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I’m sad this is an April fools joke because a lot of the sentiment rings true and I love the slogan “move slow and make things.” Artisans make beautiful things

I’m sad this is an April fools joke because a lot of the sentiment rings true and I love the slogan “move slow and make things.” Artisans make beautiful things and software artisans make beautiful software, but it’s hard to do it and still be a viable business. And artisans moving slowly isn’t arbitrary. They move slow on the things that matter. The things that shine when attention was paid to the details.

solarmist 6y ago
Better is “Be deliberate and make (beautiful) things”.
rkagerer 6y ago
Same here. I was disappointed to realize this isn't a thing.
JetAlone 6y ago
Maybe we will have a chance to move slow and make things one day, or in little moments, optimizing for the well-being of the creator etc. What rings true about it we can mull over in our heads at some point and try to implement in some parts of our lives, like hobbies, vacation, retirement, family time, etc. right?
jiofih 6y ago
Same feeling here - instead of laughing I was disappointed when the second paragraph laid out the April fools joke. I would love to see “small batch data science” where people actually understand the results. Black box recommendations never feel really right.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  It's called statistics, to be fair. In general, if your DS's can't explain the model then something has gone horribly wrong.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    People usually just call it AI then and pretend that it's not a problem. For example, there's been plenty of issues like racial bias with the computer vision algorithms that police uses, which effectively is data science on pictures. But nobody knows why the issue occurs and nobody can specifically fix it without the risk of breaking a thousand unrelated other things.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      > But nobody knows why the issue occurs They do know why that occurs. It's because the data set is biased.
      - alexashka 6y ago
        Funny, I remember thinking the questions were biased, every time they weren't the ones I studied to answer in my exam preparations. Too bad I wasn't a data scientist or else I could just get a passing grade by claiming the questions were chosen from a biased data set, or retake the exam until the data set matched the questions I studied for, at which point the data set would no longer be biased, lol. Funny line of work, this data 'science' where you only use the results that fit the narrative you wanted in the first place. We're in full doublethink mode, just keep repeating data 'science', 'science', 'science'. :)
        jjgreen 6y ago
        I did a geography O-level (the UK exams for 16-year olds at the time) which included a map-reading exercise. It just so happened to be a couple of miles from where I lived, and I knew it well. Still only got a B though.
      - tremon 6y ago
        No, you don't "know" that your dataset is biased until you perform the statistic analysis explicitly. It might be that your neural net has a non-uniform weight distribution in some dimension (e.g. in time, or in the ordering of the training data), so dismissing any unwanted results by claiming "your dataset is biased" is a form of appeal to (artificial) authority.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I have been working on a spread sheet on and off for a few weeks. The data exists, but you can't google the answer(s) I want, so I have been painstakingly putting it together, a few minutes here and a few minutes there. I've been calling it my "curiosity killed the cat" spreadsheet. Small batch data science sounds so much more respectable while meaning basically the same thing, I think.
lloeki 6y ago
The best jokes carry a message and use humour as a vessel, challenging preconceptions in a lighthearted way. I chose to take this April’s fool that way.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Thank you for this. I "move slow and make things" in some sense. I will endeavor to use this as a jumping off point for something constructive rather than leaving a pointless whiney comment about how the world will never understand or appreciate me.
nicbou 6y ago
One of my favourite articles on the internet is "an app can be a home-cooked meal". It's something you can make for your own enjoyment, with no plans for scaling on monetisation. I have started making this sort of software, and I thoroughly enjoy it. I target the platform I use, I solve the problems I have, and my only metric is pleasure. I wish we all had more of such projects.
- lloeki 6y ago
  This is the entire premise of Ruby, with Matz openly claiming that it being pleasurable to anyone else but him is a happy side-effect. Part jest, but also very core to it. I wouldn't have been able to put so much work in maintaining ArchMac for so long without going completely bonkers had I not taken it this way either. So it’s entirely possible to build large scale projects this way, and I’m wondering how we could make companies work that way too. At the very least it should be part of any employee sustainability plan.
- bovermyer 6y ago
  If you like this sentiment, read "The Forever Project": https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-project.html https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-p...
- ryandrake 6y ago
  One of the reasons I left software development as a career was I couldn't bear to keep shitting out products that were just barely good enough that the customer wouldn't return it. That's the quality bar in commercial software and I hated having my name on it. I'm more into refactoring it 20 times in order to get the perfect architecture, fix every last bug, find every performance improvement, make it not just work but make the code itself beautiful. Like the Steve Jobs quote: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” Obviously, this is totally incompatible with how most software is made in the industry, so I just do it as a hobby instead.
marcinzm 6y ago
The issue is that beautiful software is invisible except in open source projects (and even then few people look under the hood). So to an end user only the UI/UX/bugs matter while everything else doesn't.
jkingsbery 6y ago
I had a similar reaction. It's a nice April fool's joke, but I hoped for an actual counter-balance to "move fast and break things." The book that taught me the value of moving slow in programming was Test Driven Development by Kent Beck, who ironically spent several years at Facebook.
XCSme 6y ago
> it’s hard to do it and still be a viable business It's not that hard actually, but you must limit growth. You can easily be profitable and make an amazing product if your goal is not $1B in revenue, but just to be profitable at a small scale, which allows you to run things at your own pace.
hakfoo 6y ago
I've wondered if the software space has been able to get away with "move fast and break things" because liability and regulation haven't caught up with it. At some point, we started expecting civil and mechanical engineers to stop "moving fast and breaking things." If software engineers were similar licensed and on the hook for signing off on garbage, we'd see a dramatic slowdown of the pace of development, but likely an uptick in quality. I could imagine it one day even being a bifurcation of the industry. You want to work on cat videos, you can be a non-licensed programmer. You want to work on medical devices or core financial-backbone things? Better be a full-certified Software Engineer.

solarmist 6y ago

Better is “Be deliberate and make (beautiful) things”.

rkagerer 6y ago

Same here. I was disappointed to realize this isn't a thing.

JetAlone 6y ago

Maybe we will have a chance to move slow and make things one day, or in little moments, optimizing for the well-being of the creator etc. What rings true about it we can mull over in our heads at some point and try to implement in some parts of our lives, like hobbies, vacation, retirement, family time, etc. right?

jiofih 6y ago

Same feeling here - instead of laughing I was disappointed when the second paragraph laid out the April fools joke. I would love to see “small batch data science” where people actually understand the results. Black box recommendations never feel really right.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
It's called statistics, to be fair. In general, if your DS's can't explain the model then something has gone horribly wrong.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  People usually just call it AI then and pretend that it's not a problem. For example, there's been plenty of issues like racial bias with the computer vision algorithms that police uses, which effectively is data science on pictures. But nobody knows why the issue occurs and nobody can specifically fix it without the risk of breaking a thousand unrelated other things.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    > But nobody knows why the issue occurs They do know why that occurs. It's because the data set is biased.
    - alexashka 6y ago
      Funny, I remember thinking the questions were biased, every time they weren't the ones I studied to answer in my exam preparations. Too bad I wasn't a data scientist or else I could just get a passing grade by claiming the questions were chosen from a biased data set, or retake the exam until the data set matched the questions I studied for, at which point the data set would no longer be biased, lol. Funny line of work, this data 'science' where you only use the results that fit the narrative you wanted in the first place. We're in full doublethink mode, just keep repeating data 'science', 'science', 'science'. :)
      - jjgreen 6y ago
        I did a geography O-level (the UK exams for 16-year olds at the time) which included a map-reading exercise. It just so happened to be a couple of miles from where I lived, and I knew it well. Still only got a B though.
    - tremon 6y ago
      No, you don't "know" that your dataset is biased until you perform the statistic analysis explicitly. It might be that your neural net has a non-uniform weight distribution in some dimension (e.g. in time, or in the ordering of the training data), so dismissing any unwanted results by claiming "your dataset is biased" is a form of appeal to (artificial) authority.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
I have been working on a spread sheet on and off for a few weeks. The data exists, but you can't google the answer(s) I want, so I have been painstakingly putting it together, a few minutes here and a few minutes there. I've been calling it my "curiosity killed the cat" spreadsheet. Small batch data science sounds so much more respectable while meaning basically the same thing, I think.

lloeki 6y ago

The best jokes carry a message and use humour as a vessel, challenging preconceptions in a lighthearted way. I chose to take this April’s fool that way.

DoreenMichele 6y ago
Thank you for this. I "move slow and make things" in some sense. I will endeavor to use this as a jumping off point for something constructive rather than leaving a pointless whiney comment about how the world will never understand or appreciate me.

nicbou 6y ago

One of my favourite articles on the internet is "an app can be a home-cooked meal". It's something you can make for your own enjoyment, with no plans for scaling on monetisation. I have started making this sort of software, and I thoroughly enjoy it. I target the platform I use, I solve the problems I have, and my only metric is pleasure. I wish we all had more of such projects.

lloeki 6y ago
This is the entire premise of Ruby, with Matz openly claiming that it being pleasurable to anyone else but him is a happy side-effect. Part jest, but also very core to it. I wouldn't have been able to put so much work in maintaining ArchMac for so long without going completely bonkers had I not taken it this way either. So it’s entirely possible to build large scale projects this way, and I’m wondering how we could make companies work that way too. At the very least it should be part of any employee sustainability plan.
bovermyer 6y ago
If you like this sentiment, read "The Forever Project": https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-project.html https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-p...
ryandrake 6y ago
One of the reasons I left software development as a career was I couldn't bear to keep shitting out products that were just barely good enough that the customer wouldn't return it. That's the quality bar in commercial software and I hated having my name on it. I'm more into refactoring it 20 times in order to get the perfect architecture, fix every last bug, find every performance improvement, make it not just work but make the code itself beautiful. Like the Steve Jobs quote: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” Obviously, this is totally incompatible with how most software is made in the industry, so I just do it as a hobby instead.

marcinzm 6y ago

The issue is that beautiful software is invisible except in open source projects (and even then few people look under the hood). So to an end user only the UI/UX/bugs matter while everything else doesn't.

jkingsbery 6y ago

I had a similar reaction. It's a nice April fool's joke, but I hoped for an actual counter-balance to "move fast and break things." The book that taught me the value of moving slow in programming was Test Driven Development by Kent Beck, who ironically spent several years at Facebook.

XCSme 6y ago

> it’s hard to do it and still be a viable business It's not that hard actually, but you must limit growth. You can easily be profitable and make an amazing product if your goal is not $1B in revenue, but just to be profitable at a small scale, which allows you to run things at your own pace.

hakfoo 6y ago

I've wondered if the software space has been able to get away with "move fast and break things" because liability and regulation haven't caught up with it. At some point, we started expecting civil and mechanical engineers to stop "moving fast and breaking things." If software engineers were similar licensed and on the hook for signing off on garbage, we'd see a dramatic slowdown of the pace of development, but likely an uptick in quality. I could imagine it one day even being a bifurcation of the industry. You want to work on cat videos, you can be a non-licensed programmer. You want to work on medical devices or core financial-backbone things? Better be a full-certified Software Engineer.