Link: The Unforeseen Costs of Extraordinary Experience

I came across this paper a while ago, and the conclusions stuck with me. That having some kind of fancy experience, which you might expect to make you the centre of attention in social situations, actually can end up feeling alienating. Because it marks you as different.

It also reminded me of something I’d often noticed. When I meet with old friends we often dwell on quite normal things, but ones where we shared them. “Do you remember this thing we did together?”, “Yes, I remember doing that thing with you, wasn’t it funny when …?”. And the paper’s conclusions kind of make sense of this: we enjoy feeling part of a group, and reaffirming we remember this or that experience we had together is a good way to do that.

It probably doesn’t have to be a normal thing, strictly I suppose it could be, “Do you remember the time we both went up in a rocket ship and saw the Earth from space?”, “Yes, I remember going up in a rocket ship with you, and wasn’t it funny when you splurted space food out your nose!” But for most people it’s more likely to be something more mundane 😂

People seek extraordinary experiences—from drinking rare wines and taking exotic vacations to jumping from airplanes and shaking hands with celebrities. But are such experiences worth having? We found that participants thoroughly enjoyed having experiences that were superior to those had by their peers, but that having had such experiences spoiled their subsequent social interactions and ultimately left them feeling worse than they would have felt if they had had an ordinary experience instead.

From The Unforeseen Costs of Extraordinary Experience — hit “Read full-text” rather than “Download full-text PDF” to read online for free.

Build your own Database Index: part 4

In this forth part of a series about writing a simple JSON document index, we’ll talk about the ways that we can update and delete documents from the index.

Most — all? — tutorials I could find online about making simple indexes only covered adding documents to the index and basic querying. It turns out that updating the index is quite an interesting problem, with various different approaches depending on the data format used to represent the index, and the strategy we use to update our indexes. So I think it’s useful to expand our series to talk more about this.

As this is a spare-time learning exercise for me, we’ll end up with a pretty simple system. It’s not super-impractical for real world use, however, albeit with a bit more thought put into efficiency. And error handling, of course 🙃. But even this simple system shows a few tradeoffs we have to make in real world systems, in particular using more disk space to make updates faster.

Time to dig in.

Read More…

Seven Times: building a “read it again (and again)” app with Val Town and Xata

A long time ago I read that you needed to see or hear something seven times before you’d take it in. It’s stuck with me.

I read a lot. Many of these things can be read once and then left to slowly accrete into my existing world view. But some I want to read again. Seven times, to make sure they go in.

For a year or so I’ve thought about writing an application to help with this, but never got around to it. I have added items to Omnifocus, but they get buried alongside other tasks. I wanted to work out a way to bring this… let’s call it “re-reading” into my usual processes.

About three weeks ago I came across two tools that excited me. Excited me enough to flounder about for things to build with them, and to pull “Seven Times” (for that is what I’d started to call it in my head) back to the surface. Those two things were Val Town and Xata.

But what would be my “usual process”? What user experience should Seven Times have? I am a heavy consumer of RSS feeds (using NetNewsWire and FeedBin). It took a while for me to connect the two, but once I’d had the idea of making Seven Times an RSS feed, I couldn’t shake it.

So here’s our goal: articles to be re-read appear in NetNewsWire, on my Mac or phone:

That screenshot isn’t a mockup, so let’s talk about Val Town and Xata, and how I used them to build a simple — but completely usable for just me — version of Seven Times in under a day.

Read More…

Build your own Database Index: part 3

This is part 3 in a short series about writing a simple index for JSON documents. Previously we talked about things in the abstract: how we’ll encode field names and values into our key-value store so they are easy to lookup. This time we make things a bit more real.

By the end of this post, we’ll have worked up to extracting the fields from our JSON documents, then inserting those fields into our PebbleDB key-value store. And we’ll look at querying for particular values with an equality query. Finally, the bare bones of a useful thing!

Read More…

Link: Choose boring culture

The title of the piece is actually Choose boring technology culture, but I don’t know whether I can get strike-through in titles. Regardless, I think the piece says a lot about how to create a workplace people want to turn up to on a grey, windy Monday morning:

Dan McKinley coined the phrase “choose boring technology” and the concept of innovation tokens nearly a decade ago.

“Boring” should not be conflated with “bad.” There is technology out there that is both boring and bad. You should not use any of that. But there are many choices of technology that are boring and good, or at least good enough… The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood. — @mcfunley

The moral of the story is that innovation is costly, so you should choose standard, well-understood, rock-solid technologies insofar as you possibly can. You only get a few innovation tokens to spend, so you should spend them on technologies that can give you a true competitive advantage — not on, like, reinventing memcache for the hell of it.

The same goes for running a business, and the same goes for organizational culture. We have collectively inherited a set of default practices that work pretty well, like the 40 hour work week and having 1x1s with your manager. You CAN choose to do something different, but you should probably have a good reason. To the extent that you can learn from other people’s experience, you probably should, whether in business or in tech; innovation is expensive, and you only get so many tokens. Do you really want to spend one on a radical reinvention of your PTO policy? How does that serve you?

Innovation gets all the headlines, but I would posit that what most companies need is actually much simpler: organizational health.