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Advice for learning the dark arts

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I loved this episode of “My First Million”:

https://www.mfmpod.com/become-a-better-writer-in-60-minutes-masterclass/

It’s about how to communicate effectively for persuasion, which is very useful in business and life.

But I wanted to explicitly state an underlying assumption of their conversation: These techniques are a “dark art”.

These are not general principles for all kinds of writing. It would be mistaken to assume that one must apply these principles in any kind of writing — ie.g. academic, creative, formal. These are techniques to deploy when you have specific goals for your writing, and are writing within specific contexts.

They come with tradeoffs and sacrifices, such as making your writing more “sales-y” or “clickbait-y”, which can decrease credibility or compromise an artistic vision. The exact tradeoffs depend on the context and community, but they exist. That’s why I call them a dark art.

What is mastery?

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To use an analogy from cooking:

Master is when the chef not only knows how to make oatmeal the “right” way, but is able to answer if you ask “What happens if we use half the water? Twice as much butter? No butter at all? 4x the milk?”. Because they’ve tried all these things before.

A master understands where the canonical solution fits in the greater design space of all solutions, and the tradeoffs involved. They can explain, in depth, what happens if you “do it wrong”, and can provide examples of instances where you might want to.

A master understands when the laws of gravity actually break. 1

Even if people already know the plot, they appreciate the way you tell the story

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This is something my former colleague, Trent Brunson, told me on Twitter once that I’ll never forget. I tweeted earnestly how there were many things I wanted to share, but was concerned that everyone else knows these things already.

Trent’s (now-deleted) reply was:

I can’t think of a single time where I haven’t learned something from you. Keep sharing! Even if people already know the plot, they appreciate the way you tell the story.

So go forth, share freely, and don’t worry if the topic has already been covered, or if people are already familiar with what you’d like to share.

Accept the constraint and deal with the consequences

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I deal a lot with decision paralysis and this has been a helpful mental tool. Decisions I might get stuck on:

  • Which product do I buy of these options
  • Which apartment do I move into
  • Which travel itinerary do I book

Decisions are effectively constraints on your life path. At one point, you have N options open to you, but after the (permanent) decision, you now have only one, the one you chose.

The paralysis comes from worrying about making the wrong decision and suffering because of it. But at a certain point, the decision process saturates. You run out of time and energy, and spending more of them doesn’t create a better decision. (It might worsen it in fact as you second-guess a previously good decision.) But even at this saturation point, you still might be unsure what to do.

Here, I find that it helps to just:

  • Recognize that moving forward is more important than making the “best” decision
  • Pick a promising option and accept that I’ll deal with whatever future consequences
  • Move on

Unpublished content is like cash under your mattress

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I think a good reason to publish art sooner than later, and to default to creating in public, is so your art can start accruing interest as soon as possible. (“Art” used loosely; think content & projects also).

If you make art but only ever keep it private, there is a zero chance of it ever being discovered or enjoyed. In that sense, there is some wasted potential, like cash in the mattress.

But if the art is published (not necessarily promoted), there’s a non-zero chance of it being discovered and enjoyed by other people (potentially many others) with no work on your part. That’s what I mean by interest — some potential upside, at no cost to you.

I’ve been practicing this with this very blog. I write a lot and tell no one because that feels good at the moment. However, I already did spot some interest accrued: The “Nixers” newsletter #221 included a link to a recent post where I did zero promotion. Thank you!

P.S. Another advantage is that the work is readily available to be shared if you ever choose to at any point in the future — no need to dig it up and upload it.

Personal projects are like free weights

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I thought of this 7 years ago and I still think it rings true. In my experience, school projects were tightly scoped and had things like a basic build system and boilerplate runnable code (e.g. main) already provided. Maybe even some tests. It trains a specific muscle in a certain way.

With personal projects, you do all of this yourself and incidentally also train the equivalent “stabilizer” muscles. Things like: making the repo, writing the main and boilerplate code, setting up unit tests, setting up CI, setting up dependencies and their management.

And in my experience, it’s all these “stabilizer” activities that define what it means to be a senior engineer. Junior engineers work within an existing project; senior engineers own the entire thing, including these “little” (critical) parts.

The point here isn’t to necessarily criticize CS education; there are good, practical reasons for setting up such project structure to ensure all students have a good experience, given the time constraints. The point is that students should be wary of not doing any personal projects at all throughout a CS education. Maybe it would be possible so students don’t have to do this in their free time, and build it into some kind of flexible course. I suppose this is the point of final capstone projects, but I think senior year is far too late to be doing this for the first time.

A lot of my friends have been sucked up into UFOs lately

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A lot of my friends have been sucked up into UFOs lately
I’m happy for them
at least i try to be

I want to be sucked into a UFO too
I’m working hard at it
at least i try to be

we didn’t think it could happen
but then it did
took about ten years

then again
and again
it wasn’t a fluke

i’m happy for them
at least i try to be

it’s not always easy
but i try to be more proud than envious
more inspired than jealous
but i have a confession

i write this from a UFO
yes, i got sucked up too
in my own special ufo, in my own way

i once dreamed of it
but now it’s not enough
i want a bigger, newer one

maybe I should be more grateful
i’ll try to be

This poem was inspired by watching people in various areas of my life achieve incredible success. Y’all rock and I look up to you.

Memory is an abstraction

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I was learning about the different types of RAM recently (e.g. SRAM and DRAM) and it occurred to me that “computer memory” is just an abstraction. This is obvious once you think about it but I think as a programmer, it’s very easy to not realize this. The idea of memory as a linear array of bits is an abstraction created and implemented by an electrical device.

Most programmers when they think of memory are thinking of virtual memory, which is a completely different abstraction. While it’s also a linear array of bits, the abstraction is created by the operating system and lives at a higher level.

One level below, the abstraction the operating system itself uses — “physical memory” — is the one I’m talking about, created by a a set of electrical devices connected to the CPU with wires (the memory bus).

I’m projecting without any basis, but I presume the reason so few programmers think of memory as an abstraction is because the abstraction is so strong. Nearly all of the time, it “just works” — you write bits and read them out later.1 The abstraction can leak slightly during programming disciplines that require awareness of low level details like the memory hierarchy and cache coherence (i.e. lockfree) but this is a leak of the abstraction of the memory hierarchy. The core abstraction of physical memory stays in tact — for example, programmers never need to be aware of the internal refresh mechanism of DRAM.2

Of course, you can go infinitely far with this — it’s turtles all the way down.