An Idea So Good It Has To Exist
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings. Also, welcome to Halloween week! One of my favorite events of the year. I already have my bag of candy.
I hope you had a peaceful and restorative weekend!
Was this forwarded to you? You can subscribe here!
Things I enjoyed in the past week
Talking to My Father's Ghost: An Almost True Story*. I picked up this book at a random bookstore while waiting for my dog's grooming. It was such a short story, and I remembered some conversations I wish I had with my dad.
Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture*. Another pick from a random bookstore. We went for lunch with my wife, and I entered a bookstore. Looked interesting just by the cover and short description.
Sometimes we come across some ideas that seem so neatly packaged that they need to be made into the world.
I originally heard the phrase of having an idea so good that it needs to be done in the context of photography projects that become books. But I've been thinking about that both in the context of this newsletter, I felt I needed to write down my experiences as journal through to learn of my own choices, growing pains and also in the work context, coming across some inevitable ideas.
As a staff engineer, people tend to reach out with improvement ideas, or new projects they think in their teams that might have larger applicability. Like converting some personal scripts into a developer machine setup, or new steps in the CI, etc.
While it's easy to discard some of these ideas, other times they get buried under backlog and prioritization efforts. But from time to time, people seemed so compelled to execute that they volunteer their time to make it happen. We tend to feel so strongly about some solution that we will push it into existence.
Curiosly, with constant shuffling of people in tech companies, some of these ideas end up being large projects that the only way out is with a migration to a new system.
Other times, people without a full context of the original idea end up maintaining a system that "works", but nobody knows how to fix it. And this might mean sacrificing efficiency or improvements for the sake of "this is how we've always done it".
This week is a short one. I've been a bit tired lately, with some incident triage and dealing with seasonal training taking.
Your turn!
Have you ever had an idea so good it had to come into the world? Has it been physical, like carpentry, music, or software-based? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email.
Happy coding!
website | twitter | github | linkedin | mastodon | among others