So yes, you can build yourself a life like Sam Hinkie’s; or you can doggedly pursue your passion for a single idea, like Kati Kariko; or you can follow your curiosity where it leads and then “connect the dots in retrospect,” like Steve Jobs; or you can master a complex skillset that allows you to provide for a vital human need, be it via medicine or accounting or sports or food preparation or software development; or you can be an artist, or a craftsman, or a homemaker, or a Renaissance (wo)man, or a community-builder, or any of the countless forms and combinations of well-lived lives that have been and have yet to be conceived. 

Choose with the knowledge that almost any choice is better than a default on choosing, and that most choices (with some obvious exceptions) are two-way doors. 

But choose with full awareness that what you’re choosing, what you’re building, is a life; your life. It’s never just “this moment,” or “this job”, or “this relationship”; it’s a point on your timeline, an inextricable part of this one precious, singular span of existence you get to design. So if you find yourself conflicted between “present you” and “future you”, the solution is not to sacrifice either one to the other; it’s to solve the underlying design problem.

Pairs nicely with this line from Rush’s “Freewill” which often drops into my head:

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

In summary:

• Facebook is a [redacted] company with a terrible web interface.
• React is a technology created at Facebook to administer its interface.
• React enables you to build web applications and their interfaces the way Facebook does.
• I am not calling Facebook "Meta"
• JavaScript-first interfaces built on ecosystems like React’s are cumbersome and under-performing.
• React prevails because its evangelical proponents and apologists have convinced developers that Facebook’s success can be attributed to technological quality and not aggressive capitalism.

Over the past fifteen years, I feel like I’ve had a pretty good track record of knowing which technologies to pay attention to and which technologies to confidently let pass by me.

When React first dropped, I thought the setup process seemed so onerous and filled with so many dependencies that I slowly backed away and haven't really needed to look back.

It would be irresponsible of me to have zero experience in React, so of course I've inherited projects that others have started on top of it. But every time I jump into a React project, I feel like I’m Homer jumping into his unchlorinated pool.¹

Perhaps we can define “junior developer” this way: it’s somebody who needs human supervision to accomplish the things a full-fledged member of the technical staff should be able to do using only AI assistance.

If we can’t make room in our taxonomy of technical work for someone who still needs human training, we are just doing the same old thing IT has been doing for decades: borrowing from our future to cash in on the current hype. AI, “chat-oriented programming”, whatever tomorrow’s buzzword is—they’re fascinating, they may be productivity enhancers, but they won’t remove the need for experienced human generalists in the loop.

And every experienced generalist starts out inexperienced. They start as a junior developer. That’s not where software engineering dies: it’s where it’s born.

One interesting detail The Information mentioned about Strawberry is that it “can solve math problems it hasn't seen before—something today's chatbots cannot reliably do.”

This runs counter to my point last week about a language model being “like having 10,000 Ph.D.’s available at your fingertips.” I argued that LLMs are very good at transmitting the sum total of knowledge they’ve encountered during training, but less good at solving problems or answering questions they haven’t seen before.

I’m curious to get my hands on Strawberry. Based on what I’m seeing, I’m quite sure it’s more powerful and less likely to hallucinate. But novel problem solving is a big deal. It would upend everything we know about the promise and capabilities of language models.

The other day, I was sitting in a McDonald’s play place with my kids and my nephew and niece. Every other parent there was sitting on their phone, no doubt trying to enjoy a short reprieve from their responsibilities as a parent.

The urge to pull out my phone was strong, believe me. But instead, I just watched all the kids play together. I felt content, proud of my choice, curious about what’s happening in the world around me.

I get the same feeling when I opt for an apple at night instead of a fistful of boring candy that my kids scooped up from a parade.

And I think the desire to chase that feeling is the biggest gift I received from my experiment with the Light Phone.

I don’t think I’ve shared many of my newsletter posts on here before, but I wanted to make sure I shared this one to button up the Light Phone experiment.

It’s been a really great month from a mental health perspective, by the way. I think I’ve finally got my head back on straight, and more importantly, I have some good tools for those moments where I start to backslide a bit.

One of the biggest contributions to my positive headspace? Not being on my phone so much.

I’m sure Apple will continue to be very successful for many years to come and I expect to buy many products in the future as well (after all, Microsoft and Google don’t feel much better). I’ll surely even give some of those products glowing reviews on this very blog. And yet, I do wonder if the Apple enthusiast crowd as we know is in permanent decline.

You don’t need Daring Fireball, Panic, ATP, Birchtree, or anyone else like us to be massively financially successful (just look at Microsoft and Samsung), but I do find it a bit sad to see Apple stroll down the road to being a totally heartless mega corp like the rest. Why does Apple feel it’s worth trashing their relationship with creators and developers so that they can take 30% of the money I pay an up-and-coming creator who is trying to make rent in time each month?

If Homer was trying to start an internet business today, Tim Cook would be the one smashing up his home office and declaring he didn’t get rich by writing a lot of checks¹.

I’ve all but checked out on the Apple community these days. I still follow a few choice folks like David Smith and John Siracusa, but the overall tone of most Apple pundits today feels like that of a kid who was bullied in high school and became the bully’s boss.

Here’s my problem: Apple makes the best products out there today, and they know it. They deserve to be rewarded financially for this, but the problem is that they don’t know when to stop.

That mindset tends to be a problem in humans in general. People who are great at saving money tend to be unsure how to spend it when they retire.

I’ve been an Apple supporter since I got my first iPod back in 2003. Whenever I need to get a new electronic item, my first instinct is to grab whatever Apple made and be done with it.

At first, that instinct was pursued with enthusiasm. Now, after twenty years of selfish financial moves, I’m starting to follow that instinct with a funky taste in my mouth, like when you drink a can of pop after not having one in years.

Even if Apple wanted to change their behavior, I’m not sure they even know how to. Just look at how they’ve responded to all the regulations that have been thrown their way.

When they’re told they must allow apps to link to external payment sources, they require you to pay a 5% “Initial Acquisition Fee”.

When they’re told they need to allow for alternative app stores on their platform, they respond with instituting a Core Technology Fee so developers can “utilize the capabilities that we have introduced, including the ability to direct app users to the web to complete purchases at a very competitive rate”.²

Even with a market cap of 3.44 trillion dollars, they still feel the need to charge exceptionally high fees for access to their platforms.³

I guess maybe this is inevitable? Call it enshittification, call it the natural order of things, but I can’t help feeling like we’ve reached peak Apple fandom.

Heh, I suppose this whole blog post could be summarized by this excellent Adam Mastroianni quote:

Notice that, while lots of people are happy to tell you about Golden Ages, nobody ever seems to think one is happening right now. Maybe that’s because the only place a Golden Age can ever happen is in our memory.

This talk helped me articulate a few key arguments that I can use to counter myself when in the throes of impostor syndrome-related attacks from my inner monologue.

Basically, a “staff-plus engineer” is anyone in a technical role that is higher than a senior engineer. These are sometimes referred to as principal engineers, staff engineers, etc.

The big difference between staff-plus and individual contributor path is that an IC role is one you go down when you truly want to contribute as an individual, often acquiring such an expertise in a specific domain that you just do your thing alone.

A staff-plus role requires collaboration, often leading teams, but always being the lynchpin which helps be the voice of technical leadership across multiple teams.

The responsibilities of a staff-plus role include (probably) writing and (definitely) reviewing code, providing technical direction, mentoring and sponsoring other engineers, providing engineering context to non-technical people, and being involved in strategic projects which aren’t shiny but are critical to the success of an organization.

I think I came across this talk at a timely point in my career. I have been tasked with doing staff-plus engineering work ever since starting my first company, and it’s honestly the stuff I love the most.

I’m not a developer who loves to write code. I love writing code because it results in a tool that makes someone’s life easier. What brings me joy is in doing the discovery work needed to clearly articulate the problem and charting a course that’ll lead us to a solution.

Of course you’re having problems keeping up with everything that’s happening in web dev. Of course!

You’re expected to follow half-a-dozen different specialities, each relatively fast-paced and complex in its own right, and you’re supposed to do it without cutting into the hours where you do actual paid web development.

Worse yet, you’re not actually expected to use any of it directly. Instead you’re also supposed to follow the developments of framework abstractions that are layered on top of the foundation specialities, at least doubling the number of complex fields a web dev has to follow and understand, right out of the gate.

This is immense – an expectation so mind-boggling that we need to acknowledge just how remarkable it is that each of us has managed as well as we have.

This entire article is an excellent summary of the state of the software development industry from the perspective of a web developer. I think Baldur hit the nail on the head several times here.

I first learned Javascript from a book I got from the library somewhere around 1999. This predated XMLHttpRequest, debuting with IE5 in 2001, which literally enables every single subsequent Javascript framework out there.

In just the last ten years alone, I’ve worked with React, Typescript, Coffeescript, Vue, Angular, Backbone.js, Ember.js, Next.js, ES6, and maybe another dozen Javascript variants that I can’t recall right now… but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in any of them.

Like Baldur says in this article, “framework knowledge is perishable.” I don’t want to spend all my time learning a framework which, if history is any indicator, will be obsolete in a few years.

The underlying Javascript knowledge, though, is not ephemeral. I can dig up webpages I built in fifth grade and render them in moments with ease on my modern day Macbook, whereas dashboards built on React from only five years ago can only be brought up if I spend an entire day setting up an environment with a billion dependencies.

I can do that because the vanilla Javascript that worked in IE5 still works great in any modern browser.

I do have to be a realist, though… the jobs out there today do require you to use these frameworks because the software pipeline is way more complex than it was in 2000. Frameworks provide a standarized way of building software within this modern landscape. For the record, I have no problem picking one up in the course of my work and figuring it out.

I wish more organizations would simpilfy rather than move towards increasingly complex ways of writing and delivering software. I feel like so much more value could be realized by paring back the staggering amounts of dependencies that these frameworks use. Codebases would be much thinner, deploy times would be faster, your footprint for potential security threats would be smaller, etc. etc.

Anyway, I also think the way he wraps up this article is grimly astute:

The tech industry will never be a genuinely free market as long as big tech companies are allowed to be as big as they are today.

What we have today is a centrally-planned economy by MBA sociopaths, operated as a looting ground for the rich.

It will never function on normal competitive, supply-and-demand market principles.

Because, even though a healthier market is the only thing that has a hope of a return to the fast-growing tech industry of prior decades, it would also require big tech companies to accept a smaller slice of the overall pie and allow new competitors to grow.

Why do that when you can strangle the market and keep the entire corpse for yourself?

Literally laughed out loud at “centrally-planned economy by MBA sociopaths.”

Anthony Williams stepped off his bicycle late Saturday morning and let out a soft groan as he sank into a red folding camp chair on the side of a gravel road. A fine layer of brown dust covered him, from his pink helmet all the way down to his patched, black leggings.

Someone handed him a paper plate with two tortillas filled with peanut butter and honey. He slowly took several bites then paused, too exhausted to notice the honey dripping onto his lap.

“I’m having a really hard time staying awake,” he said.

The 25-year-old St. Paul man had just bicycled 124 miles in roughly nine hours — but he was only halfway to the finish of The Day Across Minnesota, a 242-mile ultra-endurance cycling race known as “The DAMn.”

The goal is pretty straightforward: Push off at midnight from Gary, S.D., a hamlet on Minnesota’s western border, and pedal to Hager City, Wis., just across the Mississippi River from Red Wing, Minn., before midnight strikes again. 

This sounds so awesome. Adding it to my bucket list.

My brother-in-law is unabashedly into marching band competitions.

Last night, while playing cards at my house, he had the DCI World Championships playing on his phone in the background.

Competitive marching is his "thing".

He and my sister attend various competitions throughout the summer, and their goal is to make it to the finals in Indianapolis one year to witness the presentation of the Founders Trophy in person.

As a young kid, I used to have a ton of "things."

In the early 90s, it was the Minnesota Twins. In the late 90s, it was the Minnesota Vikings. Peppered throughout that decade, it included Animorphs, Power Rangers, Harry Potter, the Simpsons, Pokémon, and music.

As a high schooler, I became all too aware of people who had a "thing". When all your friends tease people because of their love for Texas Hold 'Em or pro wrestling or The Sims, you start to get self conscious.

What is my "thing" that everyone is teasing me about behind my back?

I made a choice somewhere around that time to never allow myself to be pinned down as someone who has a "thing".

In my late 30s, I occasionally find myself in this exasperating situation where I don't know what to do with my idle time.

I've been getting into small electronics repair, teaching myself soldering and fixing my old iPod. I've been playing guitar more often.

But my problem is that I don't have much idle time, because I have two small kids and a wife who I really, really enjoy being around.

And collectively, we don't have a "thing".

Growing up, our family's "thing" was attending each other's activities.

I remember being bribed by my parents with Pokémon cards so I didn't throw an absolute fit when my sister competed with her dance team at Williams Arena.

I remember getting together with the boys in the far corner of the stadium, playing 500 while my brother played a real game of football on the turf.

Every band concert, every theatre production, every softball game... that's what we did as a family.

But I don't recall having a "thing" that wasn't something we participated in.

We weren't huddled around a TV watching sports. We didn't go see shows together.

We mostly just supported each other.

That was our "thing."

The Olympics provided a great testing ground for various "things" we might adopt.

Every night for the past couple weeks, I've forced the kids to watch nearly every single sport with me.

The Olympics is a hot bed of weird, esoteric "things" that somehow get even more esoteric as the years wane on.

That's not a read, by the way: I am 100% here for competitive surfing, break dancing, underwater acrobatics, and dressage.

I can't say that we found a "thing" outright from watching the Olympics with the kids, but I learned that my son enjoys archery and my daughter enjoys hand-to-hand combat sports and track. Both of them enjoy gymnastics and soccer.

I want to find a "thing" that we, as a family, can all rally behind.

I used to assume that "things" become "things" organically, without much intentionality behind it.

As I'm getting older, I'm realizing that "things" only become "things" when someone decides to expose themselves to a new experience.

I'm unsure whether our "thing" will take the form of a sports team, or something in nature, or a TV show, or a book series, or something completely unexpected.

It could be something that's dorky like competitive marching¹ or more mainstream like professional football, it doesn't really matter to me.

All I know is that I need to start actively placing my family into situations where we can experience a "thing" together.