Month: January 2022

I agree with this take by Jacob Kaplan-Moss that you should be able to estimate very accurately and then just not do it most of the time. Learning how to estimate is a non-negotiable part of building an intuition for software engineering. It’s not the estimation that we need, it’s the intuition.

The other reason why we wouldn’t do it all the time is because estimation (AND tracking, oftentimes people estimate without a tracking mechanism) has a real cost attached to it both to the team doing the estimations and to the org as a whole. Relying on estimations makes the entire organization less agile.

The follow-up post has a bunch of ways how you can estimate better but it doesn’t reference my preferred one: critical chain

https://jacobian.org/2021/may/20/estimation/

That’s a very astute observation of the state and culture of the Go programming language. I got out of Go way before I hit anything like this (though the Channel Axioms are something everybody is going to deal with). For me Go is a not very interesting intermediary language between Python and Rust.

In particular the crude simplicity is something that I always found suspect. It’s the same you would hear from PHP programmers, “It works, doesn’t it?” If getting something to work is such a feat that you can’t or won’t consider anything more than that, that’s not an environment I want to work in.

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride

Anthroposophy and Ecofascism

An in-depth study of the links between Nazism and Anthroposophy by Peter Staudenmaier at the Institute for Social Ecology with a lot of interesting bits in there.

In fact Weleda supplied naturopathic materials for ‘medical experiments’ (i.e. torture) on prisoners at Dachau.

Jazz and popular music are often scorned at European Waldorf schools, and recorded music in general is frowned upon; these phenomena are considered to harbor demonic forces. Instead students read fairy tales, a staple of Waldorf education. Some sports, too, are forbidden, and art instruction often rigidly follows Steiner’s eccentric theories of color and form. Taken together with the pervasive anti-technological and anti-scientific bias, the suspicion toward rational thought, and the occasional outbreaks of racist gibberish, these factors indicate that Waldorf schooling is as questionable as the other aspects of the anthroposophist enterprise.

And if you choose to follow the wikipedia trail lots more weird things, such as this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Tomberg

And lots of nazis and fellow travelers or intellectual precursors in there, like this guy:

Karutz war ein deutscher HNO-Arzt und Ethnologe

That combination of professions is extremely sketchy. German Wikipedia neglects to mention this particular bit (weird how that keeps happening):

Karutz was more openly antisemitic than many of his anthroposophist colleagues. He denounced the “spirit of Jewry,”which he described as “cliquish, petty, narrow-minded, rigidly tied to the past, devoted to dead conceptual knowledge and hungry for world power.”

Well worth a read and not so long as you would think. A lot of the page consists of notes and comments.

Anthroposophy and Ecofascism

Year Note 2021

The days are long but the years are short.

One more year over and these are starting to look like a blur, so here’s what changed.

Work

I gave notice between Christmas and New Year 2020 and spent the first three months of the year in a weird in-between state mostly done with the old job, waiting for the new one to start, in between daycare closures and being sick.

Then the new job started and I fell into a blur of work that has continued for most of the rest of the year. It’s been a nice change but also very intense. Details are on LinkedIn.

Travel

I haven’t been anywhere in 2021 except to an island in Croatia last September with work which definitely was a highlight.

Will I travel again and why? I have no idea.

Learning

I finished Turkish. I now prefer it over German again especially for writing.

I gave up on Chinese and couldn’t motivate myself or figure out how to book the HSK2. I did learn a couple hundred characters which seem to mean the same thing as in Japanese.

I started learning Japanese which is a lot more enjoyable and for basic conversation seems a lot easier. There also has been some strengthening on the claim for a relationship between Turkish and Japanese so let’s see how it goes.

I should have started this way earlier and not listened to anybody who ever said something is difficult. What they mean is that something was difficult for them. Depending on their intelligence, many things may in fact be difficult for them. It shouldn’t matter to me or anybody else.

Kids

The daycare was closed at the start of the year until March or Easter, not sure anymore. Most of the rest of the year things were up and running.

We had a nasty burn wound on one kid that cut the summer break short and gave us several weeks of grief but in the end all turned out well.

Then at the end of the year we gave notice. We are leaving one very esteemed Kindergarten for another which I didn’t think would be possible with two kids in the middle of the year, but it is. We even had several more places willing to take our kids.

The kids are doing really well. After a brief bout of gymnastics which they enjoyed a lot, COVID made us switch to outdoor ice skating for now.

Sports

I finally killed my old fixie or to be more correct it nearly killed me. With it gone, I could finally shop for a real road bike.

Thanks to a ship blocking the Suez Canal and all the other supply chain difficulties in the world, there was a tremendous bike shortage most of the summer (who knows, maybe it’s still going on?) and I got any random bike I could get my hands on in the €1000 price range.

I also got most of the tools and kit that you would need for cycling. It’s the clichéed guy midlife hobby. The local Rapha store is more convenient and also cheaper than many of the cycling apparel you can buy dropshipped over Instagram.

I seem to have ridden 1231km on it and looking forward to doing many times that in the coming year. The details are on Strava.

I picked up bouldering again which when in a rhythm (every 4-5 days) I’m finding pretty enjoyable.

Health

I got boosted randomly on November 17th which was a lot earlier than I expected and before almost everybody I know. I am now AZ/Comirnaty/Comirnaty.

We survived another year. That’s it. That’s the year note.