You're Not Your Codebase

If you write code, it’s really clear that your code does not represent you. The product you made, the work you did – it’s not you. Code has bugs, code has inefficiencies, and code can almost always be better than it is right now. As a developer, you have an intuitive understanding that an evaluation of your work is not an evaluation of you as a person. There’s clear evidence that a body of work lives outside of you....

May 22, 2020 · 1 min · 167 words · bear

The Past =/= The Future

Something weird happens when you start drawing time-series graphs a lot. You start to assume that all continuous experiences have a predictive value. If the business has grown at a yearly 12% rate for the last 5 years, it’s probably going to do the same this year. If my last 3 relationships ended with a fight, the next one will too. The stock markets average a 6% increase in value every year, so next year is probably quite safe....

May 20, 2020 · 1 min · 151 words · bear

The Map Is Not the Territory

The way I see the world is fundamentally different from every other person out there. This is because I’ve got a different bunch of DNA combined with a different set of actual experiences, and it’s shaped the lens through which I view everything. My map does most things well. However, it doesn’t look like your map. You map probably also does most things well. My map isn’t more correct than yours, because it’s a stretch to label all but a tiny part of existence as “objective”....

May 18, 2020 · 1 min · 127 words · bear

Feeding Bees

When bees fly out to find food for their hive, they don’t always make it back. They can get fatigued, sometimes to the point where they are unable to keep going. If this happens, they simply wait to die. I found one such bee on a windowsill. Immobile, unable to respond with more than slight twitches of its legs when provoked. I gave it liquid honey. It drank for several minutes, rested for half an hour and left....

May 16, 2020 · 1 min · 188 words · bear

The Choice Factory - Book Review

This read came up in conjunction with taking a certificate on behavioural economics. It’s essentially a business handbook, a reference of sorts that is designed to quickly guide the reader through a series of 25+ ways in which human decision making is biased, and how that affects how business can be conducted. Since we treated the course material as a direct input source for coming up with new projects for work, it was a totally awesome read....

May 15, 2020 · 2 min · 240 words · bear