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Labwork to Leadership

Jen Heemstra’s Labwork to Leadership: A Concise Guide to Thriving in the Science Job You Weren’t Trained For is the book I’ve been hoping to find for years. It includes sections on managing yourself, managing others, and coaching future leaders, all grounded in first-hand experience and empirical research. I wish it included more on organizational change and winding projects down, but those are my preoccupations: as is, it would be a great foundation for a Carpentries-style workshop, and I hope someone creates that.

cover of Heemstra's 'Labwork to Leadership'

Story Dice

My daughter gave me a set of story dice for Christmas a couple of years ago. One of them has gone missing, which makes me wonder if there are now stories I’m no longer able to tell.

three red and two green story dice

Time to make another cup of tea. If you came in peace, be welcome.

Loading the Dishwasher

My daughter was profligate in her use of kitchenware: she would always grab a fresh glass for water instead of re-using the one that she had just emptied, and never used three saucepans to cook when she could use five. Now that she has left home, I only need to load the dishwasher once a day.

But I wish I still had to load it twice.

Time to make another cup of tea. If you came in peace, be welcome.

Time Spent on Hardening

I recently received mail from someone working on a software-based approach to fault tolerance. Their tool makes applications more reliable, but they think it also makes developers more productive by reducing the amount of error detection and handling code they need write.

They have never been able to find research that quantifies how much time developers spend on code for detecting and handling problems relative to the effort for the “happy path”. they know it’s substantial, and is (probably) increasing as applications become more distributed, but the only number they’ve found is from a 1995 book called Software Fault Tolerance, where Dr. Flaviu Cristian says that it often accounts for more than two-thirds of code in production systems.

So I asked a dozen researchers I met through It Will Never Work in Theory if they knew of anything, and the answer was, “No, there isn’t anything that specifically addresses that question.” This strikes me as odd, because it wouldn’t be hard to measure and the answer would be interesting.

People do throw around questionable numbers about the cost of bugs and bug fixing, e.g., claim that companies $2 trillion in 2020. Here are some other related resources my contacts were able to give me:

Again, the fact that we don’t have reliable figures for this strikes me as odd. As one of them pointed out, while everyone is throwing LLMs at often artificial and academic problems and then claiming to have improved some arbitrary metric X% over a random baseline, we still don’t know fairly basic things about software development.

My thanks to everyone who responded to my late-night email about this.

Later: this post made the #8 spot on Hacker News. It must have been a slow day…

Hacker News

Searching for Closure

For every beginning there must be an ending, but we don’t like to talk about that, particularly not in the tech industry. There are thousands of books in print about how to start a business, but only a handful about how to pass one on, and many of those are really about how to sell out at the right time.

I have experienced a lot of endings, and the most important thing I’ve learned is that they can be dignified and fulfilling if done well. I also think that preparing for the end can make it less likely, and make what happens before it more enjoyable. However, a lot of people aren’t being given the chance to wind things down gracefully. Between the Trump administration’s attack on science and the cuts big tech companies are making in the name of AI, thousands of people are being given days (or less) to end years of work.

I am therefore assembling material for a half-day workshop on project closure. If you or someone you know has ended a software project or scientific research project, I’d be very grateful if you could spare half an hour for an online interview: you can reach me by email at gvwilson@third-bit.com.

Note: all discussion will be confidential, and everyone interviewed will be able to review and veto anything that mentions them before it is seen by anyone else.

Learner Personas

There are important differences between deliberate closure (shutting a project down of your own accord and on your own timeline), and abrupt closure (shutting it down on short notice under difficult circumstances). This workshop therefore caters to two learner personas.

Vaida

Liam

Mastodon and Webbly

I was going to title this post “Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together”, but I expect most of my readers are too young to get the reference, so I’ll just dive right in:

  1. Glitch gave literally millions of people a chance to build something on the web without having to wrestle with NPM or webpack or set up a server or deal with any of the other crap that Sumana Harihareswara has dubbed inessential weirdness. It was beautiful and useful, but it wasn’t profitable enough for Fastly to keep it alive.

  2. But the idea of a low-overhead in-the-browser way for the 99% to build things didn’t start with Glitch and hasn’t died with it either. Projects like Webbly (source here) are still trying to let people use the web to build the web. However, someone has to host these things somewhere: who’s going to do that, and where? More specifically, can we construct a hosting solution that isn’t tied to a particular company and therefore doesn’t have a singular point of failure?

  3. Well, what about Mastodon? Its authors and users are deeply committed to decentralization and federation, and more people are running servers for particular communities every day. What if (wait, hear me out) what if Webbly was bundled with Mastodon so that Mastodon site admins could provide an in-the-browser page-building experience to their users simply by saying “yes” to one configuration option?

  4. Why would they do that? My answer is, “Take a look at Mastodon’s default browser interface.” It lets you add a couple of pictures and a few links to your profile, but that’s less than MySpace offered twenty years ago. I am 100% certain that if Mastodon came with an easy in-browser page builder, people would use it to create all sorts of wonderful things. (Awful ones too, of course, but Mastodon site admins already have to grapple with content admin.)

Greenspun’s Tenth Rule is that every sufficiently complicated program contains a mediocre implementation of Lisp. Equally, I think every useful web-based tool is trying to be what Visual Basic was in the 1990s and WordPress was to the early web: useful, right there, and a gradual ramp for new users rather than a cliff to climb. I think the sort of people who built useful little things with Glitch would do amazing things with Webbly if it was married to their social media. I also think that allowing people to create custom home pages or tweak their feeds would draw a lot of new users away from fragile, centralized systems like X and Bluesky. I know that I’ve been wrong far more often than I’ve been right, but this really does feel promising.

If I Retired

If I retired tomorrow, here’s how I would would to spend each week:

What I would want most, though, is a circle of friends to do these things with. I love my wife very much, but I’m never going to enjoy gardening or cooking as much as she does, and boardgames like Hive and Santorini aren’t ever going to be her thing. I always thought my younger brother and I would wind up playing chess in the park in our twilight years; as the nights grow longer and the leaves begin to turn, I’d like to have other people to do that with.

Things I'm Looking For

Following up on my recent plea for material to use in a workshop on productivity for software engineers, I’d also be grateful for material on:

How to hand off or wind down a research project or open source software project.
For every beginning there must be an ending, but we don’t like to talk about them. For example, there are thousands of books in print about how to start a business, but only a handful about how to pass one on or wind one down, and many of those are really about how to sell out at the right time. I think the reason is that mortality scares us, but preparing for the end can make the end less likely, and can help make what happens before then more enjoyable. If you have ever shut something down or handed it over after several years, please get in touch.
A legal and business comparison of the new generation of software licenses.
The Business Source License has attracted a lot of fire from open source zealots; the Unreal Engine license also puts restrictions on use, but hasn’t caused nearly as much yelling. If anyone has written a level-headed compare-and-contrast of licenses that the Open Source Initiative hasn’t blessed, but which give users more rights than a standard closed-source license, I’d be very grateful for a pointer—again, please get in touch.