The kind of thing this is gonna be
Hiyall,
No name yet, no description yet, but might as well get this started with why I want to do this.
So the stereotypical view of writing is that it's well, writing. And that's true for most writing, it's not true for good writing. There's almost no writing in good writing. The majority of the work is in editing. An decent essay might be "first draft, final draft, publish." A good essay is "first draft, second draft, third draft, burn it all down, new first draft, second draft, stop and spend a month doing research, third draft, drafts four through ten, publish."
I've got a blog, but as an independent consultant that blog is now synonymous with my cred. That means every essay has to be a good essay, which means it's usually weeks or months between starting a post and publishing it. I want a space where I can share ideas that aren't as obsessively polished. I have no idea if I'll stick with this, or what the pieces will end up being like. I promise they'll be about "stuff in tech I find interesting", but that's about it. I'll try to aim for at least an email a week or so. We'll see how this goes!
Just to keep this from being entirely about housekeeping, something that's been on my mind recently: it's common knowledge that even senior engineers have to regularly Google even basic stuff. For all that we depend on it, we're actually pretty bad at capitalizing on Google search. I'd assume there'd have been more tools that integrate with our searching to make us better at finding and retaining information. Like, let's say I search the following strings:
- Python flatten
- How do I flatten a list in Python
- Flatten list in python
- Flatten python itertools
- Python convert nested list to flat
And on the last query I find page example.com which answers my question. But example.com isn't just the answer to the last question, it's the answer to all five searches. What I want to be able to do is bundle all five strings to that final webpage. Then later if I run into the same issue, I can fuzzy find on all the bundles. If I type "flatten itertools" it should immediately suggest example.com as the final potential answer. Maybe even take a snapshot of that webpage so I don't even need to be online. There aren't a lot of cross-app tools like this, I'm guessing it's because it's so hard to get information out of the browser.
Anyway, let me know what kind of stuff you're interested in reading about, or if you have any questions or whatever, and we'll see what comes of this newsletter.
H
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