Published on 2025-10-10
]]>Published on 2025-10-10
Tags: communication, git, software-eng, til
The Linux patch submission process has a nice guide (via) on crafting git commit messages:
]]>Describe your changes in imperative mood, e.g. “make xyzzy do frotz” instead of “[This patch] makes xyzzy do frotz” or “[I] changed xyzzy to do frotz”, as if you are giving orders to the codebase to change its behaviour.
Published on 2025-09-26
]]>Published on 2025-09-26
Tags: communication, software-eng
A collection of my favorite commentary on asking technical questions:
Please don't say just hello in chat
...
So despite best intentions, you're actually just making the other person wait for you to phrase your question, which is lost productivity (and kinda annoying).
]]>The solution is not to ask to ask, but just to ask. Someone who is idling on the channel and only every now and then glances what's going on is unlikely to answer to your "asking to ask" question, but your actual problem description may pique their interest and get them to answer.
Published on 2025-08-08
]]>Published on 2025-08-08
Tags: amazon, commentary, communication, software-eng
]]>mtlynch on Hacker News on 2025-08-04:
> Amazon meetings start with the presenter passing out copies... of a prose document... The meeting starts with everyone sitting in silence, reading the document, and adding notes and questions in the margins with red pen.
I've never worked at Amazon, but I've heard this a lot, and it always strikes me as an odd practice. Odder still is that it apparently works and everyone I hear talk about it seems to love it.
You're squandering precious meeting time by having everyone sit and read a document together. They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings.
And doing it synchronously means everyone either sits idle until the slowest reader is ready or not everyone gets to finish in time. And "slowest reader" isn't even just about reading speed. Presumably, some people can understand the document more quickly because they have more context.
Published on 2025-07-11
]]>Published on 2025-07-11
Tags: books, communication, economics, quote
Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction on 1991-03-01:
In economics, more than in the other social and political sciences, the perverse-effect doctrine is closely tied to a central tenet of the discipline: the idea of a self-regulating market. To the extent that this idea is dominant, any public policy aiming to change market outcomes, such as prices or wages, automatically becomes noxious interference with beneficent equilibrating processes.
In the book, Hirschman details three types of Reactionary argumentation. The above quote is an example of what he calls the Perversity Thesis.
]]>It is not just asserted that a movement or a policy will fall short of its goal or will occasion unexpected costs or negative side effects: rather, so goes the argument, the attempt to push society in a certain direction will result in its moving all right, but in the opposite direction. Simple, intriguing, and devastating (if true), the argument has proven popular with generations of “reactionaries” as well as fairly effective with the public at large. In current debates it is often invoked as the counterintuitive, counterproductive, or, most to the point, perverse effect of some “progressive” or “well-intentioned” public policy. ... Everything backfires.
Published on 2025-07-01
]]>Published on 2025-07-01
Tags: article, code-review, communication, software-eng
At my day job I review a lot of other people's work, in the form of code reviews or design (and other) documents. A few years back a coworker whose code I was reviewing requested, rather insistently, that I start using conventional comments when doing code reviews. They also messaged it out to the team, though more as a practice suggestion and not a proposed change to the team's process.
I internally shrugged the request off, as they were a junior engineer still working through their personal relationship to feedback — as we all do. I don't think many people are raised with the education necessary for internally de-personalizing feedback, analyzing your own behavior, synthesizing the given feedback with your own understanding of "the world", and thanking the other person for their gift, regardless of your orientation towards that "gift". It's complicated stuff and most of us, myself included, take years to adjust our reactions accordingly.
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