I am taking a twitter and LinkedIn break. I won’t login till the end of the month on any of them. That’s why I am unresponsive there.
Meanwhile I will keep writing here.
Accessible British Bathrooms
One thing I don’t understand about accessible bathrooms in the UK is their insistence on having a tiny sink, and placing it too close to the toilet. I can’t think of a reason for such a bad design and it is totally unusable.
Yak Shaving
I was in a planning meeting few weeks ago and one of my colleagues said something wasn’t done because the team was “Yak Shaving”. We didn’t understand so we googled it during the meeting and this is what we found
Yak shaving is programming lingo for the seemingly endless series of small tasks that have to be completed before the next step in a project can move forward.
Then he said I have a very good video that explains what it is. We also played it in the meeting.
This was funny.
Short random thoughts
I don’t have time to write much but I want to keep up with the habit. So here is a short random thoughts post.
These days I am thinking about London and comparing it a lot to Berlin. It is really good to be in a place that speaks English but the public transit system sucks in terms of wheelchair accessibility.
I am thinking about self censorship. I delete many thoughts after writing them. I don’t know how much self censorship is good or bad but I think I am doing more censorship than necessary.
I am reflecting on my decision to delete Facebook in 2015. Before Trump became a president, and before GDPR. It is one of the best decisions I made but I didn’t think enough of its impact. This needs another post.
I might elaborate more on those points later. I might not. But right now, those are my random thoughts.
Hello London
I am in London for a short visit. It is my first time.
It feels good to be in a place where English is the default.
I always say I am operating at 50% of my social capacity in Germany because of the language.
It feels different when you understand what’s happening around you. The signs, the announcements, and the side talks.
Unique Pageviews
I don’t check this blog’s analytics often. I do it every few months. I was curious to know which posts/pages are read the most this year. This is the data since 1st of January until today.
Scalability of ethics
I was watching Peter Thiel interview with Dave Rubin. Part of the interview was Thiel talking about seasteading, a libertarian Utopia he wants to build in the middle of the sea.
The first thing that came to mind upon hearing this was Talib’s “ethics don’t scale” argument from Skin in the Game.
There is also
A libertarian Utopia can not scale, or it will turn into a dictatorship or something else.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t understand humanists that keep saying we are all one. No we are not. We are different. There are infinite factors that determine our position in society and our life path. We can’t control for most of those factors. We live with other human beings. They have different desires and incentives. They have different genes. Their ethics are different. They act differently.
The only way we can all be one is in a dystopian world. A world in which we are all trapped together having to abide by rules dictating we all should behave in a certain way. In such a world I will probably be unconscious. This makes life meaningless. And I don’t want to live a meaningless life. Sorry, we are not one.
Quality through quantity
A friend was telling me I am writing a lot recently. I told him I try to do it daily. Then he went into the whole discussion of quantity vs quality.
Writing is a muscle. You need to train it to get better at it. It is also a habit, you need to form it.
By doing it often you get to a point where you can write high quality pieces easily. You achieve quality through quantity.
Don’t forget your booking
We were discussing how the favicon should report the status of a deployment pipeline, and I showed my team the following example from Booking.com
This is master persuasion. Even the smallest thing like the favicon and tab title can have a big impact.
Expectations
Disappointments happen because of the delta between expectations and reality. You can’t control reality, but you can manage your expectations. Lower your expectations, only by doing this you are liberated from the confinements of disappointments.