Team style in the codebase beats personal style. Even if personal style is objectively better code. Push for knowledge sharing and change within the team before pushing code. Someone once called this is "an arbitrary opinion, strongly held situation". To this day, I still don't know what to make of it.

I probably have a lot of arbitrary opinions. Aren't most opinions arbitrary to begin with? Here's some more of mine:

• You need to read and understand a code a machine generates.

• Monoliths and microservices both suck if dev tooling is bad.

• Anything can be breakfast food.

Arbitrary bears a lot of weight. It implies the opinion has no reasoning, that it's based on personal whim. But most opinions shared online aren't arbitrary. They're compressed. There's not enough words, and sometimes attention, to describe the nuance of an opinion.

Maybe the shift from "arbitrary opinion, strongly held" to "strong opinion, weakly held" (which we can all agree is the gold standard for opinions) needs more space. A longer format to fully express the opinion. I definitely need to write more - fact.

things I wrote

I shared some thoughts on npmx and the open source mindset. I’ve had to shed some corporate baggage while working on npmx. No estimations or alignment meetings. No one’s measuring your performance. Open source is a place where people choose to be. And that results in a pretty amazing community.

stuff that made me go oooh

Robert Rendle wrote about the Song of LinkedIn. I don’t look at LinkedIn all that much. But whenever I do, I hear the same tune sung over and over.

It's Nice That shares an archive of orginal artworks from Pokémon on it’s 30th anniversary. I had the Pokémon theme song playing in my head as I was scrolling through the artwork. I want to be the very best.

That's all for this newsletter. Thank you for reading! Sorry for missing the last edition. I was travelling back from Australia and grossly overestimated my productivity on flights and airports.

Jono