Mary Oliver has died. I have a friend who used to keep her poem “Wild Geese” folded up in his wallet. It begins: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a

“By which I mean, how do *you* pick a tattoo artist?”

“on a whim i started reading the rust docs and i have to say, i'm actually enjoying it; the encouragement, analogies, etc. 👍”

“Wow. Sometimes world-crafting with illustration is so powerful and evocative that it makes you want to live in the world the artist has drawn. This reminds me of my fondest memories and makes me homesick for a world I have never been in.”

“I wanted just to be there, enjoying the mundanity of a place that would soon be mythological to me. I also wanted to tour it like a stranger and send away dispatches — to friends who would never see it, to myself who could never go back, to no one in particular.” “Some pictures I texted to friends. Others I posted to my Instagram, which is slapdash and homely, with about as many followers as it deserves — I use the app like I once used Facebook, as a way of being ambiently with people I like, or to set up a dopamine drip while I’m doing something I’d rather not. My friends, flung out over the continent, were posting their own holiday or non-holiday pictures, and as much as I love my parents I felt homesick, as one does, for my independence. I live in a new city now, and Instagram was the simplest way to reconcile two lives.”

“James had this amazing way of being a total realist, seeing all of the world’s flaws and acknowledging them, and remaining passionate and optimistic.”

“This obsession with technical innovation and growth at all costs caused the tech industry to turn a blind eye to the social impacts of its creations.”

“Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions. If some readers end up signing up for Basecamp, that’s great. But if they just like to read and not buy, that’s also great.” “In fact, the intention is to lessen our dependency on Twitter too, and simply turn Signal v Noise into the independent home for all our thoughts and ideas – big or small.”

“you can end up in this place where you don't want to engage with any of it, to talk about how burnout affects people creatively." - @erikhane @printrunpodcast https://t.co/wuJvLflFE1”

I did not realize the city was so large. Brooklyn alone is the size of seattle. I knew the boroughs were a thing, but I figured they were just big neighborhoods, not entities unto themselves. There was trash everywhere. like, everywhere. which is not to say it was dirty, but just that there were so many bags of trash. So many Canada Goose jackets. So many dogs. So many Canada Goose jackets on dogs. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was extremely lovely and kind. An order of magnitude more diversity than any city in which I’ve lived. The subway’s weird turnstile-claw-revolving-door things are dystopian. Park Ave. is breathtaking; so is East Village. You look into each little brownstone and a part of you wants to stay there forever. Everything is a little bit louder than it should be. I miss it already! I miss it so much.

Ideas often get copied from well-known established projects into new projects with the background behind those decisions lost. Projects should have a "https://t.co/iLkkhljAHY" to lay out regretful design choices that can't be reversed for time, compatibility, etc. reasons— Joe Groff (@jckarter) January 14, 2019

“People talk about businesses having "moats" but I think a better metaphor is a reef. A reef can protect and foster an ecosystem while keeping bad players out, or serve as treacherous and impassable protection. They also grow fractally. Grow a reef.”

“By bypassing many of the traditional gatekeepers of entertainment, we have seen an entirely new class of celebrity emerge.”

"he cares for the egg the only way he knows how: He plants it."

"Friends, it's time for me to recharge the batteries and take a Pome hiatus. This third run has indeed been a charm; thank you so much for reading! Stay well, support your local poet, and see you somewhere down the road. -M x" "the song was in fact the joyous concordance of a moment that would not come again"

in conclusion: I'm more myself on the internet than I am in "real life". maybe you are too. maybe that's fine— Max Kreminski (@maxkreminski) January 10, 2019

One of my biggest revelations of the last year was the @fortelabs insight that you benefit from the internet information firehose by having a system that lets you embrace it, rather than rejecting/hiding from it like this: https://t.co/NU6Qz4kZTh— Drew Austin (@kneelingbus) January 9, 2019

“Everyone thinks they can write, because everybody writes,” said Rasenberger, referring to the proliferation of casual texting, emailing and tweeting. But she distinguishes these from professional writers “who have been working on their craft and art of writing for years.” “What a professional writer can convey in written word is far superior to what the rest of us can do,” said Rasenberger. “As a society we need that, because it’s a way to crystallize ideas, make us see things in a new way and create understanding of who we are as a people, where we are today and where we’re going.”

“This is in some sense a restatement of some things which I “knew” before, but I didn’t know them then as I do now.”

“and faintly like I'm cosplaying as a different, more well-adjusted version of myself.” “I am growing a beard now. This is terrible news for everyone involved.” “I am worried (albeit only faintly) that if OmniFocus doesn't work, it will less be a failure of the software (which seems very nice) and more a failure of that underlying assumption: that you cannot, in fact, sit down and think for a long time and emerge with a roadmap for the best possible 2019, a glorious lattice of checklists and todos.”

📜 A thread of some thoughts that I wish the 21-year-old version of me had done sooner: https://t.co/rKJpUo0Jsv— John F🎃minella 🌠 (@jxxf) January 6, 2019

[bonus content] enjoy this improv outtake from the archives, freshly unearthed from steve ballmer's personal media server. merry christmas from krazam watch senior engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSqexFg74F8 // merch: https://merch.krazam.tv // https://www.instagram.com/krazam.tv // https://twitter.com/krazamtv

“One thing that writing elegant software has in common with art: its crafters should remain cognizant of the overall macro vision of the project at the same time they are working on its smallest micro details. JIRA, alas, implicitly teaches everyone to ignore the larger vision while focusing on details. There is no whole. At best there is an “Epic” — but the whole point of an Epic is to be decomposed into smaller pieces to be worked on independently. JIRA encourages the disintegration of the macro vision.” “Worst of all, though, is the endless implicit pressure for tickets to be marked finished, to be passed on to the next phase. Tickets, in the JIRA mindset, are taken on, focused on until complete, and then passed on, never to be seen again. They have a one-way life cycle: specification; design; development; testing; release. Doesn’t that sound a little … um … waterfall-y? Isn’t agile development supposed to be fundamentally different from waterfall development, rather than simply replacing one big waterfall with a thousand little ones?” “In software, as in art, the micro work and the macro vision should always be informed by one another. Let JIRA map the micro work; but let good old-fashioned plain language describe the macro vision, and try to pay more attention to it.”