2024-05-03: SNAFUs, JSON, SW
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did
1. Reviewed
Still pondering the FIL-RetroPGF-1🄽 candidates; there’s over a hundred of them. Some of them are major projects in the ecosystem. Some of them are run by commercial enterprises. Some of them are volunteer-run. Some of them fit the economic definition of public goods; some of them don’t. Deciding who gets what is hard work, and I’m glad the duties are shared over a lot of badgeholders.
2. Performed
Often, I feel like I talk too much, and I also feel like I am too long-winded. But the alternatives are silence, and while absense has its advantages, I’m feeling right now that it’s not enough. On the long-winded front, I still remember an intense conversation with me and Seth Schoen🄽 and Cory Doctorow🄽, where Cory argued for the supremacy of clear, absolute statements, as opposed to the hedging and caution of Seth and my rhetorical styles (and the legalese of EFF’s institutional voice, which is rather contagious). I can compact down my style but it takes a lot of effort, and ends up more elliptical than clear. Anyway, apologies to everyone who is getting multiple pages of DMs from me. I’m sure I’ll run out of breath eventually.
3. Performance-reviewed
Connectedly: As a teenage Discordianism🄽 , I was self-raised to believe in the SNAFU Principle🄽, which states (in part) that Communication is only possible between equals. So performance reviews, OKRs, etc, all feel very irreligious to me. I don’t have any other models to work with, though, so I do my best. I talked in my performance review about the Filecoin ecosystem being an oral vs written culture🄽 and how I wanted to change that (in defiance of the SNAFU Principle? Don’t know!), trying to work on improving community dynamics (ditto), and stepping up a bit more personally (ditto?). I guess we’re all trying to beat SNAFU: possibly futilely.
TIL
- Parsing JSON frequently does my head in; gron is a command-line utility that turns
{ "foo": { "bar": [ "blim" ] } }
into
json = {};
json.foo = {};
json.foo.bar = [];
json.foo.bar[0] = "blim";
… which makes it much easier to sight-read and search.
Links Du Jour
- Hacker friend of many of my friends, Mel Chua (Dr. Mel Chua to you!) is in hospital at the moment, being cheered IRL by dozens of visitors, and even more online on her Discord. I liked this article that she wrote many years ago about why people hack communities when there’s so much delicious code to be working on.
- If you’re reading this far, you probably have a taste for link miscellanies. Here’s one of my favourite long-running linkblogs, Jason Kottke🄽 ‘s kottke.org. I think of Jason around this time of the year, because I can still remember his look of absolute furious disappointment after I dragged him to a midnight premiere of one of the prequels. Sorry, Jason, I really had no idea — and happy May Fourth.