haruki zaemon

🧐 Dieter Rams pointing at things he doesn’t like. This had me in fits of uncontrollable laugher, literally for days.

🎧 Lofi Girl. I often have this playing in the background. I listen on Apple Music but here’s a YouTube station with links off to other streaming services.

👾 How Jess (a software developer here in Australia) created 2D pixel art water. Being a kid of the ’80s I love this style of game. Being the parent of a kid who loves to code this style of game, I’m always on the lookout for inspiration and learning material for them.

😰 But they were doing fine: autistic burnout. We’ve absolutely observed all this in our ASD child. It was validating to learn we weren’t just imagining it.

🍆 How the codpiece flopped. I love how the “solution” to wearing individual stockings on each leg was not to sew them into one piece, but rather to wear increasingly large and ornate codpieces.

🤯 LIGO has surpassed the quantum limit. LIGO (or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) consists of 4-kilometer-long vacuum tubes, and detects ripples in space-time that are generated by colliding black holes and neutron stars, millions to billions of light-years away.

🎶 Five minutes that will make you love Thelonious Monk. I’ve been a fan since the early 2000s when a friend introduced me to Monk’s work. Maybe this will convert you too?

🕺 David Byrne’s dance rehearsals for stop making sense. As a kid, Talking Heads was one of my favourite bands. Seeing this brought back so many great memories.

It’s sometimes hard to know just how much involement to have. Too much and I can come across as micro-managing; too little and I’m an absent parent who only shows up when something goes wrong. I can think of numerous examples where I’ve left it too long or I’ve expected too much of a team and things have gone sideways, or other times I’ve allowed my discomfort at having less control get the better of me and I’ve jumped in too soon.

I’m not sure I have good heuristics for how much is required at any given time. Sure, there are some possibly obvious things like: Long-running, high-performing teams already know how to operate and improve and may only require intermitent involvement; Less experienced people might need more direct involvement day-to-day. But even then, as teams evolve—new people come and go, or goals and objectives change—so too must my level of engagement.

These days, I try to stay connected by attending rituals (stand-ups, etc.), offering support if/when needed, and asking individuals and teams who, what, when, and how questions to get a sense of performance and progress. In cases where they don’t need alot, I can work on building trust and understanding, and reward them for their efforts. When I sense that a team needs more, I can lean on that trust to help them navigate the uncertainty and ambiguity, redirect their efforts where needed, provide organisational support to unblock them, and coach them through the challenges.

By staying connected to the teams on a regular basis, even in a light-touch way, I get a better sense of how they are travelling and what level of involvement they need from me. For the most part, I no longer scare people when I turn up and ask questions.

There’s no such thing as common sense, so you can’t leave it to people to figure out what you think is/isn’t sensible. It’s especially difficult for them when they are presented with counter-intuitive viewpoints that challenge their beliefs—how will they have any idea which other beliefs they should hold vs challenge?

Somewhat circularly, I came to this view while reading back a list of principles (like this one) I had been collecting. I found that each time I went through the list I internalised them a little more. After a while they became familiar enough to me that I started to say to myself “well, d’uh!”

The reflection of course is: They weren’t always so obvious, even to me.

A bunch of years ago, I found I’d reached a ceiling on my personal and professional growth. For most of my life, I’d relied on instinct, gut-feel, intuition, call it what you like. This got me so far but I was at a point where it was holding me back.

Learning and growth require failure, and failure requires taking risks. When you run on instinct, you can leave a lot of decisions until the last minute. This increases the likelihood that you will be successful, but mostly because you’re choosing the least risky option. You can see the problem.

Learning and growth also require feedback, and feedback requires being wrong. When you run on instinct, you don’t need to make explicit commitments ahead of time. This reduces the likelihood you will be overtly wrong, and it’s being overtly wrong that causes reflection and introspection and long-term pattern matching.

For the past few years, I’ve been attempting to capture my implicit decision making principles in as close to realtime as possible. This has forced me to introspect and try to understand why I’m making the decisions I am. As someone who has a lifetime of running on instinct, this can be challenging to do. But, I’ve found that as with any practice, the more I do it, the easier it becomes and the more value I derive.

Periodically reviewing and reflecting on them helps me internalise things I still believe, and challenges me to rethink things I perhaps no longer agree with. This in turn helps me learn from my mistakes, helps others understand what I’m thinking, improves the feedback and input I receive, and improves my ability to support others to develop and grow.

Being explicit about my principles makes it easier for me to hold myself accountable, and for others to hold me accountable, by making sure my words and actions are consistent and coherent.

That’s not to say that I don’t still use my instinct, I absolutely do. The difference today is that I try to be more deliberate about how I use my intuition, and more explicit about how I make decisions.

🥳 Things Ray enjoyed in 2023. Always good for some inspiration.

👽 Designing alien alphabets for Rebel Moon. Love a good Louie Mantia breakdown of his creative process.

💈 The gory history of barber surgeons. For centuries in Europe, barbers performed surgical procedures like tooth extractions, stitches, and amputations in addition to haircuts.

🦎 A self-enforcing protocol to solve gerrymandering. Someone just solved gerrymandering using a mechanism that doesn’t require a neutral third party as arbiter.

🎨 93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs. Who knew that ;i;c;;#\\?z{;?;;fn':.; was a valid Perl program?!

🍆 A unified theory of fucks. You only have a finite number so give them to living things (people, animals, plants) who will give them back, not institutions (companies, platforms, systems) that will suck you dry.

🦠 Why bad strategy is a ‘social contagion’. Strategy often lacks a focus on real challenges and problems due to “success theater” and ends up with everybody getting a little piece of what they want to do.

✈️ Why you’ve [probably] never been in a plane crash. Annex 13 holds that the primary purpose of an aircraft accident investigation is to prevent future accidents, over the search for liability.

😡 Stop arguing, start debating. Decision-making skills are crucial to scaling and growing a company. Skilful debate allows you to move quickly and reliably through issues, and requires planning, structure, and discipline.

I was expecting to hate this book and instead I loved it.

Together, Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings essentially document their analysis of the key principles that drive how Netflix operates.

It became apparent fairly quickly that many company leaders are doing a bad lip-reading of how they think Netflix operates. At best, they’ve read this book and ignored some of the critical steps:

1. Increase talent density by paying for the best, and then pay them to leave when they’re objectively no longer the best.
2. Remove controls (like vacation leave, and decision hierarchies) and increase freedom, autonomy, and accountability.
3. Cultivate a culture of feedback by training everyone, and role modelling.
4. Lead with context, not control.

The book reminded me of An Everyone Culture and Principles but easier to read, more practical advice.

I read the 3rd edition, and I believe there is a 4th edition in the works.

As a fan of participatory leadership and consent-based decision-making, I figured this would be a useful book to read and I was not disappointed.

The book is almost entirely practical with very little standalone theory. Every chapter introduces a new set of patterns, then walks through what they means, why they’re important, concrete scenarios explaining when and why they apply, and concrete examples for how to apply them.

It was fairly clear, to me, how this book has both documented and influenced the practice of what has become know as The Art of Hosting.

As with such books it’s pretty dry but as a reference, I definitely recommend it.

I sent a variation of this internally, and posted to LinkedIn on Wednesday:

🦁 Today is my last day at Envato after a wild checks notes 7 years, 2 months, and 18 days.

💔 I have very mixed feelings about leaving. There are without doubt some amazing people here and I will very much miss working with you.

🎓 I’ve made plenty of mistakes and would like to think I’ve grown from them all. I encourage you to take a deliberate approach to your own development. Embrace change and constant improvement, be resilient in the face of set backs, and importantly (in fact the crucial step) don’t shrug off the failures as simply a necessary outcome. Instead, reflect on what you can learn from them and, knowing what you know today, what you will do differently next time.

💫 I’m super proud of the transformation we’ve been able to achieve, through an incredibly challenging few years: embracing change, focusing on improvement, and bringing many parts of the business together.

🧬 At the same time, there’s always more to do, and I felt Envato needed fresh eyes, fresh energy, and fresh DNA to capitalise on new opportunities.

🌱 Hopefully, me stepping out of the business also creates new opportunities for others to grow and succeed, and I look forward to seeing what you all manage to achieve.

🙏 I have one request, and it’s absolutely optional, of course. If you have any advice for me to take into my next role (good, bad, more of, less of, etc.) I would love to hear it. Help me be better.

📜 Lastly, it wouldn’t be me without a Haiku:

Beginners mindset
Give it everything you have
Start each day anew

👋 Goodbye, adiós, hei konā mai, tạm biệt.

💼 Your company’s values will be used against you. Values are trade-offs, otherwise they’re not useful for making decisions or shaping behaviour. Provide concrete examples of where company values helped make decisions, what the trade-offs were, and how the values led to better outcomes.

👩‍🔬 Toward better hypotheses. Experimentation is valuable when we already have a rich set of mental models. However, if our mental models are primitive or don’t highlight interesting variations in the landscape of possibilities, shining a light on them won’t bring much insight.

🦉 How to be a SAGE without being a snob: Remove power and authority from relationships; Make others feel included and accepted; Be generous; Create independent, self-directed learners. (Related, 7 marks of mentors who change lives.)

🎯 Why you should be afraid of ‘Great Execution’. Poor leadership treats strategy and execution as separate things. They will hand down a strategy to be executed. This leaves them able to claim credit if it succeeds; or blame you for not executing properly. Don’t fall for it.

⚙️ Fix the system problem, not the people problem. The next time you see a proposal for a restructure, ask if there’s been any attempt to tackle the underlying causes of the problem. Look for any changes to the actual system. If you can’t see any – it’s doomed to fail.

🤔 The worst programmer I ever knew. Don’t try to measure the individual contribution of a unit in a complex adaptive system, because the premise of the question is flawed.

🧠 Forgetting is actually a form of learning. In experiments with mice, memories were not truly lost, but rather the brain cells encoding them could no longer be naturally reactivated due to interference from new information and experiences. However, the scientists were able to reactivate the forgotten memories by stimulating the brain cells that stored those memories.

I’ve been sitting on some of these for a quite a while (and I have enough in the backlog for checks notes another 8 of these posts!):

🤝 Reward collaboration, not individual work. Focusing on collaboration over individual credit leads to faster work completion at a sustainable pace without accumulating technical debt.

💡 From reactive to creative leadership. Reactive leadership operates from a place of fear and defensiveness, while Creative leadership operates from openness, possibility, and passion.

🗿 The cult of the founders. While potentially inspiring, the prophetic leadership style is immature and inadequate for leading a company at scale.

🌍 5 tips for leading successfully in a global environment: Embrace change; Master async comms; Empower local employees; Amplify customer voices; and Build relationships.

🎯 Some hard truths about soft skills. Hard skills might get you a job, but soft skills like curiosity, emotional resilience, and learning ability can help you excel in the job.

🎲 The strategic benefits of randomized decision-making. In highly ambiguous environments, random decision-making can provide strategic advantages like: getting to market sooner, faster learning, less predictability, and reduced biases.

🌀 Obliquity as a strategy for learning. Focusing on helping people understand how they learn, rather than deep strategy or techniques, may help people thrive in complex situations.

⛔ How software companies can avoid the trap of Product-Led Growth. Eventually even the best PLG companies will need an enterprise sales strategy, which takes years to develop properly.

🔍 The hidden potential of eliminating failure demand. While some types of failure demand are simply unavoidable, reducing failure demand can improve customer satisfaction, reduce operating costs, and increase employee job satisfaction.

🔨 Value engineering and build vs. rent. Companies should focus their engineering efforts on building capabilities that are strategically important to their core business and customers, rather than generic systems that are readily available from vendors.

❓ Are OKRs improving or inhibiting decision making? OKRs are not a substitute for strategy, and may be less effective in complex domains with low validity or predictability.

🚧 Do OKRs hinder decision making in radically uncertain environments? Goal setting constrains decisions to a “known end, unknown means” scenario and boxes thinking into a single approach rather than exploring alternatives.

⚠️ Are OKRs overprescribed? Goals can trigger escalation of commitment and overinvestment even if the initial assumptions prove wrong.

I really enjoyed Hidden Potential by Adam Grant.

There’s so much fascinating, insightful, and often validating stuff, I almost don’t know where to start.

Some things that stuck with me though, in no particular order:

🌱 Character traits that predict growth potential: being pro-active; pro-social; disciplined; determined. Develop these in yourself, and foster them in others.

🚀 Be pro-active: don’t wait for others; become a leader in your journey; experiment with new ideas and approaches.

👥 Be pro-social: work collaboratively, inspire collective efforts; build understanding of other people and yourself.

🎯 Be disciplined: persist; stick to the plan despite challenges; don’t choose the easy path; endure discomfort for the sake of improvement; practice deliberately.

💪 Be determined: mistakes and setbacks are part of the process; the more effort you invest, the more you grow.

🌟 Aspiration over ambition: Aspiration represents who you wish to become; Ambition is about your desired achievements.

😖 Discomfort is where growth happens: create opportunities to face it. Embrace imperfection and start before you have full understanding or skill mastery; this leads to faster improvement.

🎈 The joy of learning: cultivating a love for learning fuels growth; discover and alternate between various learning methods to keep the process fun.

🎓 Teaching to learn: reinforce your understanding, especially when grappling with difficult material; teaching is a highly effective learning tool.

🧠 The curse of knowledge: It’s often easier to learn from someone only slightly ahead of you in experience; large knowledge or skill gaps require additional effort to bridge.

There’s also a wealth of information about fostering equitable education systems that offer increased opportunities for all, and unbiased hiring practices that consider the individual’s potential, rather than solely past success.

[This was originally published on October 31, 2009.]

I recently watched a wonderfully insightful presentation by Eric Evans on Responsibility Traps. In it he describes a number of traps into which otherwise well meaning and capable developers fall. Among others these include:

• Building a platform to make other (lesser) programmers more productive
• Cleaning up other people’s mess; being a janitor
• Making hackers (pejorative) look even better

He concludes that the responsible developer often focuses her energy on solving the wrong problem, incorrectly believing it to be in the best interests of the project/company/etc. as a whole.

Since then I have subconsciously been on the lookout for other areas of life where this anti-pattern arises and to my delight (or perhaps horror), I see it everywhere.

I thought about the number of relationships that I had dragged on for much longer than was probably good for either party, where, as a result of my desire to avoid hurting anyone, both parties suffered needlessly.

I spoke with a colleague who told me how, in a recent attempt to both fulfil his unspoken promise to help a project out of trouble and preserve the reputation of his sponsors, he continued to engage with the client well beyond his own reasonable belief of success. A near stress-related break down followed shortly thereafter leading to strained relationships all ‘round.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to “rescue” a project I thought was doomed to failure, implement an unnecessarily complex story, “protect” a friend/relative/colleague/client from some bad news. In almost all cases the outcome was as bad as, if not worse than, it might have been had I confronted the reality at the outset.

Why do I fall into these traps when I believe I’m primarily motivated by of a sense of duty and responsibility? Partly I think it’s about taking a path of least resistance – It seems easier to try and press ahead to “fix” the symptom than to address the underlying cause; partly it’s about self-esteem – I’m a failure unless I can solve the problem; there’s an aspect of self-importance – few others can see what I see, so it’s up to me to do something about it. And then there’s just a plain old misguided sense of responsibility.

Many years ago, someone handed me a copy of a Garfield cartoon – ironically it was probably a technically illegal copy. The cartoon showed Garfield in bed on a Monday morning with Jon telling him to “Get out of bed Garfield!” Garfield wonders to himself “What’s my motivation?” Taken literally that doesn’t really say much but the message it has left with me is to be honest with myself about what really drives my decisions.

As a professional software developer, I believe I have a duty of care to act in the best interests of my employer even if that means delivering the news nobody wants to hear– “I think we’d be better off killing this project than sinking anymore money into it.” – and that doing so is ultimately better for me as well.

More often than not, the way a message is received has far more to do with the way in which it is delivered than with the substance of the message itself. Telling someone they’re screwed unless they do what you say probably won’t get you anywhere; suggesting humbly that they are spending double what they could be paying if all they are after is someone who’ll unquestioningly implement whatever whacky ideas they present, has historically worked out much better for me.

I’ve come to the conclusion that, more important than acting responsibly is to act ethically – fairly and honestly. If you act ethically you will necessarily end up acting responsibly but not necessarily the other way ‘round. Acting ethically takes courage, determination and optimism and that’s bloody hard work™. I encourage you to be brave, take a risk, act ethically and do the right thing.

[This was originally published on June 25, 2009.]

I’ve heard the phrase “Excuse my poor code” (or words to that effect) a number of times recently. I’ve said it to myself about my own code (if not to others), I’ve heard two of my work colleagues say it, and I’ve had a customer’s sole developer apologise ad nauseum about his code.

I’m not here to make any determination as to the veracity of these claims but the thing that I find interesting is that in all cases, the majority of the code in question was written by a single person.

Now, this may be difficult for some to believe, but I inherently don’t trust my own opinion. I do tend to confidently put ideas forward as bold assertions to be shot down when I’m wrong. The confidence comes from knowing I’ll defend my ideas to the hilt and not take it personally when my argument is proven flawed.

I hate working alone because I don’t trust decisions that weren’t arrived at through furious debate. I don’t like developers working alone no matter how good they are (or think they are) because I don’t trust they can be objective enough by themselves. In fact I don’t care if they’re working in pairs of developers or not, I just want their decisions to be scrutinised by smart people as early as possible.

The idea that the majority of a developer’s work involves going off to think on their own is totally nonsensical to me. It feels like a lot of hocus pocus going on behind closed doors and then poof a few days later something is divined. Not only is the process opaque, but the possibility for smart people to scrutinise is left as late as possible. Sure, I like to sit and ponder without the hullabaloo of every man and his dog trying to give me their 2c worth as much as the next but the lack of transparency and scrutiny in this as a process is something I find very difficult to accept.

Smart people working alone is even worse. They’re often implicitly promoted to the position of grand wizard, the seer and knower of all things. They go away, think about a problem and come back with much fanfare (trumpets playing, drums beating) to bestow upon the people their creation who will wonder in amazement at the design, so simple and yet, so complex, that only they can truly grasp the significance of what they have achieved.

When I write code on my own, I feel personally, individually, responsible. When I write code on my own, the pressures I feel are, mostly, self imposed. They make me lie awake at night. They make me code into the wee hours of the morning, on the train home. I worry that I’ve missed something. I start to believe my own hype. That I’m good enough to do this on my own. That because I did most of it on my own, I should fix it on my own lest someone else realise how crap my code is. In a vacuum my ideas have no predators. As importantly (if not more so), my priorities have no predators. I race towards a goal without stopping to re-think that goal because I’m stuck in a vicious cycle of self doubt and self confidence. Moreover, when I work alone, the production of code becomes the focus and not, as I believe it should be, thinking!

When we write code together we have shared code ownership. I feel like someone has my back. That even if we got the decision “wrong”, we decided together and if two smart people can’t get it right then maybe it’s good enough, maybe there are diminishing returns for adding more people to solving the problem. When I go home at night, sure I might tinker but I know there’s not much point to spending a lot of effort because I’ll just be re-doing it tomorrow anyway. And if there is something we missed, someone has my back if need be.

I speak as one who has been, done and experienced others doing all of the above and decided once and for all that it’s just not worth working alone. Having more than one person working on something WILL cost more but I assert that the result will be better and will be achieved more quickly and with less churn. Anyone who thinks they’re smart enough to do otherwise needs to learn to keep it in their pants.

I have this mental model of software development that is akin to the way I’ve heard Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet described. Apparently he got a whole bunch of really smart people together, even those from opposite sides of politics, and let them argue it out. His (Lincoln’s) role was to decide when to stop the debate and which idea(s) to act on.

I think that’s what collaborative development should be.

YMMV :)

❗ Exposing the vulnerabilities of Large Language Models in Low-Resource Languages. Turns out, you can bypass GPT-4 safety measures by using a language other than the dominant languages used for training.

👮‍♀️ Kudurru is a network that actively blocks AI scrapers from websites to prevent them from scraping content without permission. We’ve started using Cloudflare but Kudurru seems to go one better and actively poison the well from which AI drinks.

🖋️ Silicon Valley’s biggest AI developers are hiring poets, partly to improve the style and credibility of their content, and partly to avoid potential copyright issues that could arise from training on copyrighted books and stories without permission.

🌐 Knowledge graphs improve generative AI. I’ve practiced concept mapping for perhaps 15 years, since reading Novak’s paper, and been into graph databases since the early days of RDF, so this is genuinely fascinating.

🔌 Generative AI exists because of the transformer. By moving away from sequential processing and focusing on “attention” mechanisms, the Transformer model significantly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of machine learning in language tasks.

🏞️ With DALL-E 3, you can now get high-quality images that depict complex scenes, by default. I don’t have access to DALL-E 3, yet but from all the reviews I’ve seen, it sounds like I might be able to switch from using stability.ai’s DreamStudio.

Ami Vora:

What I need from senior leaders around me isn’t to understand all the exact same info I learned. Instead, I need them to offer complementary info that will help our team make a stronger decision, like:

1. More context about what’s happening around the company or the industry
2. Decision-making frameworks I might not be thinking about
3. Pattern-matching based on other decisions they’ve seen
4. Identifying other options or logical gaps I’m too close to see
5. Sometimes, just giving me a vote of confidence that my thinking makes sense and they believe in me

[…]

how can I frame my recommendations so my manager can engage with them and challenge my assumptions, and then I can learn from how they think? Sometimes this means outlining my decision criteria clearly so my manager can disagree with specific ones and I can understand the principles they’re using. Sometimes it means sharing intentionally provocative “hot takes” about things we could do differently so I can hear context I might be missing

On the weekend, our 15yo and I went about setting up a blog for her on micro.blog.

She already had a website she describes as “that mess” from when she first started getting into technology, and wanted to get into daily blogging on topics she reads about and is interested in.

After convincing her not to roll her own, researching various platforms, a bit of Cloudflare magic, and redirecting funds from Microsoft Game Pass, she was ready to roll.

Turns out, I had a dormant micro.blog account from when they first launched. If I didn’t have a bunch of historical baggage on this site I felt compelled to lug around with me, I’d be tempted to move over there myself.

Enjoy!

👩‍🚀 A short film made to explore one man’s fascination with artificial gravity in space. Beautifully produced and totally believable. So believable, in fact, I started to get nauseated watching it.

🤳 Sebastiaan de With reviews the latest telephoto-equipped camera out of Cupertino in his annual review. So many people have linked to this article that it’s probably not worth me adding to the pile, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you only skim it for the photos it will be worth it.

🤖 The iPhone 15 Opts for Intuitive AI, Not Generative AI. I really like the idea of AI to enhance human creativity and productivity, rather than replace it.

🕵️ A research team found it’s easy to evade current methods of AI watermarking, and even added fake watermarks to real images. Watermarking has emerged as one of the more promising strategies to identify AI-generated images and text but as it stands, it’s ineffective.