Keeping Tech Fun, More Music, Mythical Man-Month

I'm lumping together a few little things I've been meaning to write about into a single entirely disjointed post. It's a 3-for-1 special!

Keeping tech fun

I've started realizing that my view of the direction tech is heading has been getting pretty pessimistic lately. There's just lots to be worried about it seems. Over-centralization, needless complexity, reckless AI adoption, government overreach... shall I go on?

I love tech, I just need to find more ways to keep it exciting for myself. I was talking about this on Mastodon when Akseli showed me Hackaday which features cool little hardware projects. It's things like that that remind me how fun and exciting tech really is.

The Mastodon thread

https://hackaday.com/

I've been finding that following other blogs more closely also really helps. If you're on the fediverse, you're doing yourself a disservice if you're not following #100DaysToOffload or other blogging related tags!

I've got a few other things planned for myself to keep tech fun, but more on those when I get around to them.

More music

I'm still finding a lot of new bands that I'm liking. A few album highlights:

Where Myth Becomes Mystery by Rolo Tomassi

I really like whatever metal subgenre this is. It's melodic, really dynamic, heartfelt even.

Sundowning by Sleep Token

These guys have a unique musical style which I think this album shows off really well. They seem to be getting ready to put out a new album and I'm looking forward to it.

Hush by Slow Crush

I'm still a sucker for shoegaze.

The Mythical Man-Month

This book by Fred Brooks has been required reading for one of my courses, and I've actually really liked it. It's old but still has a lot of nuggets of wisdom that I imagine any software engineer or project manager would benefit from.

Some of my takeaways:

When a deadline slips, the instinct is to add more people to the project. Brooks likens this to "dousing a fire with gasoline" with all the extra overhead this ends up adding.

There's a tendency to overdesign or pack in too many features to the second version of a project.

There really aren't any silver bullets in software development. It will always be difficult.

- moddedBear / 2023-02-10

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