Hopefully the future me is able to relate to this, because I really feel like I'm in a rut when it comes to working on personal projects.
I have many ideas that I want to build, but I'd have to learn new languages, yet I just can't sit and go through the documentation every day like I should. Still haven't finished the rust book.
The other way is start building already, and if you come across a block, then learn about that thing and move on, but I feel uncomfortable having gaps in my knowledge, AI exists but I don't want to use it to generate code for me because I wanna enjoy the process of writing code rather than just reviewing code.
Basically I'm just stuck within the constraints I put for myself :(, I'm not sure why I wrote this here, probably just wanted to let it out..
throwanem · 7m ago
> I feel uncomfortable having gaps in my knowledge
Understanding why I feel this, when I have, has always proven enlightening. I find it never has to do with the gap or what would fill it.
maxbond · 32m ago
I like to say programming is about knowing which rabbit holes to plunge down and which to step over. There's too much to know to go depth-first down every rabbit hole. Go breadth first and accept gaps in your knowledge - everyone has them. If something never comes up and never causes an issue you need to look into, and the project gets done, it doesn't matter. There's always an improvement that could have been made, but done is better than perfect because perfect never gets done. But the projects never getting done or even started - speaking for myself, that is corrosive to my motivation.
I've written a lot of Rust. I've read less than half of the Rust book. Your competence in Rust is a function of how many lines of Rust you've written; getting to the point you can start working with it is more important than completing the book. Jon Gjengset's videos were really critical for me there, seeing how he worked in Rust made it possible for me to develop a workflow. (I broke down what I learned in more detail at one point [1].)
Rust is an example I've honed in on because you mentioned it and I related to it, but this is broadly applicable. Dare I say, more broadly than just programming, even.
(Also, note that I'm a giant hypocrite who shaves yaks and struggles with perfectionism constantly. I learned Rust 5 years ago to start a project, and I've written 0 lines of code for it. If I sound critical, that's my self criticism leaking through.)
> I've written a lot of Rust. I've read less than half of the Rust book.
Just knowing that there's someone out there who has worked like this or has been in the same situation gives me enough confidence to go through it!(the just write code part)
I've gone through so many resources (including the book) and I never managed to finish any of them. But I think now I need to get comfortable with having gaps and just start writing code and not be afraid of writing non-idiomatic rust code, atleast for now.
vanjajaja1 · 25m ago
> I like to say programming is about knowing which rabbit holes to plunge down and which to step over.
I like this a lot. I told someone once I avoid documentation like the plague and it just didn't have the same poetic ring as this line.
Sometimes you need to dive in, other times you need to hobble together something to step over
kunley · 1h ago
Very well said, to enjoy the process of writing the code.
I don't understand why so many people suddenly started to insist on taking this all away, and they totally seriously proposed to become a janitor of a hallucinated output of some overhyped tool. That's the most frustrating thing one can imagine about programming, yet people insist on it.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn · 28m ago
And even if it is correct output from said overhyped tool it still detracts from the enjoyment of building/fixing stuff. I used to love going over the code I wrote to fix a specific issue, now not so much as half of it was written by AI so half of the satisfaction has gone too.
CivBase · 17m ago
I don't want an AI to write my code. Coding is one of the only things I enjoy about my job and I barely get to spend any time doing it right now.
lelanthran · 55m ago
> I have many ideas that I want to build, but I'd have to learn new languages,
Why? Why, specifically, do you "have to learn new languages"?
So, sure, I can see that, for some product, you might need to learn a new tech (say ... some specific AWS/GCP/Azure service), or perhaps a new configuration language (YAML, TOML, whatever).
And, sure, for some ideas (for example a mobile phone app) you're forced into that specific ecosystem.
Other than the mobile exception above, why do you need to learn a new language to build your idea? There is nothing stopping you from implementing your idea in (for example) Python. Or Javascript. Or Java, C#, C++, etc.
A programming-language-barrier absolutely does not stop you building your idea.
You gotta make the call - are you interested in building $IDEA, or are you interested in learning $NEWLANG?
PixelForg · 17m ago
> There is nothing stopping you from implementing your idea in (for example) Python. Or Javascript. Or Java, C#, C++, etc
Except there is, my brain :), that's one of the constraints I'm talking about, I'm a frontend web dev and I only know JS/TS, and like some frontend web devs, I'm enamored by Rust because it seems so different. I already use JS/TS at work so I want to use something else for my personal projects. So I definitely would have to learn something new.
> You gotta make the call - are you interested in building $IDEA, or are you interested in learning $NEWLANG?
If I was only interested in building my idea, I'd have just used what I know and used AI to accelerate the process. However for me the journey is also important, I want to enjoy thinking and writing code (and this project is something only I'd use, so there's no hurry to release a prototype). The problem is I want to start writing code right away, but that has the issue that I've mentioned above (gaps in knowledge).
Nobody is at fault, other than me for setting these constraints for myself. I know the solution is to just suck up and go through the rust book, read a chapter daily and eventually I'd have all the concepts in my head that I can then just focus on writing the code. But whenever I go about doing this, my mind always persuades me that there must be a better way, or it finds some flaws in my current approach and so on. So I need to learn how to not listen to my mind in such cases, and stick to the goal that I set.
Edit - After reading a reply to my comment, I've decided to just start writing the code and not worry about having gaps, anytime I start having doubts again, I'd go through this comment thread
dakiol · 27m ago
I guess it depends. If they have been developing mobile apps, and now want to develop a web app, then they definitely need to learn something like PHP, or Go or Python kr Java. On the other hand if they have been doing web development and now want to develop a native app, they must learn Java/Kotlin/Swift.
Same for databases (perhaps you never worked with one, then you must learn sql). Even html+css must be learned if you never used them before.
rmonvfer · 44m ago
I very much relate to this feeling (and I haven’t finished the rust book either!). In my case, I do use AI a lot (especially o3 and Sonnet 3.7), not to write code but to help me understand things that would’ve taken me a week, in a matter of hours (the conversational aspect is a game changer for me).
tpoacher · 1h ago
You are not alone. I feel the same way.
erulabs · 1h ago
Software engineers, I love yall. To see the light at the end of the tunnel. To see some glorious perfect paradigm that maybe could be. I envy you.
I grew up in a datacenter. Leaky air conditioners and diesel generators. Open the big doors if it gets too hot.
Now let’s go back. Back to when we didn’t know better.
Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists.
Everything, everywhere, is greasy and lousy and half broken. Sysadmins, we accept that everything is shit from the very beginning.
bonoboTP · 58m ago
This is quite hard to grapple with fresh out of school, where you worked mainly on pristine implementations of eternal algorithms, proven to be optimal in multiple ways, elegantly crafting each loop and feeling accomplished by expressing the algo with even higher clarity, reading and idealizing Knuth etc.
Then you see the real world and you think it must be because people are stupid, the bosses are pointy-haired, they don't understand, they don't value elegance, they are greedy, they etc. etc. But once you spend enough time on your own projects, and they evolve and change over the years, they turn more and more into a mess, you rewrite, you prioritize, you abandon, you revive, and you notice that it goes much deeper than simply laziness. Real solutions depend on context, one caching algo is good when one medium is x times faster than another, but not when it's only y times faster. It makes sense to show a progress bar when downloading a file if the usual internet speed is X but not when it's Y. Over years and decades the context can shift, and even those things can change that were only silent assumptions of yours when you made the "perfect" program as a young'un, looking down on all the existing "messy" solutions that do a bunch of unnecessary cruft. It's an endless cycle...
galbar · 1h ago
I have said many times to teammates: the only code that is perfect is the one that hasn't left our minds. The moment it's written down it becomes flawed and imperfect.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it as good as we can, but rather that we must accept that the outcome will be flawed and that, despite our best intentions, it will show its sharp edges the next time we come to work on it.
moffkalast · 1h ago
I'm sure some mathematicians would disagree.
bonoboTP · 51m ago
Math can be greasy and messy. Definitions can be clumsy in a way that makes stating theorems cumbersome, the axioms may be unintuitive, proofs can be ugly, they can even contain bugs in published form. There can be annoying inconsistencies like optional constant factors in Fourier, or JPL quaternions.
Yes, prototypical school stuff like Pythagoras are "eternal" but a lot of math is designed, and can be ergonomic or not. Better notation can suggest solutions to unsolved problems. Clumsy axioms can hide elegant structure.
pjc50 · 58m ago
I think applied mathematicians started to encounter this reality of the impure world the first time someone taped a dead moth into the logbook of the Harvard Mark II.
figassis · 2h ago
I too suffer from this, but as I learned, Nature built an elegant solution to this. Have a family and kids. Your choice when you have time off of work will be reduced to hacking or playing with your child that you have been neglecting due to a crunch at work.
You’re welcome.
TeMPOraL · 2h ago
Parent here, can confirm Nature solved this elegantly.
However, like every other solution built by Nature, this one also works through pain, suffering and death. Nature doesn't care if you're happy, nor does it care if you're suffering. And it especially doesn't care if your suffering is a low-burn, long-term pain in the depth of your heart.
So yeah, having kids will force you to make choices and abandon frivolities, in the same way setting your house on fire will free you from obsessing over choices for unnecessary expenses :).
isolli · 31m ago
Nature has another elegant solution, often applying both in conjunction: aging. As I age (and, yes, take care of my kids), I find myself more and more on the side of exploit in the exploration–exploitation dilemma. This will most likely endure once the kids have left.
yuppiepuppie · 2h ago
This is a great comment, as it hits far too close to my heart. Im currently trying to get my team to rethink how they are building the APIs for certain services in our product, and focus really on design and craftmanship. To the point where Im ready to start breaking it apart myself and coding up the solution on my off hours.
But then I look at my son, and say "screw it, they couldnt pay me enough to care out of hours and give up play time"
aleph_minus_one · 44m ago
Not everybody who is a great programmer is a great parent. :-(
I, for example, would not necessary be a bad parent, but very likely one who does at least not obey the social expectations of how to rise a child.
piva00 · 2h ago
Or just have another hobby not involving programming. I got into this from being my main hobby as a kid, the passion thing I did when free time was available, I learnt a lot (enough to build it into a career), I had lots of fun but that time is gone.
My free time is to be spent on other things, I get paid to fix issues and that pays my bills, I don't want nor need to be thinking about these issues outside of paid hours, you know too much to the point where you know how much effort it will take to fix something that might look innocuous, innocent, but definitely has deep tendrils of other related issues to tackle. It's not worth it, not if I'm not being paid for it or it isn't part of a personal project I'm really passionate about.
So I learnt to not care much, I help my colleagues, deliver what I tell I will deliver, and free space in my mind to pursue other more interesting stuff to me.
globular-toast · 1h ago
You don't need kids, just a partner who has a "normal" job and likes to do stuff on the evenings and weekends is enough. If you have a partner who also does thought work and tends towards the workaholic then things might be more difficult...
throw_away_0613 · 1h ago
As I'm getting older, I want things to be as standardized as possible, and just don't worry about the details. I have learned from my mistakes
The script I made for deployment, because existing solutions didn't "feel" right, required a lot of work and maintenance when we later had to add features and bug fixes.
Another script I made for building and deploying Java applications, because I didn't like Maven and Puppet.
The micro service I rewrote because I wanted to use my own favourite programming language. I introduced a lot of bugs that were already fixed, missing features and another language for my co-workers to learn when they inherited the application when I left.
clan · 1h ago
I hope many people read this and take it to heart.
It is a rare and wise insight which only becomes crystal clear with age. Choose your battles very carefully.
This is a golden nugget up there with "time flies". I never understood that as a kid but really hits hard with your mid-life crisis.
Listen carefully little grasshoppers.
bonoboTP · 43m ago
Maybe. Or maybe it's crucial to gain such firsthand experience to wisen up.
Maybe it's better to let people just blast ahead while they have that young cocky energy. Based on what I hear from many teachers, it's rather the lack of initiative and inventiveness that's the problem nowadays. Rather than the stereotypical overconfidence, they see passivity and need permission and clear instruction to do anything.
dandellion · 7m ago
I really can relate with the article. Also, it doesn't just apply to software but to lots of other things. It's the same mentality as being into cars and always tuning or restoring old ones. Being into woodworking or craftsmanship and fixing and building stuff around the house, etc.
lightyrs · 1h ago
Having kids is an excellent solution to this feeling.
Besides occupying any time you used to have for unnecessary work, they have an uncanny ability to remind you just how little you actually control.
However you get to the end of the OCD tunnel, the journey is often very worthwhile.
codelikeawolf · 12m ago
> We write a new tool because we are overwhelmed. Refactor it, not because the code is messy, but your life is. We chase the perfect system because it gives us something to hold onto when everything else is spinning.
This really got to me because I've been doing this without realizing it for as long as I can remember.
moconnor · 36m ago
> I believe sometimes building things is how we self-soothe.
> I have written entire applications just to avoid thinking about why I was unhappy.
I think this is true too. The prefrontal cortex is inhibitory to the amygdala/limbic system; always having a project you can think about or work on as an unconscious learned adaptation to self-calm in persistent emotionally-stressful situations is very plausible.
I wonder how many of us became very good at programming ~through this - difficult emotional circumstances driving an intense focus on endless logical reasoning problems in every spare moment for a very long time. I wonder if you can measure a degree of HPA-axis deregulation compared to the general population.
And whether it's net good or net harmful. To the extent that it distracts you from actually solving or changing a situation that is making you emotionally unhappy, probably not great. But being born into a time in which the side effects make you rich was pretty cool.
EZ-E · 3h ago
There is the curse of knowing how, and maybe more importantly there is the curse of other people knowing you know how.
Cthulhu_ · 1h ago
Family members asking you to fix their printers.
aleph_minus_one · 42m ago
> Family members asking you to fix their printers.
My honest, brutal answer is: "Your problem is very likely self-inflicted. Buy a decent Brother laser printer."
This attitude resolves you of nearly all such requests. :-)
brianhama · 1h ago
It never ends.
A_Stefan · 47m ago
Thank you for sharing your personal journey. I too have (too) many ideas floating around, getting ready to fix everything I see broken, ignoring what's really important. So I whole-heartedly agree with "You learn how to program. You learn how to fix things. But the hardest thing you’ll ever learn is when to leave them broken."
maephisto666 · 3h ago
Amazing piece of text. Honestly, I saw myself in everything you wrote. The struggle, the attempt to write a single line of code to make it perfect, durable, etc. it never works at the first try...but man the joy of having the control over fixing things... And I also relate with the personal chaos that maybe we tend to fix by fixing our software... I see a lot of this "unfinished" behaviour with other things in my life as well... Cleaning the shed, finishing videogames.... Sometimes even the feeling of having the challenge is enough...I don't even try, because I know it will take time to make it right
throwanem · 3h ago
What would it mean to be finished with life? Where are you going in such an all-fired hurry?
walterbell · 3h ago
> I can fix something, but not everything.
“Calvin: Know what I pray for?
Hobbes: What?
Calvin: The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can't, and the incapacity to tell the difference.”
—Bill Watterson (1988)
This resonates a lot with a thought that I've had for a long time..
A computer is not a tool, it never was, it never will be..
It's a workshop.
davnicwil · 1h ago
Fractal complexity.
It's not only that solutions decay, though that's true, but also that the search for improvement itself becomes recursive.
When you identify something can be improved, and fix it, your own fix and every individual step of it now become the new thing that can be improved. After the most fleeting of pauses to step back and appreciate your work, this becomes your new default.
Indeed I often look back at my own solutions and judge them more harshly than I would ever judge anyone else's. Why? Because as the article says, I know much more about how it works. Cracks increase surface area by a lot. I know about a lot of the cracks.
I wrote a blog post [0] about this mindset getting in the way of what you care about in product development which you might enjoy, if you enjoyed this article.
I think about this from the perpective of change management. Every defect I hope to fix entails a change, which has a certain probability of creating another irksome deficiency or incompatibility. When building complex systems I try to design them with the end state, that you describe very well, in mind.
Each time you set about to make a single change ask what is the probability (p) that this change results in another change, or track this probability empirically, then compute 1/(1-p) this will tell you how much change you should "expect" to make to realize your desired improvement. If you have n interacting modules compute 1/(1-np). This will quantify whether or not to embark on the refactor. (The values computed are the sum of the geometric series in the probability which represents the expectation value)
So this is about how we manage change in a complex system in order to align its functionality with a changing environment. I suggest that we can do so by considering the smallest, seemingly innocuous change that you could make and how that change propagates through to the end product.
In the end, a solution may be to make systems that are easy and painless to change, then you can change them often for the better without the long tail effects that drag you down.
TeMPOraL · 1h ago
Does this help explain why any simple household activity has a frustrating ~50% chance of turning into a string of dependencies and dependents that make you spend 10x the time you expected on it all?
E.g. you figure it'll take a minute to take the trash out and wash your hands. But on the way you discover you run out of trash bags, and while washing your hands you run out of soap, then as you pick the refill bottle from storage some light items fall out, and you need to put them back into a stable configuration, then you spilled a bit of soap during refilling so you need to clean up, but you just run out of paper towels, and...
WJW · 1h ago
When reality doesn't match your expectations, why do you blame reality instead of your expectations? Especially for thing like running out of soap, trash bags or towels that should be at least 90% in your own control.
kmanraj · 1h ago
What you've described is called "yak shaving", which is a series of neverending tasks that must be completed in order to complete the original task. It's apty named since shaving a hairy yak is a neverending task.
TeMPOraL · 1h ago
Right. I know the name (though it took me longer than I want to admit to connect the term with situations outside programming!) - what I now seek to know is, how to minimize it in personal life.
Letting go is probably most people's answer - nothing bad will happen if I do all the dependent tasks (cleanup, restocking things that just run out) later in the day - but I have difficulty getting them out of my head, they keep distracting me until they're completed.
arkey · 43m ago
> how to minimize it in personal life.
Structure, order, habits.
rocqua · 2h ago
The N systems case equation has to be wrong. I think you need either 1/(1-p)^n or 1/(1-p^n)
esjeon · 3h ago
> Knowing which problems are worth your energy.
This, but with proper balance. TBH, you can live a happy life if you just stop caring about every technical problem, but that would make you unimaginative and passive. Just make sure your pick a hole (or two) you're gonna die in.
mgaunard · 2h ago
Letting go means stopping to care. That's a slippery slope to coasting.
arkey · 37m ago
> Letting go means stopping to care.
This reasoning (which I can easily identify with) is a slippery slope towards OCD anxiety and depression when you refuse to acknowledge that you can't fix everything.
You need to be realistic, set your priorities within a limited, defined context, take decisions and actions based on those, and forget about the stuff that didn't make your priority list.
That's not not-caring. That's focusing on what really needs your care.
Wish I was better at it though.
pjc50 · 2h ago
I think the Buddhists would disagree with you on the moral valence of this.
WJW · 39m ago
There's plenty of Western philosophy as well that sees "not caring" (at least not about things outside your own actions) as very desirable. Not to mention the Epicureans, for whom freedom from worries ("ataraxia") was the highest attainable state.
OP's fear of (being seen to be) "coasting" would be entirely foreign to them.
Cthulhu_ · 1h ago
Letting go of everything means stopping to care about anything, sure. But the point of the article is to try and stop caring about everything and focus on the things that are really important to you, focus on the things you can change.
GardenLetter27 · 1h ago
This is well-written. I think LLMs can help a bit here too - the other day I was watching a rare, old film with my wife and the subtitles kept de-syncing. I.e. the frame-rate was slightly different as well as a fixed offset.
So I explained it to Claude and made it write a Python script where I could manually set a few fixed times and it would adjust the SRT file, and it worked perfectly.
I literally paused the film and did that in under 5 minutes. It was amazing.
So fixing a lot of small things has become easier at least.
urig · 1h ago
My takeaway from this post is not to find better ways to do, but to find a way not to.
GardenLetter27 · 1h ago
Yeah, but the main thing is I didn't publish the script, or try to develop it into a more generic tool with more features (automatic synchronisation, etc.) - that is where things become overwhelming.
Like I have published a FOSS tool from some scripts I had for managing VPNs, and there I get constant issues around new providers / updates and it not working in people's specific environments (which I can't test).
The LLMs make it viable to write quick throw-away scripts with almost no time investment, and as such you feel no pressure to share or improve them.
pknerd · 15m ago
The site is down
howtofly · 1h ago
Serious software development is rarely an individual endeavor; most issues should be resolved through collaboration. In other words, they should be addressed through management. What the author needs to overcome, in my view, is essentially a form of extreme individualism.
TeMPOraL · 24m ago
I guess that's a problem for a lot of us who learned to program as teenagers. A big reason programming felt good for me is precisely because it let me do interesting and impressive stuff myself, and not collaboratively. There were very few kids who had even remotely similar interests to me back then - and that's true in adulthood too, outside of work contexts. While on the job, my projects may be collaborative in nature, but after hours, there's very few people among my family and friends who'd even be interested in doing a small software project, much less capable of doing so.
jeffreygoesto · 7m ago
/.ed :(
sapht · 1h ago
I'm compulsively drafting ideas along these same lines, but now I don't need to fix that. Wonderful, brilliant text, thank you raf.
throwanem · 3h ago
Welcome to your thirties!
pmkary · 2h ago
This was something I really enjoyed reading, having suffered greatly from the same conditions. It made me realize I’m not alone, and for that I hugely thank you, and everyone else in this thread who commented.
arjvik · 3h ago
These days, knowing that instead of spending hours artfully crafting a solution to something, GPT could code up a far-less-elegant-but-still-working solution in about 5-10 minutes of prompting has all but solved this.
pmkary · 2h ago
I went down this road and it doesn't free up time, you just get to fix many many more problems.
arjvik · 2h ago
I should clarify - I don’t mean I use GPT to write these solutions, I leave them unsolved knowing that they’re solvable in a very inelegant way.
TeMPOraL · 1h ago
That makes me feel even more guilty for not solving them, now that I realize the solution is one or two orders of magnitude easier to do.
Not joking with orders of magnitude. At this point, I regularly encounter a situation in which asking ChatGPT/Claude to hack me a little browser tool to do ${random stuff} feels easier and faster than searching for existing software, or even existing artifacts. Like, the other day I made myself a generator for pre-writing line tracing exercise sheets for my kids, because it was easier than finding enough of those sheets on-line, and the latter is basically just Google/Kagi Images search.
Cthulhu_ · 1h ago
Yeah but if you let go of your years of coding standards / best practices and just hack something together yourself, it won't be much slower than chatgpt.
dmichulke · 3h ago
Wow, great piece.
We are playing software factorio and the winning move is not to play.
Cthulhu_ · 1h ago
Don't start, I've started a playthrough again with the new expansion and just landed on the first planet after overbuilding my home base with grids and trains and stuff.
WJW · 1h ago
It's more like society factorio, but unlike factorio it's not fun and you're forced to play against people with much more resources and talent than you.
TeMPOraL · 1h ago
Also if you stumble and fall behind, you don't get to hit pause and plan your next steps carefully - that'll only make you fall behind even further.
Melkaz · 3h ago
I'm seeing myself in the text, but one aspect that doesn't seem to be covered enough is the ego.
I find joy in receiving praise from my colleagues when they have good experiences with my tools.
alexisread · 59m ago
Playing devil's advocate here, but is that simply validation that stuff you've written is actually useful?
This could be seen as a proxy for self worth, which if something is useful, helps stave off that nagging anxiety in the back of your head?
The question here is, is that a useful driver to build new things, or do we let things go? That's kinda similar to the article's premise.
(takes one to know one here)
kookamamie · 2h ago
It's good to remember it's a marathon, not a sprint and that everything rots over time.
nyanpasu64 · 3h ago
There's a... sad comparison of this article about over-responsibility, and https://www.benkuhn.net/blub/ about the value of learning about the stack you use (the more you know about the workings of bugs, sometimes the more they gnaw at you).
Nevermark · 3h ago
I have spent some percentage of my life attempting to rewrite all software from first principles up.
Software is so spectacularly broken. Applications that don’t let me adjust the position of a little button for my work habits. Why is that impossible!?! A global software and commerce system, where you can buy candy or transfer $ billions, both with cute warnings like “Please, oh, please, sir! Please don’t hit the back button!”
I can sum up the results of my quest quite simply: “The rewrites continue…”
Is this chasing windmills? The case for that seems solid on the surface, but…
It is true that every rewrite of a specific set of features, or a platform for enabling better support for efficiently and correctly commingling an open class of features, inevitably runs into trouble. Some early design choice is now evidently crippling. Some aspect can now be seen to have two incompatible implementations colliding and setting off an unnecessary complexity explosion. Etc.
But on the other hand, virtually every major rewrite points to a genuinely much improved sequel. Whose dikes keeping out unnecessary complexity hold up longer with less finger holes to plug, for a better return. Before its collapse.
Since there must be a simplest way to do things, at least in any scoped area, we have Lyapunov conditions:
Continual improvement with a guaranteed destination. A casual proof there is a solution.
It’s a dangerous phantom to pursue!
——
It would be interesting to compile a list from the heady 90’s, when corporations created boondoggles like Pink and Cyberdog, and had higher aspirations for things like “Object Linking and Embedding”.
You just don’t see as many romantic technological catastrophes like those anymore. I miss them!
alexisread · 25m ago
If you're looking at really from first principles, it's hard to beat forth systems.
You can type in Plankforth (https://github.com/nineties/planckforth) in a hex editor ie. this can be built from zero software, by effectively morse-coding it into bare memory.
Yes. Well, "tilting at," jousting specifically. The figure relates to the comical pointlessness of such an act; the windmill sail will in every case of course simply remove the lance from the rider and the rider from the saddle, and turn on heedlessly, as only a purblind or romantic fool could omit trivially to predict.
> You just don’t see as many romantic technological catastrophes like those anymore.
The 90s were a period of unparalleled economic surplus in the United States. There was more stupid money than at any other time and place in history, and stupid money always goes somewhere. Once that was tulips. This time it was this.
> I miss them!
I miss the innocence of the time, however amply undeserved. But I was young myself then.
exe34 · 1h ago
I don't know if this is post-hoc justification, but I see myself as somebody who wants to know what everything is and how everything works - so to me, re-implementing (and always failing to take it to completion) is the means to an end. I think I spent the first 25 years of my life studying, so learning has become the goal itself. Work is there to provide funds to support me while I learn. Re-implementing the basics of something is a terrific tool for learning how it works.
Barbing · 2h ago
raf: from grins to smirks, thank you for repeatedly putting the smiles on my face. You know me so well considering we’ve never met. Ever so salient; thanks for (hopefully) course correcting any of my remaining years :)
I see a similar issue in 2025, but with vibe coding.
It all boils down to the 3 key factors: speed, quality and cost. And you can't have it all
Know your trade-offs.
Tepix · 1h ago
With vibe coding, you have none of those. The initial speed advantage will disappear once you need to maintain the mess.
foobahhhhh · 1h ago
Glad I'm low enough on the bell curve to not have this problem. If a tool is broken I shrug. Maybe someone will fix it
abhisek · 3h ago
So true. I have tried building from scratch so many times for specific use-cases with my own opinionated experience only to recreate the bloat over time. That’s actually good. The alternative was building something based on momentary spark of creativity that no one, not even me end up using.
metalman · 29m ago
This is very amusing, and evocative of what creative makers go through in many other fields....and as an do it my self absolutist, got me mired in attempts to pick up programing as another side gig/hussle in a life that is wildly over subscribed.
So reluctantly I am letting go of a bunch of stuff that lingers, Presque vu skills, always almost, and never enough time to push up and over.
The bonus is that I have focused on things that I did level up on, and can now do with ease, and a bit of flare......and perhaps more importantly give others a bit of joy to watch and see, "hey! that doesn't look so hard now!"
One of the things I picked up.along the way was, audio engineering, live and studio sound, where when it kicks in, it's pure misery, and every mistake and buzz, ruins all music listening, fingers twitching for sliders that are not there, griping like a back seat driver.....the better the stereo, the worse the experience, especialy with heavily produced studio work.....at least with live recordings, all the mistakes are honest and oten the recovery is where the magic happens.
sylware · 3m ago
"SSL error"...
ajuc · 3h ago
Great article. I know it's not the main subject, but I really liked this part:
> Technical Work as Emotional Regulation
Men are taught to do that in most societies. You are unhappy - don't bother talking about it (men don't cry), do sth for the society - you'll receive praise in return and your pain will go away for a while. Even if nobody'll praise you - you'll think better of yourself. Same thing that makes our fathers obsessively fix any minor inconveniences around the house instead of going to the doctor with their big health problem.
Men often laugh at women talking for hours instead of fixing the damn problem (and it is frustrating to observe). But we often do not fix THE damn problem either - we fix other unrelated problems to feel better about the one we fear thinking about.
What's more tech-specific IMO is the degree to which our egos are propped by our code. Code is the one thing many programmers had going for them when they grew up. It's what made them special. It's what was supposed to pay for all the bullying in school. It's what paid their bills and made them respected. It's very hard not to make code your main source of value.
People praise "ego-less" programming, and most programmers adhere to the rules (don't get overly defensive, take criticism, allow others to change "your" code, etc.) But that's not actually ego-less programming, it's just hidding your ego in the closet and suffering in silence.
If you procrastinate when programming - it's because you feel your code reflects on your worth as a human being. It's all ego. Changing what you do won't change that. You need to change what you think.
Cthulhu_ · 1h ago
To expand, code is a means, the core "habits" that programmers develop (at least speaking for myself) is twofold; abstracting, trying to reduce things to simple stereotypes; codifying / decision-tree-ing interactions, things like that. And problem solving, when someone mentions an issue, the gut reaction is to try and fix it. And it takes a lot of internet wisdoms and/or therapy to learn that you are allowed to let people stew in their problems, or that unless you're asked for a solution you don't need to offer one.
Problem solving is easier than listening and empathy.
brador · 54m ago
The next step is burn out, then keeping everything default and just living with it. I know of no steps after this.
atoav · 3h ago
Some truth in there, but I have to admit that most simple static generators I have written I wrote out of fun and curiosity and not because I thought all existing ones had flaws (even if they did).
It is okay to do things and abandon them later, that is how we learn. We programmers are multipliers, which gives us special responsibility. If we create a shit tool with a shit workflow that wastes time, we waste time multiplied by the number of users of our software. If we save time or bring joy, the same is true. That can be beautiful and devastating.
But every software needs to be maintained somehow and maintainability is a technological choice as well. I have an embedded project running for well over a decade without a single maintenance step of either the hard- or the software. I could have built that project also with more dependencies to the outside world, or in more sophisticated ways with more moving parts, but I wanted to not deal with the consequences of that. This choice isn't always easy, but it is a choice. Ask your sysadmin which things worked for the past decades without having to touch them and investigate. Typically it is boring tech with boring choices.
Another aspect the article does not tackle is that if you know to repair or build many things, people will naturally also come to you asking you to do precisely that. But that again produces maintenance work and responsibility. This is why I like working in education, you can show people how to do it and then it is their project.
arlyle · 3h ago
we wont fix things by adding but deleting
esjeon · 3h ago
Yes, but deleting is more difficult and often more expensive than adding. It becomes another burden if you are not bold and determined enough.
maephisto666 · 3h ago
The less, the better
abstractspoon · 3h ago
Can't disagree with any of that
bflesch · 3h ago
This resonates
anthk · 1h ago
Well, with OpenBSD:
- Updates often don't break things
- Remind for notes
- Gopher as my main site
- Multimarkdown+git for a wiki
- A web/blog without RSS is not worth your time
- Nvi can be good enough against vim, entr+make do magic
- mbsync/msmtp/slrnpull and so work in batch mode, fire mutt and forget
I don't hack my tools any more. I don't distrohop. CWM, XTerm, MuPDF, GV and friends like Bitlbee do everything well since years. Now I'm focusing in Forth, because in a near future low power microcontrollers and laptop will say a thing or two.
I have many ideas that I want to build, but I'd have to learn new languages, yet I just can't sit and go through the documentation every day like I should. Still haven't finished the rust book.
The other way is start building already, and if you come across a block, then learn about that thing and move on, but I feel uncomfortable having gaps in my knowledge, AI exists but I don't want to use it to generate code for me because I wanna enjoy the process of writing code rather than just reviewing code.
Basically I'm just stuck within the constraints I put for myself :(, I'm not sure why I wrote this here, probably just wanted to let it out..
Understanding why I feel this, when I have, has always proven enlightening. I find it never has to do with the gap or what would fill it.
I've written a lot of Rust. I've read less than half of the Rust book. Your competence in Rust is a function of how many lines of Rust you've written; getting to the point you can start working with it is more important than completing the book. Jon Gjengset's videos were really critical for me there, seeing how he worked in Rust made it possible for me to develop a workflow. (I broke down what I learned in more detail at one point [1].)
Rust is an example I've honed in on because you mentioned it and I related to it, but this is broadly applicable. Dare I say, more broadly than just programming, even.
(Also, note that I'm a giant hypocrite who shaves yaks and struggles with perfectionism constantly. I learned Rust 5 years ago to start a project, and I've written 0 lines of code for it. If I sound critical, that's my self criticism leaking through.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020654
> I've written a lot of Rust. I've read less than half of the Rust book.
Just knowing that there's someone out there who has worked like this or has been in the same situation gives me enough confidence to go through it!(the just write code part)
I've gone through so many resources (including the book) and I never managed to finish any of them. But I think now I need to get comfortable with having gaps and just start writing code and not be afraid of writing non-idiomatic rust code, atleast for now.
I like this a lot. I told someone once I avoid documentation like the plague and it just didn't have the same poetic ring as this line.
Sometimes you need to dive in, other times you need to hobble together something to step over
I don't understand why so many people suddenly started to insist on taking this all away, and they totally seriously proposed to become a janitor of a hallucinated output of some overhyped tool. That's the most frustrating thing one can imagine about programming, yet people insist on it.
Why? Why, specifically, do you "have to learn new languages"?
So, sure, I can see that, for some product, you might need to learn a new tech (say ... some specific AWS/GCP/Azure service), or perhaps a new configuration language (YAML, TOML, whatever).
And, sure, for some ideas (for example a mobile phone app) you're forced into that specific ecosystem.
Other than the mobile exception above, why do you need to learn a new language to build your idea? There is nothing stopping you from implementing your idea in (for example) Python. Or Javascript. Or Java, C#, C++, etc.
A programming-language-barrier absolutely does not stop you building your idea.
You gotta make the call - are you interested in building $IDEA, or are you interested in learning $NEWLANG?
Except there is, my brain :), that's one of the constraints I'm talking about, I'm a frontend web dev and I only know JS/TS, and like some frontend web devs, I'm enamored by Rust because it seems so different. I already use JS/TS at work so I want to use something else for my personal projects. So I definitely would have to learn something new.
> You gotta make the call - are you interested in building $IDEA, or are you interested in learning $NEWLANG?
If I was only interested in building my idea, I'd have just used what I know and used AI to accelerate the process. However for me the journey is also important, I want to enjoy thinking and writing code (and this project is something only I'd use, so there's no hurry to release a prototype). The problem is I want to start writing code right away, but that has the issue that I've mentioned above (gaps in knowledge).
Nobody is at fault, other than me for setting these constraints for myself. I know the solution is to just suck up and go through the rust book, read a chapter daily and eventually I'd have all the concepts in my head that I can then just focus on writing the code. But whenever I go about doing this, my mind always persuades me that there must be a better way, or it finds some flaws in my current approach and so on. So I need to learn how to not listen to my mind in such cases, and stick to the goal that I set.
Edit - After reading a reply to my comment, I've decided to just start writing the code and not worry about having gaps, anytime I start having doubts again, I'd go through this comment thread
I grew up in a datacenter. Leaky air conditioners and diesel generators. Open the big doors if it gets too hot.
Everything, everywhere, is greasy and lousy and half broken. Sysadmins, we accept that everything is shit from the very beginning.Then you see the real world and you think it must be because people are stupid, the bosses are pointy-haired, they don't understand, they don't value elegance, they are greedy, they etc. etc. But once you spend enough time on your own projects, and they evolve and change over the years, they turn more and more into a mess, you rewrite, you prioritize, you abandon, you revive, and you notice that it goes much deeper than simply laziness. Real solutions depend on context, one caching algo is good when one medium is x times faster than another, but not when it's only y times faster. It makes sense to show a progress bar when downloading a file if the usual internet speed is X but not when it's Y. Over years and decades the context can shift, and even those things can change that were only silent assumptions of yours when you made the "perfect" program as a young'un, looking down on all the existing "messy" solutions that do a bunch of unnecessary cruft. It's an endless cycle...
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it as good as we can, but rather that we must accept that the outcome will be flawed and that, despite our best intentions, it will show its sharp edges the next time we come to work on it.
Yes, prototypical school stuff like Pythagoras are "eternal" but a lot of math is designed, and can be ergonomic or not. Better notation can suggest solutions to unsolved problems. Clumsy axioms can hide elegant structure.
However, like every other solution built by Nature, this one also works through pain, suffering and death. Nature doesn't care if you're happy, nor does it care if you're suffering. And it especially doesn't care if your suffering is a low-burn, long-term pain in the depth of your heart.
So yeah, having kids will force you to make choices and abandon frivolities, in the same way setting your house on fire will free you from obsessing over choices for unnecessary expenses :).
But then I look at my son, and say "screw it, they couldnt pay me enough to care out of hours and give up play time"
I, for example, would not necessary be a bad parent, but very likely one who does at least not obey the social expectations of how to rise a child.
My free time is to be spent on other things, I get paid to fix issues and that pays my bills, I don't want nor need to be thinking about these issues outside of paid hours, you know too much to the point where you know how much effort it will take to fix something that might look innocuous, innocent, but definitely has deep tendrils of other related issues to tackle. It's not worth it, not if I'm not being paid for it or it isn't part of a personal project I'm really passionate about.
So I learnt to not care much, I help my colleagues, deliver what I tell I will deliver, and free space in my mind to pursue other more interesting stuff to me.
The script I made for deployment, because existing solutions didn't "feel" right, required a lot of work and maintenance when we later had to add features and bug fixes.
Another script I made for building and deploying Java applications, because I didn't like Maven and Puppet.
The micro service I rewrote because I wanted to use my own favourite programming language. I introduced a lot of bugs that were already fixed, missing features and another language for my co-workers to learn when they inherited the application when I left.
It is a rare and wise insight which only becomes crystal clear with age. Choose your battles very carefully.
This is a golden nugget up there with "time flies". I never understood that as a kid but really hits hard with your mid-life crisis.
Listen carefully little grasshoppers.
This really got to me because I've been doing this without realizing it for as long as I can remember.
> I have written entire applications just to avoid thinking about why I was unhappy.
I think this is true too. The prefrontal cortex is inhibitory to the amygdala/limbic system; always having a project you can think about or work on as an unconscious learned adaptation to self-calm in persistent emotionally-stressful situations is very plausible.
I wonder how many of us became very good at programming ~through this - difficult emotional circumstances driving an intense focus on endless logical reasoning problems in every spare moment for a very long time. I wonder if you can measure a degree of HPA-axis deregulation compared to the general population.
And whether it's net good or net harmful. To the extent that it distracts you from actually solving or changing a situation that is making you emotionally unhappy, probably not great. But being born into a time in which the side effects make you rich was pretty cool.
My honest, brutal answer is: "Your problem is very likely self-inflicted. Buy a decent Brother laser printer."
This attitude resolves you of nearly all such requests. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer
It's not only that solutions decay, though that's true, but also that the search for improvement itself becomes recursive.
When you identify something can be improved, and fix it, your own fix and every individual step of it now become the new thing that can be improved. After the most fleeting of pauses to step back and appreciate your work, this becomes your new default.
Indeed I often look back at my own solutions and judge them more harshly than I would ever judge anyone else's. Why? Because as the article says, I know much more about how it works. Cracks increase surface area by a lot. I know about a lot of the cracks.
I wrote a blog post [0] about this mindset getting in the way of what you care about in product development which you might enjoy, if you enjoyed this article.
[0] https://davnicwil.com/just-build-the-product/
Each time you set about to make a single change ask what is the probability (p) that this change results in another change, or track this probability empirically, then compute 1/(1-p) this will tell you how much change you should "expect" to make to realize your desired improvement. If you have n interacting modules compute 1/(1-np). This will quantify whether or not to embark on the refactor. (The values computed are the sum of the geometric series in the probability which represents the expectation value)
So this is about how we manage change in a complex system in order to align its functionality with a changing environment. I suggest that we can do so by considering the smallest, seemingly innocuous change that you could make and how that change propagates through to the end product.
In the end, a solution may be to make systems that are easy and painless to change, then you can change them often for the better without the long tail effects that drag you down.
E.g. you figure it'll take a minute to take the trash out and wash your hands. But on the way you discover you run out of trash bags, and while washing your hands you run out of soap, then as you pick the refill bottle from storage some light items fall out, and you need to put them back into a stable configuration, then you spilled a bit of soap during refilling so you need to clean up, but you just run out of paper towels, and...
Letting go is probably most people's answer - nothing bad will happen if I do all the dependent tasks (cleanup, restocking things that just run out) later in the day - but I have difficulty getting them out of my head, they keep distracting me until they're completed.
Structure, order, habits.
This, but with proper balance. TBH, you can live a happy life if you just stop caring about every technical problem, but that would make you unimaginative and passive. Just make sure your pick a hole (or two) you're gonna die in.
This reasoning (which I can easily identify with) is a slippery slope towards OCD anxiety and depression when you refuse to acknowledge that you can't fix everything.
You need to be realistic, set your priorities within a limited, defined context, take decisions and actions based on those, and forget about the stuff that didn't make your priority list.
That's not not-caring. That's focusing on what really needs your care.
Wish I was better at it though.
OP's fear of (being seen to be) "coasting" would be entirely foreign to them.
So I explained it to Claude and made it write a Python script where I could manually set a few fixed times and it would adjust the SRT file, and it worked perfectly.
I literally paused the film and did that in under 5 minutes. It was amazing.
So fixing a lot of small things has become easier at least.
Like I have published a FOSS tool from some scripts I had for managing VPNs, and there I get constant issues around new providers / updates and it not working in people's specific environments (which I can't test).
The LLMs make it viable to write quick throw-away scripts with almost no time investment, and as such you feel no pressure to share or improve them.
Not joking with orders of magnitude. At this point, I regularly encounter a situation in which asking ChatGPT/Claude to hack me a little browser tool to do ${random stuff} feels easier and faster than searching for existing software, or even existing artifacts. Like, the other day I made myself a generator for pre-writing line tracing exercise sheets for my kids, because it was easier than finding enough of those sheets on-line, and the latter is basically just Google/Kagi Images search.
We are playing software factorio and the winning move is not to play.
I find joy in receiving praise from my colleagues when they have good experiences with my tools.
(takes one to know one here)
Software is so spectacularly broken. Applications that don’t let me adjust the position of a little button for my work habits. Why is that impossible!?! A global software and commerce system, where you can buy candy or transfer $ billions, both with cute warnings like “Please, oh, please, sir! Please don’t hit the back button!”
I can sum up the results of my quest quite simply: “The rewrites continue…”
Is this chasing windmills? The case for that seems solid on the surface, but…
It is true that every rewrite of a specific set of features, or a platform for enabling better support for efficiently and correctly commingling an open class of features, inevitably runs into trouble. Some early design choice is now evidently crippling. Some aspect can now be seen to have two incompatible implementations colliding and setting off an unnecessary complexity explosion. Etc.
But on the other hand, virtually every major rewrite points to a genuinely much improved sequel. Whose dikes keeping out unnecessary complexity hold up longer with less finger holes to plug, for a better return. Before its collapse.
Since there must be a simplest way to do things, at least in any scoped area, we have Lyapunov conditions:
Continual improvement with a guaranteed destination. A casual proof there is a solution.
It’s a dangerous phantom to pursue!
——
It would be interesting to compile a list from the heady 90’s, when corporations created boondoggles like Pink and Cyberdog, and had higher aspirations for things like “Object Linking and Embedding”.
You just don’t see as many romantic technological catastrophes like those anymore. I miss them!
In terms of accessibility though, I'd recommend Forthkit (https://github.com/tehologist/forthkit), Miniforth (https://compilercrim.es/bootstrap/), Sectorforth (https://github.com/cesarblum/sectorforth), Sectorlisp (https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/) Freeforth (https://github.com/dan4thewin/FreeForth2 contains an inlining cross-compiler for MSP430)
The problem with forths is that they don't seem as scalable as say lisp, from a social perspective. At a larger level, Project Oberon (https://projectoberon.net/) builds from the base CPU on FPGA, and A2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2_(operating_system)) show what can be done to scale up.
Steps (https://github.com/robertpfeiffer/cola/tree/master/function/...) also was supposed to do this, but the available code is rather disjointed and not really easy to follow.
Yes. Well, "tilting at," jousting specifically. The figure relates to the comical pointlessness of such an act; the windmill sail will in every case of course simply remove the lance from the rider and the rider from the saddle, and turn on heedlessly, as only a purblind or romantic fool could omit trivially to predict.
> You just don’t see as many romantic technological catastrophes like those anymore.
The 90s were a period of unparalleled economic surplus in the United States. There was more stupid money than at any other time and place in history, and stupid money always goes somewhere. Once that was tulips. This time it was this.
> I miss them!
I miss the innocence of the time, however amply undeserved. But I was young myself then.
It all boils down to the 3 key factors: speed, quality and cost. And you can't have it all
Know your trade-offs.
> Technical Work as Emotional Regulation
Men are taught to do that in most societies. You are unhappy - don't bother talking about it (men don't cry), do sth for the society - you'll receive praise in return and your pain will go away for a while. Even if nobody'll praise you - you'll think better of yourself. Same thing that makes our fathers obsessively fix any minor inconveniences around the house instead of going to the doctor with their big health problem.
Men often laugh at women talking for hours instead of fixing the damn problem (and it is frustrating to observe). But we often do not fix THE damn problem either - we fix other unrelated problems to feel better about the one we fear thinking about.
What's more tech-specific IMO is the degree to which our egos are propped by our code. Code is the one thing many programmers had going for them when they grew up. It's what made them special. It's what was supposed to pay for all the bullying in school. It's what paid their bills and made them respected. It's very hard not to make code your main source of value.
People praise "ego-less" programming, and most programmers adhere to the rules (don't get overly defensive, take criticism, allow others to change "your" code, etc.) But that's not actually ego-less programming, it's just hidding your ego in the closet and suffering in silence.
If you procrastinate when programming - it's because you feel your code reflects on your worth as a human being. It's all ego. Changing what you do won't change that. You need to change what you think.
Problem solving is easier than listening and empathy.
It is okay to do things and abandon them later, that is how we learn. We programmers are multipliers, which gives us special responsibility. If we create a shit tool with a shit workflow that wastes time, we waste time multiplied by the number of users of our software. If we save time or bring joy, the same is true. That can be beautiful and devastating.
But every software needs to be maintained somehow and maintainability is a technological choice as well. I have an embedded project running for well over a decade without a single maintenance step of either the hard- or the software. I could have built that project also with more dependencies to the outside world, or in more sophisticated ways with more moving parts, but I wanted to not deal with the consequences of that. This choice isn't always easy, but it is a choice. Ask your sysadmin which things worked for the past decades without having to touch them and investigate. Typically it is boring tech with boring choices.
Another aspect the article does not tackle is that if you know to repair or build many things, people will naturally also come to you asking you to do precisely that. But that again produces maintenance work and responsibility. This is why I like working in education, you can show people how to do it and then it is their project.
- Updates often don't break things
- Remind for notes
- Gopher as my main site
- Multimarkdown+git for a wiki
- A web/blog without RSS is not worth your time
- Nvi can be good enough against vim, entr+make do magic
- mbsync/msmtp/slrnpull and so work in batch mode, fire mutt and forget
I don't hack my tools any more. I don't distrohop. CWM, XTerm, MuPDF, GV and friends like Bitlbee do everything well since years. Now I'm focusing in Forth, because in a near future low power microcontrollers and laptop will say a thing or two.