Brent Simmons:

I had a bias about engineers that worked for large corporations. I assumed that they weren’t as good as indies and engineers at small companies

I work for a small company and my clients are usually big companies, so I have some perspective here¹.

From my experience, the difference between working for large and small companies is bureaucracy and focus. A tolerance or affinity for these things means that the people attracted to each are different. Normally when we talk about “bureaucracy,” it’s a pejorative, but that’s not what I mean here. Larger companies need more formal process to function. We can save the argument about good or bad process for another time.

Some of the clients I work with have a very collaborative culture. Decisions are always run past all interested parties and buy-in is required from everyone.

The people in charge set the general direction but not how to do it.

I prefer to work for (and with) companies that are like that because, well, my opinion counts! Having the people who know the work the best make the decisions makes the most sense. People appreciate the autonomy and the trust that management place in them.

I’ve read a lot of Moren’s words over the years, but mostly in Macworld and Six Colors¹. I picked “The Caledonian Gambit²” entirely arbitrarily.

His fiction is… fine. It’s a bit too military to my taste, but with a bunch of spy and action for good measure. There’s some family backstory that feeds into it, leading to a well rounded story. It didn’t fully engage me but I did keep reading, and wanted to know how it ended. There were a few phrases where I thought “he’s trying too hard” but, otherwise, it’s well written.

I talked about what it would take for me to leave Twitter a couple of years ago, but never followed up when I did leave around a year later. So here we go.

I didn’t quit in one go. I stopped posting. I checked in on my feed less frequently. I switched my account to private. I didn’t go cold turkey, I simply found fewer reasons to return.

I’d like to say that I was high minded and principled, that I quit because of Musk and Nazis and hateful content. But the truth is that the people I followed and blocked meant that my feed was mostly hate-free, an odd mixture of geeky stuff and dad jokes. Though I did leave because of the people and the content.

I wrote my initial thoughts about the Switch 2 announcement a couple of months ago. Against my better judgement, I pre-ordered one. What follows are a few thoughts about it now that I’ve had my hands on one for a couple of weeks.

The best summary I can think of for my initial impressions is: consider the name. The +1 label neatly captures both the good and the bad. It’s a better Switch. Faster. Higher resolution graphics. Generally… just nicer. It’s not a game changer (pardon the pun), but not everything needs to be revolutionary. Nicer is good.

In this piece, Seth Godin argues that understanding something is better than just memorising a process. Understanding is certainly key, but I think that misses something: there is value to in steps.

True, if you slavishly follow the steps, you can’t adapt. But if you don’t document the steps, it’s easy to miss one and get yourself into trouble. The challenge is knowing when to follow the steps and when to improvise.

The clue is in the name. Rather than a significant break from the past, the Switch 2 is an iteration. Bigger. Faster. Better. But not a revolution.

That’s not a bad thing. Why break with a successful formula?

I’m not a big gamer. In fact, the Switch is the first console I’ve bought. Let’s take a quick tour of the original, eight year old Switch and see what it got right and wrong.

Comic books are like ballet.

No, wait! I can explain!

I could go to see an opera or a ballet. I might enjoy it. Unless the performers fell over or were dramatically out of tune, I’m not completely sure that I would understand it or be able to assess it¹. What distinguishes a good ballet from a bad one?

So. A Better World [affiliate link]. I’d heard good things about it. The conceit: in a world where the police also serve as judge, jury and executioner, someone figures out that by diverting funds from security to education they can almost entirely eliminate crime. It’s a clever idea and one that fits perfectly into the Dredd universe.

It’s five years since the first UK lockdown.

Despite that distance, I wonder if there is anything original that can be said about 2020?

Unlikely. Knowing that removes some of the pressure. Instead, I really just want to write something to commemorate the strangest of years¹.

For the most part, personally, 2020 wasn’t a terrible year, just unusual. I’m fortunate in so many ways. I kept my job. I normally work from home anyway, so the challenge when the first lockdown hit was having to work while having two kids running around all day. Not easy, but, equally, churlish to complain when so many others were losing their jobs or having relationship issues.

I don’t have an account on TikTok. I’ve never downloaded the app. Yet I see videos that were originally uploaded there, always in portrait format with the logo in the bottom corner. Even if you’ve not used it, you have likely been impacted by it in some way. And if you follow the news, you’ll be aware of some of the controversies.

So even though I never really had much interest, it is interesting.