Fascination Street - Jan 6, 2025

Writing for the week of Jan 6th, 2025

I called this newsletter Fascination Street because a) it’s an exemplary The Cure song b) the recent uprising of the software engineering is a fascinating period in human history. Maybe I’m overstating that second reason but go with me. The industry is constantly evolving. There is always something new to learn. That fascinates me. If you’re bored as a software engineer you are in the wrong industry.

The tagline of the newsetter mentions discussing the intersection of art forms. I spent a lot of time creating art as a child and young adult. I still do to this day. I love the process. I throw on my headphones and focus on putting something down on paper. I enjoy doing photorealism drawings. If you want to have your mind blown by photorealism drawings, go check out Jono Dry. Just paper and pencil. Graphite if you will. I draw (pun intended) a lot of parallels with software engineering. At least early in my career.

Early in my career was also early in the age of the internet. Things were new and evolving and quite frankly, they were being figured out. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that the internet would turn into a consumer space viable of making people money. It was academia to an extent. Academia where the students were skateboarders and surfers (or maybe punk rockers). Creating code that ran on a computer or a web site was akin to an art project. Or a DIY skateboard ramp. It didn’t follow a template. There were no “best practices”. You learned by figuring it out.

The process for an art project can be boiled down in simple terms to: figure out what you want to draw, decide on your tools, compose the look and feel, dedicate some time and focus 🎧 and once finished show it to someone by saying “check this out.”

Back when the internet was a microbrew, that is what the process of software engineering was. You figured out something to accomplish, you opened your code editor, dedicated some time, and then posted “check this out” in an online forum. You’d pass code around like it was a mixtape. You were happy to teach others.

Not to get too romantic but it is an amazing feeling to produce a work of art after intently focusing on it. The same was true of software engineering. Still can be depending on the project. Some projects require a lot of collaboration, integration, no code, now AI (meh), etc and don’t have the same level of satisfaction as “check this out” type of projects. However, I think a lot of open source projects have a “check this out” feeling still.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about software projects as art projects. That mindspace emphasizes a few things for me that I may have lost throughout the years. First, decide on a deliverable piece of work. Silo it. A lot of software teams will say the phrase “definition of done”. It means know when the project is complete. You can always do more on an art project but at some point you have to call it done. Same with software. Next is deciding on tools. There are so many languages, frameworks, patterns, designs, etc in software. Making these choices are fun. The bulk of the work is in the focus phase. Maybe because I am introverted but I really like the focus phase. Just me and an editor. Blocking off time on my calendar for what Cal Newport refers to as “deep work”. Finally, we share what we created.

But like art projects, you move on to the next project. You have something new to pour yourself into. After a while you realize these things are all going to become history. Something you did in the past. A symbol of where you were in life at that time. Not exactly a measure but immortalized on GitHub for all eternity.

The point I’m making is that software engineering has an element of being creative like art does. I prefer the projects that require more creative versus not. I like the process. I like the focus. I like the parallels. This newsletter will cover those things. Some weeks may be more technically leaning. Some may be more about the process or management of software. Some weeks may be about actual art and music. Some will hopefully contain some content from some of the early artists that I respected the works of.

That’s the intro. I hope people will subscribe and participate in the discussion. The format will include some links and music that caught my attention over the week. Thanks for reading!

Oh, it’s opening time down on Fascination Street So let’s cut the conversation and get out for a bit Because I feel it all fading and paling and I’m begging To drag you down with me, to kick the last nail in

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Links

• https://andrewkchan.dev/posts/figma2.html - some really well said points in here that I agree with whole heartedly. For example “If I had to pick a dividing line between the failures and successes, it’s that the successes always had a product goal in mind ahead-of-time.” The projects I have worked on, regardless of company size, that have carried momentum and felt the most successful, especially from an efficiency stand point, are the ones where we spent some time up front to understand what we were building and why. In software engineering, I’ve heard the adage “knowing the recipe to bake the cake”, which ultimately means knowing what cake you are baking and spelling out the recipe to get you there, including details like how many people does it feed, what flavor, any allergies, do you have all of the ingredients, etc. Great article with a lot of first hand learning.
• https://open.substack.com/chat/posts/34c93cdd-edd9-4280-8e05-997588fc0042 - Kent Beck wonders why the gap between founder and investor returns are widening on early founding engineers. Are Tech skills not as essential? Or is there something else going on? The comments are very interesting reads. I’m shaking my head at the “well, LLMs and AI make software engineering less valuable” comments. This has nothing to do with AI Kool-Aid drinkers. I think there are multiple ways to look at this and multiple reasons why “Founding Engineers” may not be reaping the financial rewards of the past. I’ll save it for a later post.

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Music

• Die Sexual : Dressed in Black - Super interesting this. It’s not a cover, but is inspired by the Depeche Mode song of the same name. Is it a remix? Not technically. Is it a cover but just in a different modern twist? I don’t know what to call it. They mention it as “track 4 based on ‘dressed in black’ written by m.l. gore” on the Bandcamp page.
• Recondite : Indifferent - I’ve been listening to techno that I think goes along with the cathedral effect quite a bit lately. I like the idea of trying to make my home office feel bigger so recordings like Recondite that offer some atmosphere have been welcomed.
• UFO95 : A Brutalist Dystopian Society - Similar to Recondite, adds some atmosphere when I am writing code.

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A couple of promotions each week. First, use my invite link to try Warp as your terminal. It’s fast and has some great features. I’m not affiliated with them at all, just really like it. Also, check out my project–Schemabook, especially if you work in an organization that wants to get organized around defining data through contracts and collaboration. Lastly, I’m writing a book about learning Rust if you are familiar with Ruby. Stay tuned. As always, you can connect with me more at https://mikekrisher.com.