Simpler Machines

Hello! Hello!Things have been crazy around here, in the way that contracting occasionally gets — for a hot minute I had effectively three jobs, but things are wrapping up and settling in and generally feeling a lot more manageable. Still don’t have news I can share on

“I knew you’d love this.” Is there anything more delicious? One of my favorite sensations of this meme age — a friend was scrolling, saw something, and thought of you.

I’m going to try to convince you to start a company — especially if you’re a Pivot.

Why Pivotal engineers changed teams so often, and how those changes happened

My favorite thing about this test is that it's not a test for whether these operations are happening inside of a transition. It might actually be better to do this with the first request as a subquery inside the insert, and this test will happily accept that solution.

I miss being able to do that raw volume of work. I miss the feeling of being on a team that pairs. The level of collaboration skill. The pace.

There are people trying to get us back to that disaster vibe – but – I dunno – society-as-a-whole has escaped TheGlobalChatroomSlashAnxietyReflectionMatrix and I think everyone's chilled out a lot.

let’s just get tactical write away, and talk about note-taking for dependency mapping

ChatGPT by default writes verbose and somewhat naive Bash, but you can improve it a lot with a few directives.

This week I've been moving an Elixir application from Fly to Gigalixir. It shouldn't have taken a week except that I hate this kind of work, so I find all kinds of other things to do instead. Been getting a lot of writing done. Started lifting

Write a lot. This is alpha and omega of writing advice, the beginning and the end, and it's that way for a reason– I don’t know anyone who’s good writing who hasn’t also put in serious hours.

Nat here– with your latest issue of Simpler Machines.Last week's post was actually a last-minute rescue of a much longer, weirder piece about how software engineers (and people in general?) have a tendency to evaluate the goodness of the work they do by the stock price

Fourth of July is upon us– one of the great American excuses for the chill hang.I'm Nat Bennett, and you're reading Mere Being, a monthly(ish) newsletter about hanging out and kicking back. (But, also, whatever I want.)It's looking increasingly like

The alternative to results-oriented thinking is process-oriented thinking. With process-oriented thinking, your focus is on the quality of the decisions that produce the result – the part of the process that you can control, instead of the random variables that you don't control.

Pivotal did a lot of things differently, but it did management really differently.

There are roughly three senses of "estimate." One is "a prediction of how much something will cost." One is "a guess." But another definition is a rough calculation.

A little bit of day job day dreaming, history's greatest system for comparing movies, weirdos who actually read the source code, and a good way to eat avocados.

Normal software work is so much about changing the system. Add capabilities. Change behavior. Imagine what could be or should be. Understanding what is – always a byproduct or a precondition of change.

Three book recommendations for thinking about getting meaning from work

I'm not the only person writing about Pivotal. Plus, an old way to play Magic, and some notes on the Sopranos.

Hey there! Many of you have joined this week from Morning Brew and Kottke. Welcome! Wow. And– thank you.You're reading Simpler Machines, a newsletter that is mostly about software development, but software development as a creative practice, and a social one. That just happens to make

Basically, it's this: I don't have to think as much about where to put a piece of behavior. If I'm wrong about where it ought to go? I just move it. I don't have to change what language it's in or update a client or write new tests or any of that.

If your model is "it's okay to lie if I've been lied to" then we're all knee deep in bullshit forever and can never escape Transaction Cost Hell.

Software as model-building, and a social activity

People keep setting things on fire near me & Slack was probably a mistake.

Dynamic type systems are good and I will not be dissuaded from this. Also: how I write, and why I buy books.

Hey there! Nat here – with your weekly edition of Simpler Machines. A little on the long side this week – lots of stuff I wanted to get out on the internet.Is pairing good for exploration?Last week Hillel Wayne wrote a newsletter called What Mob Programming is Bad

Hey there! I'm Nat Bennett, and you're reading Simpler Machines, a weekly letter about making software with other people.Thought I'd try something a little bit different this week for the header image – usually I use Unsplash if I use something at all,

Why do most software businesses still manage software engineering teams by managing the individuals on the teams? If XP is so much better (especially when combined with Lean, Balanced Team, and User-Centered Design) shouldn't companies doing it run circles around the companies that aren't?"

Thinking about membership programs & books

My basic stack for emotional management

Hey there. I'm Nat Bennett, and you're reading Mere Being, a monthly newsletter about whatever's on my mind that month.First, a few announcements.I'm working on a new pop-up newsletter. It's titled "500 words about Pivotal" and

Hey there! This is Nat Bennett, from Simpler Machines, a newsletter about software.This week I launched a new zine, called How to Quit Vim. It's twenty pages, you can print it out, you'll probably learn something new even if you've used Vim for

Why is it, exactly, that prototypes are so miserable to maintain and operate? And how can we avoid putting prototypes into production?

Hello there! You're reading Simpler Machines, a newsletter about making software, that right now goes out whenever I can't stop myself from writing.If you wish I was writing here more, there are two things you should check out, from my partner, Jesse Alford. If you

I started meditating again this month. Decided to hell with the slowly-ramping-up stuff and jumped straight into 40 minute sessions. I don't always go for that long, if I don't feel up to it I might just do 10 or 20. But as often as not

Mostly what you're doing when you give these choices to application developers is giving them opportunities to get bitten by clowns.