November 29, 2021

Black Swan Event

A black swan event describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. ¹.

Today, I woke up, and did my usual weekend routine – went back to sleep for another few minutes. My weekends are pretty standard; I usually spend some time in a cafe downtown where I read a paper or write a blog post. Unfortunately, the cafe I frequent was absolutely filled to capacity. This is an incredibly rare event, so rare, in fact, that I can’t remember the last time it happened to me.

No matter, I have a backup cafe that I designate in case things like this happen ². This one is approximately a two minute walk from my usual haunt. When I got there, a sign was plastered on the door: “Power Outage, Closed today.” At this point, I went back home, completely defeated. This was my black swan event. Although it didn’t have any major effects other than my usually methodical weekend schedule being disrupted, it did make me think about creating some contingencies in case it does happen again.

In more exciting and relevant news, I started actually writing my thesis over the past few days. I was taken by surprise when Gail mentioned that I could get started on it (at least the introduction and the related work sections), since I don’t feel like I’ve done nearly enough. However, once I started writing, I began to notice that I had some things to say. Imagine that, I actually formed opinions and thoughts over the past few months regarding the state of developer tooling and program comprehension. Of course, things will change over the next few months (I wouldn’t be surprised if none of what I’m writing right now is actually going to make it into the final version of my thesis), but it’s good to get some ideas down “on paper.”

Next week, I’ll be deploying my survey (that got ethics approval!) on Twitter. Gail will retweet it so it hopefully gets more traction. I’m more excited about working with JetBrains on this. Tim from JetBrains Research seems to be pretty excited in the work, and it’ll be cool to actually build something useful for a tool I use almost every day.

I think that’s it for now, see you in December.