Writing

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Writing is hard. You’re condensing your thoughts into more general concepts that can (hopefully) be understood by others. It’s equivalent to compressing a giant file (your mind) into some smaller artifact (some scribbles on a page).

Writing is valuable. It’s how we can give the gift of knowledge to the future. One can learn some concept and teach it to others with no investment other than the time spent compressing that knowledge.

Writing is introspective and philosophical. Writing delves into the nature of knowledge. What’s worth sharing with others?

The process of writing is good practice for thinking. It forces you to focus on communicating clearly. It makes you think about language and how to effectively convey concepts. It makes you consider if your examples are truly clear and engaging, or just a distraction not adding any value.

I’m really bad at writing. My thoughts are chaotic and disorganized and hard to communicate. Praciting writing gives me the chance to hone what I’ve been thinking about, and work “muscles” to help me communicate more clearly.

Recent posts from blogs that I like

Ohioan woman painter in Paris: Elizabeth Nourse, 2

Paintings of real, often poor, people in the Netherlands, the extreme west cost of Brittany, and foothills of the mountains. She also remained in Paris to help there during the First World War.

via The Eclectic Light Company

Dot product: Component vs. Geometric definition

The goal of this post is to answer a simple question: why are the following two definitions of the vector dot product in Euclidean space [1] equivalent for vectors \vec{a} and \vec{b}: Component definition: \vec{a}\cdot\vec{b}=\sum_{i=1}^{n}a_i b_i Geometric definition: \vec{a}\cdot\vec{b}=|\vec{a}|...

via Eli Bendersky

In defense of not understanding your codebase

As a software engineer, how well do you have to understand your own codebase?

My guess is that people who work on small codebases with low-turnover teams (say, Redis or games like The Witness) would say “obviously you have to understand it completely, otherwise you can’t do good work”. I’d also gues...

via Sean Goedecke
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