This is also the story behind my current profile name.

I worry that if an EMP wipes out computers I'll have nothing to contribute to society except general wisdom and telling people how to organize their work.

Honest question: I keep hearing that the same medical care or medication costs more if you have insurance. Can you pay cash, get the lower price, and submit a claim to the insurance company? I'm sure it's more of a hassle. Does it work?

"Sorry, I touched you. I know you don't like to be touched." Who said that? No, I'm okay with being touched. I'm not saying that I want you to touch me. That's weird. You can touch me. Still weird. Why did someone say that about me? I'm neutral on being touched.

You need 24 credits to graduate high school in Florida. 8 are for electives. Let that sink in. They're not mandatory, which means no one thinks anyone needs these subjects. But they're 1/3 of your education. One third of graduating high school is points for being in a classroom. That as many credits as English and math combined.

You can't reason with people who make decisions based on ignorance. The underlying premise is that they're ignorant but they still get to make the decision. The battle is already lost.

> We want to centralize code related to Q within this platform we created. That's awesome. It sounds like you understand the concept of a bounded context, and you've chosen how you want to organize the code your team owns to provide that capability. > No, we want your team to own pieces of Q and be responsible for them, but want you to do it within our platform. That's contradictory. The point of defining Q as a bounded context and keeping its code together is so that one team can own it. If you want someone else to own it then why do you care where they put it?

I thought this was dead. But because they put two words together about why we should use their inner platform, they went to our VP. Now I need Gemini to translate why this is such a bad idea into executive language.

My Start menu has a set of pinned icons. There's an empty spot where I want to pin one. Right beneath it is the icon for an app I just installed. I can drag it, but not into that empty spot. (Where can I drag it?) I can right-click and select "Pin to Start." How convenient.

Product tries to stay between developers and the business. What amazes me is that every time I (developer) get to spend time with stakeholders, the things they tell me are most important are nothing like anything I hear from Product. What is Product doing? They're off in their own world making up work no one wants. Their participation has negative value. If they did their job, they could help us. As it is, we could fire them, light their salaries on fire, and watch the money burn for fun, and we'd still come out ahead. They prevent value just by being involved at all.

A man walks into a bar in a small town. The bartender asks him what he does, and he says he's a doctor. In the next hour, five people show up at the bar asking to see the doctor. Two bring children. What does that tell you? The town has no doctor, or he's not very good. That's like the meeting we had with users yesterday. We wanted to ask about one specific thing, but they overwhelmed us with a dozen other urgent needs. I want to hear about those needs. But it tells that me either no one in the Product organization represents them, or they're not doing their job.

People who organize corporate town halls live in a bubble of deluded corporate-think. They create a "panel" of people pretending to be on a talk show and ask them about their favorite books or ice cream. In what unknown version of reality does anyone care?

Did we all become cyborgs and not notice it?

You can pronounce "forte" like "fort." It's a correct pronunciation. And you can wait for someone to correct you. And then you can correct them.

I have no confidence that knowledge of history will prevent anyone from repeating anything. Those who know the past are only granted frustrated awareness of what they have repeated.