---- title: my personal manifesto desc: The personal manifesto of omz13. tl;dt avoid assholes and block idiots because life is too short. We are Gen X with BOFH tendencies who cares about quality, so what else would you expect? theme: zebra ---- # 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 destination[^indieweb], 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v__qD6E978c)). ## 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv0i8YasmEM) ## 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](https://youtu.be/hYRhIeIkMtc) 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 Quiche](/quiche.txt)[^more-quiche] ## 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 people[^jvt] 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](https://lawsofux.com/postels-law/) (or the Robustness Principle[^robust] 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 Bit_[^unt-bit], which is not to be confused with the _Int Bit_ (a hallucination frequently seen by spending too many hours staring at a VDU). $LastModified:$ [^unt-bit]: _'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. [^indieweb]: 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. [^more-quiche]: 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. [^robust]: Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept. [^jvt]: 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?