“…Given this, you’d think I was talking about politics or religion or some stupid crap like that. Hell no. I was talking about infrastructure, and specifically the wobbly mess of shitty “we’re gonna run Flask everywhere and call it microservices” that somehow let people accomplish things over the Internet. Absolutely amazing. …”
People wonder why I freely mix writing online about tech, religion, politics, and so forth. It’s because there’s no difference: we’re really talking about the medium, message, and audience’s ability to converse about difficult subjects. The actual subjects themselves take a back seat. You can get into just as big of a flame war talking about somebody’s favorite myth as you can whether or not it’s important to use tabs or spaces, or the best programming language.
Frankly, I don’t think text is the medium for difficult conversations, and I’ve seen one brilliant person/team/org after another go down the road of trying to get a big enough hammer to make it work. It never does. When you’re trying to debug something or reach a productive conclusion to a difficult conversation, there’s simply far too much going on such that you can reduce it all to just typing little words into a textbox somewhere.
But, hell, we still keep trying. Perhaps a Code of Conduct will work, or a new app, or video puppets. Best of luck, my friends. I am not optimistic, but I’d love to be wrong about this.
“…Given this, you’d think I was talking about politics or religion or some stupid crap like that. Hell no. I was talking about infrastructure, and specifically the wobbly mess of shitty “we’re gonna run Flask everywhere and call it microservices” that somehow let people accomplish things over the Internet. Absolutely amazing. …”
People wonder why I freely mix writing online about tech, religion, politics, and so forth. It’s because there’s no difference: we’re really talking about the medium, message, and audience’s ability to converse about difficult subjects. The actual subjects themselves take a back seat. You can get into just as big of a flame war talking about somebody’s favorite myth as you can whether or not it’s important to use tabs or spaces, or the best programming language.
Frankly, I don’t think text is the medium for difficult conversations, and I’ve seen one brilliant person/team/org after another go down the road of trying to get a big enough hammer to make it work. It never does. When you’re trying to debug something or reach a productive conclusion to a difficult conversation, there’s simply far too much going on such that you can reduce it all to just typing little words into a textbox somewhere.
But, hell, we still keep trying. Perhaps a Code of Conduct will work, or a new app, or video puppets. Best of luck, my friends. I am not optimistic, but I’d love to be wrong about this.
[Comment removed by author]
That doesn’t sound good. Do you get any support from other parts of the company, even if they’re not technical?