the snail shell


Code for People is Organization

“Code for the machine” vs “code for people”

Some code is for the machine. That is, maybe you write code to compute a big numerical optimization, or to predict whether AAPL will go up or down, or to multiply a zillion matrices and tell you whether this photo contains a bird.

Some code is for people. You want to let people share their photos online. You have a chat client that has complicated rules about whether to notify you. You want to give people access to your internal apps, but only people in department X get to see app Y, and so on.

(This is, of course, a dubious binary, but at least I’m not saying “one is good and one is bad.")

The primary skill in “code for people” is organization

Your application exists to do “business logic”; it has 400 layers of Frameworks around it to enable it to (run on the web/run on your phone/store data/control a robot arm/etc), but the reason for your app’s existence is that business logic. Most of the difficulty in “software engineering” is to make the right business logic available at the right time.

(This is why software is so goofy; if you build houses or something, at least you’re interfacing with wood and concrete and nails. If you build software, it’s as close to “just complexity” as you can get. Besides maybe law or accounting.)

Anyway, it’s kind of weird that people study Computer Science and then go on to write “code for people.” You need a dash of algorithms and data structures, big-O notation, databases, graph theory, networks, sure. But there should be a series of classes in the Computer Science curriculum with problems like:



DJ and Cooks' Knowledge Data Structures

There’s a kind of knowledge that involves:

One example: DJs. Imagine a DJ just spinning what feels good. A track is coming to an end. The DJ must come up with a next track to play that not only matches the BPM well enough, but most importantly, feels right. They may have thousands of records, but they can search that out. I bet every song they play, they know it well enough to hum it pretty accurately.

Another example: cooks. Cooking involves knowing enough things you can make that you can pick one out that uses what you have, matches everyone’s food requirements, and fits everyone’s tastes and mood.

(A third example might be improvisers, both musical and comedic. But I’ll focus on DJs so I don’t have to repeat everything 3 times.)

How do they/we do it? I’m probably a crap DJ, but I’ve had the experience of “I know what we should hear next” and it felt pretty right. There was no explicit “data structure” in my mind - I wasn’t saying “ok this sounds kinda new-disco, now we need a classic-disco song to come next, let’s sort by BPM, ok that one”, I just thought “oh yeah this would sound good.” (Indeed, when I try to data-structure it, it gets worse!)

Part of it has to be years of practice - I’ve got a wider music vocabulary than some, because I make more than zero effort to seek it out, but real professional DJs' vocabularies must be much wider!

But that doesn’t really answer the question of “what’s going on in those years of practice.”

why

Yes, of course behind this inquiry is an Angle: what if we can at least partially speedrun this??

Before you get all mad at me for optimizing everything! I would love to speedrun mental music storage because DJing is fun. Even just for yourself. But it feels so opaque and impossible because I only have, idk, 3k songs I know well enough to DJ.1 So if I could boost that to 10k in less than, say, 4 more decades, that would be nice.

It would also be fun to write a cookbook with this in mind, one that answers the actual hard questions of: 1. what do I buy, 2. what do I cook. Without getting too stiff about either one. Because “here’s a list of recipes” sure isn’t it - but every time I try to think about “what is it, then?” my head explodes with all the things you have to keep in mind to cook reasonably.

  1. and even those, I’d probably be surprised to learn some of them have quirks that mean I’m not quite ready to DJ them yet. eg to pick a random song from my library: “The Tide is High” by Blondie: it has about 6 seconds of drum fill at the start that would bring any dance floor to an awkward stutter if I didn’t compensate for it ↩︎



So What About Twitter

My journey of using twitter had a couple phases:

  1. maybe it’s good to Follow the News and stuff
  2. hmm, maybe not, but it’s got a couple more niche uses like tweeting about a conference as it happens
  3. hmm, maybe not, well it’s a social network that some of my friends are on that’s less bad than Facebook
  4. wait, no, it’s also for following people you don’t yet know and making friends

Phase 4 has been roughly 2020-present. It’s been the most fascinating by far! Thanks to the bird site, I have:

The best part about this is that it’s not even just like finding information about these things, it’s finding people who care about these things. I sort of know where to go to find out more about any of them.

but

I’ve also spent countless hours scrolling. It’s not the worst kind of scrolling, I’m good at avoiding that. But it’s kind of a time- and attention-sink. Especially because most of my tweeting is dumb jokes. is it worth it?

always finding my people

so here’s the thing. during the times in my life where I felt aligned with my work, I managed to feel part of a community. these were: college, grad school, and the first few years at stitch fix.

what did that look like? I knew:

I crave this. We all do, but I think I have a higher need for it than most. I currently have a lot of great friends, but many of them don’t know each other, and all our life paths are sort of diverging in a sense where I’m often not inspired by the things that they are. Remote work adds to the isolation; kids do too, because all us parents are either running around keeping them alive, visiting family, or getting sick.

So Twitter, in the couple minutes here and there: is it a way to help find my people?

Well, yes, in a sense, in those connections I’ve made. But it’s also frustrating: after 5 years, I have met a few acquaintances. I thought maybe Vibecamp would help, meet them in person, but it’s only once a year, and so after the past two, I don’t think I’m going this year. Might be “stopping digging just before you hit diamonds” but also, idk, it feels like another big cost with low and uncertain payoff. (Ironically, it’d be nice if I lived in a place with a bunch of these folks and could have more regular meetups, like I did until 2022)

There’s also a parasociality to it. Part of this is, twitter publishes follower counts, so you know who’s “big on twitter” - you feel like you’re meeting a celebrity if their Number is much higher than yours. Extreme version of the Friendship Paradox. You’ll meet some old scene folks, and you can’t actually make friends with them because they’re quite naturally busy hanging with their other old friends.

So maybe that’s it: there’s this fantasy that I’m in a global ingroup (hah) where everyone’s more amazing than the next, which keeps it shiny and exciting, but I’m not actually building any community within it. To do so would require ongoing getting-to-know-people, which, idk, I can’t do one tweet at a time1. (and is hard to do in Pittsburgh besides the mighty ~6 of us who live here, and it’s hard to take off work and baby care2 to fly out to one-off events!)

So I’m building a global network of like-minded acquaintances. Which, don’t get me wrong, is incredibly cool. But there’s another need it’s not filling, and I wonder if I’m displacing finding that need.

I think it’s at least neutral; a lot of the “lost time” is little minutes in between here and there. But it does make me wonder.

meanwhile, I also need to perform

I get a kick out of making dumb jokes on the internet! I don’t know! I get very excited about this! I’m sort of embarrassed to admit it! But at least it’s all online and you can just not follow me if you find it grating!

side note: sigh, elon

much has been said about how this guy owns the site and aren’t I ashamed for still being there? no, any more than you should be ashamed for using facebook or amazon or oracle databases or u-line boxes. I can’t stand the guy, but we can’t live our lives based around “do I agree with the CEO of this product.”

is twitter different, because it’s warping my mind? I don’t think so; if I were doing twitter dumbly, sure, but I’m not, so getting off it for ideological reasons feels like throwing away your tv because some channels are fox news.

it does continue to spiral downhill, as a functioning website, though, welp

  1. “skill issue”, maybe! I guess some people have built real relationships from tweeting back and forth, DMing, calling, etc ↩︎

  2. tweet from @made_in_cosmos: “me when all my childless Twitter friends go to yet another awesome meetup” and there’s a video of a bunch of goats jumping over a fence while a sheep is stuck unable to jump ↩︎