"We use AI to build the tools because we use them in cursor or Visual Studio or code or wherever else people are making our stuff. I use AI a bunch." https://37signals.com/podcast/listener-questions/
"Today we’re introducing Fizzy. Kanban as it should be, not as it has been.
[...] we’ll host your account for just $20/month for unlimited cards and unlimited users. [...] And here’s a surprise... Fizzy is open source! If you’d prefer not to pay us, or you want to customize Fizzy for your own use, you can run it yourself for free forever." https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1995886683028685291
I wonder why SanDisk stopped manufacturing the Sansa Clip+. The production cost in 2025 would be extremely low and the demand still relatively high (relatively high as in, really low but high enough to sustain it as a product).
I don't understand. They've seen the contributions. How can they possibly do a clean-room implementation to avoid copyright infringement? (Let alone how tangled up in the history of the codebase they must be...)
You can consume a lot less on a surprisingly small salary, at least in the U.S.
But it requires giving up things a lot of people don't want to, because consuming less once you are used to consuming more sucks. Here is a list of things people can cut from their life that are part of the "consumption has gone up" and "new categories of consumption were opened" that ovi256 was talking about:
- One can give up cell phones, headphones/earbuds, mobile phone plans, mobile data plans, tablets, ereaders, and paid apps/services. That can save $100/mo in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 20 years ago.
- One can give up laptops, desktops, gaming consoles, internet service, and paid apps/services. That can save another $100/months in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 30 years ago.
- One can give up imported produce and year-round availability of fresh foods. Depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save almost nothing, or up to hundreds of dollars every month. This was a luxury 50 years ago.
- One can give up restaurant, take-out, and home pre-packaged foods. Again depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save nothing-to-hundreds every month. This was a luxury 70 years ago.
- One can give up car ownership, car rentals, car insurance, car maintenance, and gasoline. In urban areas, walking and public transit are much cheaper options. In rural areas, walking, bicycling, and getting rides from shuttle services and/or friends are much cheaper options. That could save over a thousand dollars a month per 15,000 miles. This was a luxury 80 years ago.
I could keep going, but by this point I've likely suggested cutting something you now consider necessary consumption. If you thought one "can't just give that up nowadays," I'm not saying you're right or wrong. I'm just hoping you acknowledge that what people consider optional consumption has changed, which means people consume a lot more.
> - One can give up cell phones, headphones/earbuds, mobile phone plans, mobile data plans, tablets, ereaders, and paid apps/services. That can save $100/mo in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 20 years ago.
It's not clear that it's still possible to function in society today with out a cell phone and a cell phone plan. Many things that were possible to do before without one now require it.
> - One can give up laptops, desktops, gaming consoles, internet service, and paid apps/services. That can save another $100/months in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 30 years ago.
Maybe you can replace these with the cell phone + plan.
> - One can give up imported produce and year-round availability of fresh foods. Depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save almost nothing, or up to hundreds of dollars every month. This was a luxury 50 years ago.
It's not clear that imported food is cheaper than locally grown food. Also I'm not sure you have the right time frame. I'm pretty sure my parents were buying imported produce in the winter when I was a kid 50 years ago.
> - One can give up restaurant, take-out, and home pre-packaged foods. Again depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save nothing-to-hundreds every month. This was a luxury 70 years ago.
Agreed.
> - One can give up car ownership, car rentals, car insurance, car maintenance, and gasoline. In urban areas, walking and public transit are much cheaper options. In rural areas, walking, bicycling, and getting rides from shuttle services and/or friends are much cheaper options. That could save over a thousand dollars a month per 15,000 miles. This was a luxury 80 years ago.
Yes but in urban areas whatever you're saving on cars you are probably spending on higher rent and mortgage costs compared to rural areas where cars are a necessity. And if we're talking USA, many urban areas have terrible public transportation and you probably still need Uber or the equivalent some of the time, depending on just how walkable/bike-able your neighborhood is.
> It's not clear that it's still possible to function in society today with out a cell phone
Like I said... I've likely suggested cutting something you now consider necessary consumption. If you thought one "can't just give that up nowadays," I'm not saying you're right or wrong. I'm just hoping you acknowledge that what people consider optional consumption has changed, which means people consume a lot more.
---
As an aside, I live in a rural area. The population of my county is about 17,000 and the population of its county seat is about 3,000. We're a good 40 minutes away from the city that centers the Metropolitan Statistical Area. A 1 bedroom apartment is $400/mo and a 2 bedroom apartment is $600/mo. In one month, minimum wage will be $15/hr.
Some folks here do live without a car. It is possible. They get by in exactly the ways I described (except some of the Amish/Mennonites, who also use horses). It's not preferred (except by some of the Amish/Mennonites), but one can make it work.
I've been alive slightly longer than that. And can't say life today is definitively better than 50 years ago in the USA.
It was the tail end of one income affording a house and groceries for a family. So to afford the same things, for many families requires almost double the labor.
A lot of new medical treatments, less smoking and drinking, overall longer life spans. But more recently increases to longevity have plateaued, and an epic of obesity has mitigated a lot of the health care improvements. And the astronomical increases in health care costs means improvements to health care capabilities are not available to a lot of people, at least not without greatly reducing their standard of living elsewhere.
College and university costs have grown exponentially, with no discernible increase in the quality of learning.
Housing prices far outpacing inflation of other goods and services.
Fewer intact families, less in person interactions, and the heroin like addictiveness of screens, have ushered in an epidemic of mental illness that might be unprecedented.
Now AI scaring the shit out of everyone, that no matter how hard you study, how disciplined and responsible you are, there's a good chance you will not be gainfully employed.
I frankly think the quality of life in the world I grew up in is better than the one my kids have today.
But if we take "surprisingly small salary" to literally mean salary, most (... all?) salaried jobs require you to work full time, 40 hours a week. Unless we consider cushy remote tech jobs, but those are an odd case and likely to go away if we assume AI is taking over there.
Part time / hourly work is largely less skilled and much lower paid, and you'll want to take all the hours you can get to be able to afford outright necessities like rent. (Unless you're considering rent as consumption/luxury, which is fair)
It does seem like there's a gap in terms of skilled/highly paid but hourly/part time work.
(Not disagreeing with the rest of your post though)
You aren't wrong and I agree up to a point. But I've watched a couple of people try to get by on just "cutting" rather than growing their incomes and it doesn't work out for them. A former neighbor was a real Dave Ramsey acolyte and even did things like not have trash service (used dumpsters and threw trash out at his mother's house). His driveway was crumbling but instead of getting new asphalt he just dug it all up himself and dumped it...somewhere, and then filled it in with gravel. He drives junker cars that are always breaking down. I helped him replace a timing chain on a Chrysler convertible that wasn't in awful shape, but the repairs were getting intense. This guy had an average job at a replacement window company but had zero upward mobility. He was and I assume is, happy enough, with a roof over his head and so forth, but our property taxes keep rising, insurance costs keep rising, there's only so much you can cut. My take is that you have to find more income and being looked upon as "tight with a buck" or even "cheap" is unfavorable.
Ouch! Man this is a terrible take on the world. I know you mean well and that the majority of the world agrees with this, but to be honest, I have been having real thoughts about letting the make it till you break it mentality go myself. things are getting more expensive and I dont think im willing to live a life running from paycheck to paycheck... Not sure why I am going to do about it, but I know that feeling is there.
I've given up pretty much all of that out of necessity, yes. Insurance and rent still goes up so I'm spending almost as much as I was at my peak, though.
>I'm just hoping you acknowledge that what people consider optional consumption has changed, which means people consume a lot more.
Of course it's changed. The point is that
1. the necessities haven't changed and have gotten more expensive. People need healthcare, housing, food, and tranport. All up.
2. the modern day expectations means necessities change. We can't walk into a business and shake someone's hand to get a job, so you "need" access to the internet to get a job. Recruiters also expect a consistent phone number to call so good luck skipping a phone line (maybe VOIP can get around this).
These are society's fault as they shifted to pleasing shareholders and outsourcing entire industries (and of course submitted to lobbying). so I don't like this blame being shifted to the individual for daring to consume to survive.
Voting in people who can actually recognize the problem and make sure corporationa cant ship all of America's labor overseas. Blaming ourselves for society's woes only pushes the burden further on the people, instead of having them collectively gather and push back against those at fault.
I suppose so, but that takes decades of change. I don't see any solution right now though which is what matters to many.
As an aside, every thread I see here has a comment by you lol, that's some good effort but maybe take a break from such strenuous commenting, I say this sincerely as I also used to get into all these back and forths on HN and then realized, much of the time, it's a waste of my own time.
That's the thing... Agile processes do position themselves as a starting point, and suggest that once the team understands it by living it (but not sooner!) they might adapt it and customize it.
From The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition by James Shore et al. (the most recent eXtreme Programming book, if you will):
> As a result, although it’s tempting to customize your Agile method from the beginning, it’s best to start with a by-the-book approach. The practices that are the least familiar are the ones that are most tempting to cut, but they’re the ones you need most, if you’re really going to be Agile. They’re the ones that involve the biggest change in philosophy.
> Mastering the art of Agile development requires real-world experience using a specific, well-defined Agile method. Start with a by-the-book approach. Put it into practice—the whole thing—and spend several months refining your usage and understanding why it works. Then customize. Choose one of the rough edges, make an educated guess about what happens, and repeat.
From The Scrum Book by Jeff Sutherland et al.:
> It’s important to understand the rules, and it’s even useful to follow them most of the time. But reading the rulebook of chess won’t make you a great chess player. After learning the rules, the player then learns about common strategies for the game; the player may also learn basic techniques at this level. Next is learning how to combine strategies you learn from others while maybe adding some of your own. Ultimately, one can transcend any formalism and proceed from the cues one receives from one’s center, from one’s instinct. [...]
> Some day, long from now, you may even outgrow these patterns as you evolve them and define your own. There are no points for doing Scrum, and these patterns are the gate through which a highly driven team passes on the road to the top echelons of performance.
But have you tried any of that, in a team that has had "follow Agile to the letter" imposed upon it? I'm trying to distinguish between the Manifesto and the Industry here.
> Working in an office as a preference is one that naturally relies on the control of other people.
Not at all. Working in an office as a preference is one that can instead rely on working with other people who also share that preference. No control is necessary.
Right, sure, until one of your employee's eventually says "hey I want to work from home because X, Y, Z" and you have to force them to be in the office or fire them. Because everyone else's comfort, supposedly, relies on this person's discomfort.
With such a preference I can't help but wonder:
1. How genuine is it? Where is the "cutoff" point where in-office work no longer works? Do we need 100% compliance? What about 80%, is that good enough?
2. What, materially, do you gain from the preference and does that material gain actually rely on the preference? From what I've heard, 99% of the time it does not.
At what point did you decide that I have employees?
I find that I work better in an office, depending on the office. I'm in no position to enforce that position on anyone. (I'm currently unemployed and looking for work, in fact.) I find that I dislike giving up room in my small house for work. And I dislike having no separation between work and home.
These are all personal preferences. Nothing is being enforced on anyone. Your reaction is overblown.
Right, I understand all of that, but the indisputable reality is that such a preference requires actions from other people to be satisfied. That's just what it is - in office work requires people working... in an office.
This isn't a reaction on my end, I'm just explaining where the value judgment of the preference comes from. It's intrisincally a "closed" preference, and people don't like that generally.
You are not in a position of power to exercise said preference, you rely on the goodwill of your company. That's fine, but still, you exert some influence. People are listening, and some of them do have the power to exert that control. So when you say "I like that control", it makes people a little nervous.
And, onto my whole "does this actually require in office work" point:
> find that I dislike giving up room in my small house for work. And I dislike having no separation between work and home.
This is that. None of these preferences require in office work, that's just a close enough proxy. I would argue these are more obtainable in a WFH environment, because the cost savings of WFH can easily afford you a dedicated office space away from home.
Because, again, one is open, and one is closed. So with the open one you can just do that.
For some reason I'm able to say "I don't know" to coworkers and superiors at work with no problem, but I have a much harder time online where it may affect future employers' opinions of me.
I agree. I think, at least for me, it's because I know my colleagues know my overall capability, so admitting I don't know a specific thing isn't a big deal because I've already proven I'm capable of overcoming any specific gap. But to strangers, perhaps that may be all they know of me -- that I don't know this one thing. There's no preexisting relationship or past body of work (in other words: no trust) to balance that gap out or put it in perspective.
I think this is objectively mostly a silly and counter-productive worry. But I still feel it.
- I blog with my real name, which includes an uncommon first name. It's easy for hiring managers to search the web for.
- My blog is linked from the website I host on the domain name I use for my email address, including for job applications. Anybody I email is likely to follow that thread.
I wonder how much of that comes down to culture. Since going remote I have come to wonder if a direct-message-first chat culture is harmful to collaboration.
DM-first is an extremely frustrating culture. That kind of operation tells me that that folks are too risk averse and political to discuss things openly. Typically this is led by panicky managers that are worried about involving too many people or having to explain things to folks they don’t want to deal with, and it escalates from there and gums up ALL the things. It makes Slack basically useless.
The same people DMing however will also extol the virtues of posting in public and lament why there is not more conversation happening in the open.
IMHO most companies encourage public-first conversation, but still end up with DM-first as their employees don't have enough trust in how their messages will be received.
It requires to be comfortable exposing lack of knowledge or saying weird things to peers, and be confident it will be taken in good faith. As you point out, that requires a whole level of culture building.
It is. You need to be aware of it and have people that can set examples about chatting in public rooms or who can recognize when to stop a dm chat and move to be public
I am indeed learning, working to close those gaps.
For automated testing, I'm in the middle of reading Developer Testing by Alexander Tarlinder, with xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros coming close behind. I'm also working through Test-Driven Development: By Example with my wife as we have time.
For SQL, I read Grokking Relational Database Design by Qiang Hao last winter, and I started SQL Queries for Mere Mortals by John Viescas this week. Sadly, my flub with "left inner join" was not a joke.
For OOP, I've been on a whirlwind tour: OOA&D With Applications by Booch et al., Object Thinking by David West, POODR and 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz, Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans, IDDD and DDDD by Vaughn Vernon, Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen, Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin, and Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck. Still on the docket are Design Patterns by the Gang of Four, PoEAA by Martin Fowler, Smalltalk, Objects, and Design by Chamond Liu, and Object Design by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.
> confessing that you don't know something and gleefully stopping there is not much better [...] we shouldn't let shamelessness about what we don't know limit us either
I promise you, this was not gleeful and this was not shameless. Shame and fear affected me for months on these issues. And I'm not stopping there... From the end of the article: "I’m going to continue to work on skill building, but now I feel free to write about it. If [...] you’d like to help me fill [my knowledge gaps], [...]"
> if you want to write a blog about a topic, then part of the requirements here is that you do hold yourself to a high standard
A high standard of writing, maybe. But plenty of great stories come from those who are striving for a high standard, not just those already in the upper echelon. It's what makes this place different from academic journals.
This is great to hear and I do appreciate the clarification. Having put lots of content out in public myself (though this account is intentionally pseudonymous) I know it's also equally difficult to comment on content like this without being on either end of the "asshole" <-> "awesome!" spectrum, and sincerely hope my comment to not fall to close the the first part.
I don't fully grasp whether your knowledge gaps are severe or just an impostor syndrome. Do your knowledge gaps affect you or do you just feel guilty for not being an expert of every tech?
It's easy to feel dumb on the internet, around every corner there are people pointing out your mistakes and they seem to know it all. But it's often just by chance, of course there is someone out there that know this exact thing you got wrong. You did the rare thing what no one does in tech, you said what you don't know, all the _experts_ out there simply hide that.
The other issue is also that people try to overwhelm you with their questionable knowledge. I find that quite problematic with OOP. I've smoked a lot of the OOP crack, but I feel more efficient without all the rituals and dogmas. Knowing all the bells and whistles of smart OOP stuff will just cause more shame, because with every piece of code you will think "oh I have to do it that way or people will hate me".
That being said, I usually prefer to know the essence of something. There are many ways to testing, but if you know what it's conceptually doing, then you can write your own test lib. It's not hard, neither magic. But elaborate frameworks and ritualized concepts often lead you away from the gist of things. You are supposed to do things how they've imagined it for you, if you don't, feel shame.
"Today we’re introducing Fizzy. Kanban as it should be, not as it has been. [...] we’ll host your account for just $20/month for unlimited cards and unlimited users. [...] And here’s a surprise... Fizzy is open source! If you’d prefer not to pay us, or you want to customize Fizzy for your own use, you can run it yourself for free forever." https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1995886683028685291
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