On the non-user-friendliness of Linux:

Every operating system is a batch-card processing retro-mess underneath. Linux makes this a virtue to be celebrated rather than a sin to be hidden. I appreciate that. It’s nice not to have to pretend that computers actually are good, or work.

On the “personal” in “P.C.”:

My goal as a software person is to figure out ways to put “personal” back into the systems we discuss and build. “Efficient” or “slick” or “easy to deploy to AWS” are great things, but “empowering” and “gave me a feeling of real control” are even better.

You don’t have to listen to the whole thing, but I thought this observation by Paul Ford (about 26 minutes in) was really great. It’s something that never really gets talked about. I feel like working in software is always talked about as this dreamy, change-the-world endeavor. But the reality is just getting something out the door that people will actually want to use can be a monumental effort. If you can do that, if you can ship something that’s good enough for people to want to use it, that’s pretty damn good. You should give yourself a pat on the back.

the fundamental problem that most people are facing is not, “how do I apply technology X to get, you know, incredible yields?” That’s a very startup-y, West Coast kind of problem. The problem most people have is: can I get a good enough piece of software shipped that people want to use? That’s it — that is it, and that is...still the fundamentally hardest thing that most people can pull off...And especially at an organizational level. If you’re in a big org, just trying to get good software out the door [is incredibly hard]. (emphasis mine)

day after day, year after year, people go to the whiteboard, use a faint marker, and then just leave that marker for the next person. After all, they think, it still has a little ink left. Maybe someone likes faint marker lines. Maybe someone will come along at night and refill it. Or it might naturally grow new ink. Really, who can say?

I think there’s a little gap of knowledge in all of us around how whiteboard markers work – which is why, when we pick one up and use it only to find its output faint and unreadable, we put the cap back on. “It’s probably got something left in it, I just don’t know how to coax it out. I’m sure someone else smarter than me will know how.”

This piece reminded me of someone I worked with who, whenever they found a used marker, would always put the cap back on and dramatically chuck it across the conference room towards the trash. It was beautiful thing.

By no means do I consider myself a public speaker. However, in the limited experience I have speaking to groups, these tips seem relevant to public speaking.

First: do you ever wonder why most talks begin with a joke or story? Here’s why:

I’m finding that it’s very important to just get up there and talk a little bit, make some dumb jokes, let people get used to you existing.

Second: it’s generally a good idea to get rid of slides and notes and just have statements that you can respond to, then it feels conversational as opposed to dictated:

I've thrown away most of the slides with bullets, and I’ve thrown away all of my slide notes. Notes are terrible and half the time you can’t see them anyway. Then, what I try to do is make every slide a little statement, and respond to it...By throwing together statistics and pictures and quotes, it looks like I’m giving a talk, but what’s really happening is that I’m having a conversation with myself. The slides are saying things to me and I’m responding.