Slow Dispatch

/now

What I'm doing now

Last updated

Working on

Rebuilding the Slow Dispatch deploy pipeline so I stop manually copying files between three repos. The whole thing should be one push to main, and right now it isn’t. The fix is unglamorous — a small Node script and a GitHub Action — but the thinking about it has been the most engineering work I’ve done all month.

Also slowly, slowly drafting an essay about why memoization makes most code worse. It will probably end up arguing the opposite of that. We’ll see.

Reading

  • Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal. Three chapters in. Already correcting some opinions I held about open-source maintenance.
  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann), reread. The chapter on derived data is on its third pass.
  • The Increment archive, specifically issues 11–14.

Thinking about

The asymmetry between the time it takes to ship the simple version of something and the time it takes to undo a complicated one. Not done thinking yet.

Not doing

  • Conferences. Not this year.
  • Twitter / X arguments about microservices. Especially not arguments I started.
  • Side projects that require me to log into a dashboard.

A /now page in the Sivers tradition. Things I’m not doing are as informative as things I am.