y ago
    I think I spent more time watching video snippets and reading portions of other articles to give myself a lightning course on weaving jargon, just so I could understand what was being talked about in the OP. And suddenly, why looms look as complex as they do and are able to weave complex patterns makes sense. Why looms were automated makes sense, and I find myself with a new sense of respect for those who learn and master operation of a manual loom. It's not a trivial task. Still haven't been able to figure out what a "differential sett" is. Searching with quotes on google finds a bunch of stuff talking about '"differential sett"lement'. Or stuff about Egypt. Best guess is that it has something to do with using a number of threads per inch that is different from what is set on the reed, or differs across the breadth of the warp.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    Off-topic: one of my favorite dev environments had a half terrabyte of memory, and it was _fantastic_ for prototyping -- we rarely had to be bothered with disk spillover or any of the other time sucks that arise in low-RAM environments.
ericmcer 6y ago
The daughters goof reminds me of a quote from Lawrence Durrell: 'She showed him the difference between knowledge and understanding'. The idea of this ingrained understanding from experience is so much more intriguing to me than trying to pull knowledge together with the conscious mind. I like the idea of the conscious brain orchestrating the training regime for the subconscious, but once it is time to perform it just steps back and watches.
thedanbob 6y ago
This is the same reason I enjoy repairing electronics and machines so much. Even if it doesn't look good as new or the fix is a little bit of a kludge, it is incredibly satisfying to take something broken and return it to working order. And like the author, once I get started on a repair I can't stand to stop until it's done.
svat 6y ago
I'm reminded of a post called Music and Lyrics in Math Talks (https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion78.html https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion78.html) by the mathematician Doron Zeilberger: > Human beings have bodies and souls. Computers have hardware and software, and math talks have lyrics and music. Most math talks have very hard-to-follow lyrics, […] > But like a good song, and a good opera, you can still enjoy it if the music is good. The “music” in a math talk is the speaker’s enthusiasm, body-language, and off-the-cuff heuristic explanations. > Sometimes you can recognize a familiar word, and relate it to something of your own experience, whether or not the meaning that you attribute to it is what the speaker meant, and this can also enhance your enjoyment. I think of this often (e.g. https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/music-and-lyrics/ https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/music-and-lyrics...). This post here is a wonderful example. Although the lyrics here are beyond my understanding: > I decided that the best way out, was to carefully pull the warps that ended up in front of the reed, since they were only 1 1/2 yards, and resleying them where required (because this was a differential sett warp, there were dents where there were as many as five ends) and then carefully tying them back into the slippery rayon warps that went through the heddles, one by one. the whole post is clearly pulsing with the kind of music that speaks to a programmer's soul. I remember one of our CS textbooks, in the chapter running through some history, had half a page on Jacquard's loom (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jacquard_machine&oldid=989697711 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jacquard_machine&... ); evidently the similarity in spirit between programming and weaving runs deep. This is most evident in some paragraphs: > I sort of think that it has to do with creating calm in chaos. There is so little in the world that we have any control over. But what happens at our looms, that thing, we have control over. And if what happens on our looms becomes total chaos, then patience, tenacity, and time will make it work. That’s why I did it. > […] I did it because there is something intensely satisfying about bringing order to chaos. There is something intense about saving a project. I had my doubts that this was even weaveable […] I grabbed my 5X glasses, a magnifying OTT lite, and a sley hook and started in. 10 hours later I was triumphant. …but really, one can sense this throughout the entire post. I'm glad I read it.
cjcenizal 6y ago
This was my favorite part, because I'm new to engineering management and this is a lesson I've been learning: > Brianna did manage to beam and weave the new samples. She did as I suspected have to cull some of the warps in the densest part of the reed. But she learned that on her own. And she also learned that when tying in a new warp, you should use overhand knots. But kids learn by falling flat on their faces and picking themselves up and reevaluating the experience. People learn when you give them the opportunity to fail. This has been a tough lesson for me to learn because I'm used to successful outcomes being visible -- a feature is complete, a bug is fixed, a project ships. But when someone successfully learns, the outcome is internalized and usually only manifests the next time they take on a similar challenge, so I just gotta wait and see!
renewiltord 6y ago
Reminds me of a (kinda downvoted and I understand) comment on HN that I take inspiration from when things get tough. Not the same sentiment but there's a stylistic similarity. Paraphrasing, "You know what made me give up programming? It wasn't that the classes assumed knowledge already. It wasn't that I was bullied for it. It wasn't that I didn't fit the mold of an engineer. Nothing. Nothing made me give up programming". Reminds me that the world is tough. Societally, making it easier to do some things is worthwhile. But personally, personally if you want something, you just go get it. And damn the rest of them in your way.
broberts01 6y ago
Privacy preferences seem to be borked
Pasorrijer 6y ago
I've been struggling with diving into a difficult task at work. I think it's because it's been a while since I've had a difficult task. This post resonated with me, and reminded me of the sense of accomplishment that comes when you push past that feeling and succeed. Thank you, for posting this, because I know that because I read it tomorrow will be a better day.
otakucode 6y ago
When I had to come up with a company name back when I was doing freelancing, I chose Entropy Fueled Productions on a rationale quite similar to what was expressed in this article. Then I got to find out very few people know the word 'entropy' much less know how to spell it, and 'fueled' always gets mangled over the phone...
captaincrowbar 6y ago
"For all of you out there who have ever had to deal with the warp from hell, remember that there is something healing in finally controlling that which would not be controlled, something triumphant about making something from total chaos." Today in "Unexpected WH40K quotes"...

209 points by MaysonL 6y ago

This is my sister-in-law’s blog, and it’s about weaving,and somewhat technical. But the lessons it teaches cam apply to a lot more than weaving…

peter_l_downs 6y ago
Thank you for sharing this, very good story.

3pt14159 6y ago

This is one of my favourite posts on Hacker News of all time. There are so many obvious lessons for the very definition of a programmer of any skill level to learn in this metaphor that it feels hollow in comparison to how beautiful the story is to life itself; even though that secondary comparison is quite valid in its own right. Thanks for sharing.

exmadscientist 6y ago
And for anyone who doesn't realize why your mention of "programmer" is completely appropriate here in discussing an article about weaving, I can only suggest a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
- rektide 6y ago
  Mariko Kasako had a lovely talk on weaving, punch cards, & her own neat DIY work. Fun talk, some good history there too, with a bit of the modern too. The Jacquard loom is featured! https://youtu.be/e7wwuZnnM9k https://youtu.be/e7wwuZnnM9k
  - tworingsoft 6y ago
    Shameless plug for an essay [0] I wrote a while back comparing looms and computers (which also has some of the best other videos I could find on looms, for those who want to learn more about them specifically). Wish I had seen this video back then, thanks for sharing! I find this comparison so fascinating to contemplate. [0]: https://tworingsoft.com/blog/2017/08/29/looms-and-computers.html https://tworingsoft.com/blog/2017/08/29/looms-and-computers....
greenyoda 6y ago
In particular, this passage about asserting control over chaos resonated with me, as a software developer: > I sort of think that it has to do with creating calm in chaos. There is so little in the world that we have any control over. But what happens at our looms, that thing, we have control over. And if what happens on our looms becomes total chaos, then patience, tenacity, and time will make it work. That’s why I did it. Also, here are explanations of some of the weaving terms used in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving#Process_and_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving#Process_and_terminolog... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_and_weft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_and_weft
- aceBacker 6y ago
  I've never been able to articulate why I got good at coding when I was very young. Growing up in a chaotic household coding gave me an area of life that I could control. This seems obvious to me now.

emilecantin 6y ago

Archive.org link as the site seems hugged to death: https://web.archive.org/web/20201125175036/https://weaversew.com/wordblog/2020/11/07/thats-not-why-i-did-it/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201125175036/https://weaversew...

draw_down 6y ago

A fun read. I do think it's possible to learn this lesson too well, though. Sometimes it really is better to just cut your losses, and the only thing stopping you is pride.

yobert 6y ago
I see why this got downvoted because it seems rude at a superficial glance. I vouched for it because I think it's worth discussing a very important distinction here. What's important isn't that you tilt at windmills or beat a dead horse. Notice that nowhere in the story does either her or her daughter suggest the other do the work to fix it. The importance is in recognizing what you truly want. Sometimes people don't have the self reflection, perception, or foresight to realize the joy they might get out of some damn hard work. Also this comment has an interesting vibe in the classical "pride is bad" sense. I think it can be bad in the sense that it usually describes like a narcissist kind of pride when it's used negatively. But this is clearly a justified pride in oneself-- pride in not only overcoming adversity, but enjoying it immensely.
- draw_down 6y ago
  Well, I used the word "sometimes" for a reason, not to say that this story was one of those times. It does feel good to do this kind of involved work sometimes, I completely agree. My admonition is that just because it feels good doesn't always make it the right move. And yeah, I think it's bad to let pride get in the way of doing what makes sense. Just crazy like that I guess!
bonkabonka 6y ago
I think it might depend on your goals - the old, "The Journey is the Reward" chestnut. She mentioned a couple of times that she went into the tangle because she wanted to, that she hadn't had to "bail a loom out of a major temper tantrum" in a while. To be sure, recovering the 1 1/2 yard Shetland warp and other materials would in no way compensate 10 hours of labor - but that presumes there's nothing to learn from the process. I want to say something surly about how accountants have driven software development to losing its soul in pursuit of dollars but ... that's not going to end constructively. =D So instead I'll just say I really admire the attitude of, "I can fix that. It will take more time than it's worth but screw the economics of it all, I'm going to do it anyway. Fsck you, entropy."

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

CarVac 6y ago

This reminds me of a time when I was working at Target and my manager let me spend an hour to straighten out the shelves for spices, which were horrendously disorganized, with incredibly incorrect inventory counts. That was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done, sorting every tiny container, counting them, backstocking the excess, marking the empty shelves, straightening the guides… Pure bliss.

ericmcer 6y ago
That sounds great. When I worked grocery we used to joke about getting everything perfect on the shelves and then just sealing the store up. After long enough the empty shelves, spills, and broken items sort of blended together and the customers who caused them did not matter, like the store itself was alive and we were tending to its habitual needs.
bvcvbuiy 6y ago
I love this feeling as well. Reading this I actually realized that is a big part of what I like in my role as a data scientist. You are given a ton of messy data and during months you get a very intimate knowledge about how your data reflects the business processes, you understand every edge case, and end up building a nice data model that allows to answer many question that had previously no answer with a simple SELECT FROM WHERE statement. Very satisfying.
- ksenzee 6y ago
  That description makes me want to be a data scientist.
iamdbtoo 6y ago
This is the same feeling I get from playing Satisfactory.
- waterhouse 6y ago
  Playing it like this, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg (for those who don't want to click: guy constructs horrible factory monstrosities and tests the limits of the game's physics)

legerdemain 6y ago

Yes, it is very easy to get absorbed in a mindless, repetitive task. You'll feel superficially productive afterwards, but what did it all amount to? I once spent several hours grepping and changing every instance of `if (foo != true)` in a multi-million LOC codebase. Was it a good use of my time? Not at all.

yobert 6y ago
I think it can be good for you to do this kind of work once in a while. I like to sort my M&Ms. But! From a technical perspective, I would never ever do this. It's likely to causes merge conflicts on every single pending branch anyone has. I would recommend only changing the area you are working on. Leave it better than you found it, but don't rock the canoe so to speak.
- legerdemain 6y ago
  This is one good purpose for video games. If you have an uncontrollable urge to do something mindless, at least do it safely in a simulated environment.
rzzzt 6y ago
What did you change it to?
- muricula 6y ago
  This is pure speculation, but they may have changed it to foo==false. In C a boolean is just a byte which conventionally has the values 0 or 1, but an attacker which controls a boolean can give it the value of 2, and 2!=true and 2!=false. This has lead to real exploits: https://windows-internals.com/exploiting-a-simple-vulnerability-in-35-easy-steps-or-less/ https://windows-internals.com/exploiting-a-simple-vulnerabil... When writing C or C++, never compare against true.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
    I'm not sure that's right. Too lazy to look it up right now, but my recollection is that in C, 0 is False and anything else is True.

quickthrower2 6y ago

> One of the samples Brianna decided to weave, was exploring what happens when you use differential sett with really slippery rayon, warp and weft, and then slippery rayon warp and a dragging kind of weft like Shetland wool. The sample with the slippery rayon warp, though challenging, was completely successful. She then wound a warp with the Shetland wool, and the idea was she would tie into the rayon warp and repeat the experiment with a rayon weft and a wool weft, producing an additional two samples. The jargon! Is this what tech talk sounds like to outsiders?

bonkabonka 6y ago
Ayup! Totally like that. And I'm sure they have their own sort of correction-reflex for "My computer has 1TB of memory!" - "Oh, you mean you have 1TB of storage." - "Same thing." - "No. It's not. eyeroll"
- korethr 6y ago
  I think I spent more time watching video snippets and reading portions of other articles to give myself a lightning course on weaving jargon, just so I could understand what was being talked about in the OP. And suddenly, why looms look as complex as they do and are able to weave complex patterns makes sense. Why looms were automated makes sense, and I find myself with a new sense of respect for those who learn and master operation of a manual loom. It's not a trivial task. Still haven't been able to figure out what a "differential sett" is. Searching with quotes on google finds a bunch of stuff talking about '"differential sett"lement'. Or stuff about Egypt. Best guess is that it has something to do with using a number of threads per inch that is different from what is set on the reed, or differs across the breadth of the warp.
- hansvm 6y ago
  Off-topic: one of my favorite dev environments had a half terrabyte of memory, and it was _fantastic_ for prototyping -- we rarely had to be bothered with disk spillover or any of the other time sucks that arise in low-RAM environments.

ericmcer 6y ago

The daughters goof reminds me of a quote from Lawrence Durrell: 'She showed him the difference between knowledge and understanding'. The idea of this ingrained understanding from experience is so much more intriguing to me than trying to pull knowledge together with the conscious mind. I like the idea of the conscious brain orchestrating the training regime for the subconscious, but once it is time to perform it just steps back and watches.

thedanbob 6y ago

This is the same reason I enjoy repairing electronics and machines so much. Even if it doesn't look good as new or the fix is a little bit of a kludge, it is incredibly satisfying to take something broken and return it to working order. And like the author, once I get started on a repair I can't stand to stop until it's done.

svat 6y ago

I'm reminded of a post called Music and Lyrics in Math Talks (https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion78.html https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion78.html) by the mathematician Doron Zeilberger: > Human beings have bodies and souls. Computers have hardware and software, and math talks have lyrics and music. Most math talks have very hard-to-follow lyrics, […] > But like a good song, and a good opera, you can still enjoy it if the music is good. The “music” in a math talk is the speaker’s enthusiasm, body-language, and off-the-cuff heuristic explanations. > Sometimes you can recognize a familiar word, and relate it to something of your own experience, whether or not the meaning that you attribute to it is what the speaker meant, and this can also enhance your enjoyment. I think of this often (e.g. https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/music-and-lyrics/ https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/music-and-lyrics...). This post here is a wonderful example. Although the lyrics here are beyond my understanding: > I decided that the best way out, was to carefully pull the warps that ended up in front of the reed, since they were only 1 1/2 yards, and resleying them where required (because this was a differential sett warp, there were dents where there were as many as five ends) and then carefully tying them back into the slippery rayon warps that went through the heddles, one by one. the whole post is clearly pulsing with the kind of music that speaks to a programmer's soul. I remember one of our CS textbooks, in the chapter running through some history, had half a page on Jacquard's loom (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jacquard_machine&oldid=989697711 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jacquard_machine&... ); evidently the similarity in spirit between programming and weaving runs deep. This is most evident in some paragraphs: > I sort of think that it has to do with creating calm in chaos. There is so little in the world that we have any control over. But what happens at our looms, that thing, we have control over. And if what happens on our looms becomes total chaos, then patience, tenacity, and time will make it work. That’s why I did it. > […] I did it because there is something intensely satisfying about bringing order to chaos. There is something intense about saving a project. I had my doubts that this was even weaveable […] I grabbed my 5X glasses, a magnifying OTT lite, and a sley hook and started in. 10 hours later I was triumphant. …but really, one can sense this throughout the entire post. I'm glad I read it.

cjcenizal 6y ago

This was my favorite part, because I'm new to engineering management and this is a lesson I've been learning: > Brianna did manage to beam and weave the new samples. She did as I suspected have to cull some of the warps in the densest part of the reed. But she learned that on her own. And she also learned that when tying in a new warp, you should use overhand knots. But kids learn by falling flat on their faces and picking themselves up and reevaluating the experience. People learn when you give them the opportunity to fail. This has been a tough lesson for me to learn because I'm used to successful outcomes being visible -- a feature is complete, a bug is fixed, a project ships. But when someone successfully learns, the outcome is internalized and usually only manifests the next time they take on a similar challenge, so I just gotta wait and see!

renewiltord 6y ago

Reminds me of a (kinda downvoted and I understand) comment on HN that I take inspiration from when things get tough. Not the same sentiment but there's a stylistic similarity. Paraphrasing, "You know what made me give up programming? It wasn't that the classes assumed knowledge already. It wasn't that I was bullied for it. It wasn't that I didn't fit the mold of an engineer. Nothing. Nothing made me give up programming". Reminds me that the world is tough. Societally, making it easier to do some things is worthwhile. But personally, personally if you want something, you just go get it. And damn the rest of them in your way.

broberts01 6y ago

Privacy preferences seem to be borked

Pasorrijer 6y ago

I've been struggling with diving into a difficult task at work. I think it's because it's been a while since I've had a difficult task. This post resonated with me, and reminded me of the sense of accomplishment that comes when you push past that feeling and succeed. Thank you, for posting this, because I know that because I read it tomorrow will be a better day.

otakucode 6y ago

When I had to come up with a company name back when I was doing freelancing, I chose Entropy Fueled Productions on a rationale quite similar to what was expressed in this article. Then I got to find out very few people know the word 'entropy' much less know how to spell it, and 'fueled' always gets mangled over the phone...

captaincrowbar 6y ago

"For all of you out there who have ever had to deal with the warp from hell, remember that there is something healing in finally controlling that which would not be controlled, something triumphant about making something from total chaos." Today in "Unexpected WH40K quotes"...