my personal manifesto on life, the universe, and stuff like that

show, don’t tell: Less talk talk more walk walk!

many people are very good about talking about things: what they have done, what they are currently doing, and what they are going to do. this is all very nice, but they don’t actually achieve anything, apart from generating a lot of talk. sure, the journey may be more interesting than the destination1, but for me, what is the point of making a journey if you don’t reach your destination, i.e. results matter.

shit or get off the pot!

do what needs to be done in a situation, or get out of the way. if you have been any of the movies in the viewaskeweverse, this should resonate with you (it is when Randall gives advice).

i know nothing

nobody knows everything; admitting that you yourself is a step towards obtaining wisdom!

be excellent to each other

Bill & Ted were absolutely right: “Be the best person you can be, and if you can do that, then you can party on”. explainer

be bold. be brave. be amazing

everybody does mediocrity; do more and push against the envelope to make a difference

Simon de Pury expressed it so well when he was on Next Great Artist.

promises are easy to make: delivery is hard

this is one degree above “show, don’t tell”: worse than always talking and never delivering is making promises and never delivering on those promises. don’t give people false hope, just get on and deliver the goods. q.v. “shit or get off the pot”.

real programmers don’t eat quiche

back in the early days of computing, programmers were real programmers. life was difficult. this was summed up on a tongue-in-cheek document, a version of which is Real Programmers Don’t Eat Quiche2

beware those who don’t suffer with imposter syndrome

these people are to be avoided because if they are not aware of your limits (q.v. “I know that I know nothing”), then they have this false-sense of knowledge. these are the kind of people3 who will cite a 12 year old article on slashdot as “proof”, completely oblivious that in the years that passed technology has moved on and what was true then is not true now,

the only true wisdom consists in knowing (and admitting to others) that you know nothing

extending on the “I know that I know nothing” theme, only the wisest will admit to others where their knowledge is lacking instead of trying to bullshit an answer.

be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send

this is known Postel’s Law (or the Robustness Principle4 if you are infected by systems thinking).

verify don’t trust

there is a lot of bullshit and bullshit artists (imposters, influencers, grifters) out there, so take what people say with a pinch of the proverbial salt and, depending on the circumstances and sensitivity, explicitly verify instead of implicitly trusting.

If somebody says one thing, but then does something else, that hypocrisy can lead to the Bozo Bit being set, or in extreme cases the setting of the Unt Bit5, which is not to be confused with the Int Bit (a hallucination frequently seen by spending too many hours staring at a VDU).

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  1. This is a trap that many online communities fall into, especially when they go down the performative optics and “vibes” over actual impact and delivery path; the hypocrisy, dogma, layers of paradox, and self-reinforcing bubble are just the icing on the cake. ↩︎

  2. This is a version, but not necessarily the version, for many copies exist in the internet, and over the years bitrot has occurred. The version here is not as I remember it: there are some things missing. ↩︎

  3. You will be unsurprised that this person considers themselves a senior programmer after only a few years, and has been pushing for promotion at every opportunity. Inflated job title, inflated ego, Dunning-Kruger? ↩︎

  4. Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept. ↩︎

  5. ‘unt is short for Hunt; Hunt is short for Mike Hunt; Mike Hunt is a crude phonetic pun, because we have the potty humor of a 5 year old kid. Cockney Rhyming Slang purists would likely prefer Berk (as in Berkeley Hunt), which is authentic rhyming slang for the same word. But we appreciate that unt directly maps to hunt whereas berk requires more linguistic and East London parlance than anybody should be comfortable with. Some people claim that Unt was just sloppy typesetting and that somebody was referring to the Int bit, which they presumed to be the Intellectual bit. By a strange coincidence, there is a strong correlation between between quiche-eating software theorists who think they have their Intellectual bit set are more than likely to have their Unt bit flipped. Real Programmers are, after all, most adept at seeing through their bullshit. ↩︎