One of the differences between regular developers and software craftsmen is that software craftsmen are on a mission. They are on a mission to make things better, to deliver value to their clients, and to inspire people around them. They are not afraid to lead the way and drive changes. For software craftsmen, striving to always do their best is just a natural state of mind.

The entire premise of the book is about getting us to look at software as a craft. So take the time and energy to make things better for everyone rather than just seeing it as a job to get done and get to the next thing. Taking time like this leads to better results in the short and the long term

The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution valorized precision, and as the revolution gathered speed, requirements for precision grew ever more stringent. In the 1770s, James Watt proudly declared that the cylinders of his steam engine were bored to the precision of 1/20 of an inch. By the 1850s, the self-acting machines of Joseph Whitworth aimed for a precision of 1/10,000 of an inch.  Eighteenth-century England stood out in its ample supply of craftsmen able to do high-precision work. From 1700–1800, England saw a doubling in the number of clockmakers and instrument makers, according to evidence collected by Kelly and Ó Gráda. Besides clocks, these producers made instruments for mathematical disciplines such as surveying, navigation, bookkeeping, and astronomy.

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-mathematics-built-the-modern-world/

See also: Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World - Simon Winchester

Monju is an extreme case, but it’s not in a category by itself. Far from it. Nuclear power plants are one of the worst-performing project types in my database, with an average cost overrun of 120 percent in real terms and schedules running 65 percent longer than planned. Even worse, they are at risk of fat-tail extremes for both cost and schedule, meaning they may go 20 or 30 percent over budget. Or 200 or 300 percent. Or 500 percent. Or more. There is almost no limit to how bad things can get, as Monju demonstrated so spectacularly.

How Big Things Get Done - Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

What was so spectacular about Monju was that it was a nuclear power plant that over the entire lifetime of the project from when it started to generate electricity in 1994 to when it was decommissioned in 2016, a lifetime of only 22 years, it contributed to the grid for roughly one hour. For about 10 billion dollars. The table below gives a general timeline of the main events but yeah it was a spectacular failure.

How does the book propose we avoid these spectacular failures? The key issue with these

The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. That lets you design what you know—and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good.

That’s a quote from Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.

when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1913, workers simply walked out. One of Ford’s biographers wrote, “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.” https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft

When I think of the assembly line and the supposedly better working conditions brought in by Ford, I think surely workers would have been clamouring to get these well paying well treated jobs. But the opposite must have been the case where they had to hire nearly 10x the number of men for the number of positions that were to be filled.

I’ve read the article this is from but not yet the book that was inspired by the article. The basic premise is how work evolved from a craft, as something to be proud of and based on skill, to assembly line based where no real skill was required.

The article also lays out how this new assembly line work gave rise to debt. Likely used by employers to hook the employees on regular payments too.

The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has shown in a recent article, through the installment plan, previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. The display of a new car bought on installment

It was very much on a whim that I decided to make this. I know I wanted to do something like this for a while but couldn’t ever get started on making the site. I know I’ll be more interested in something if I completely control and customise it, but it also needs to be easy to start and stick with. There’s no real use if it takes ages to get started so I need it to be easy above all else to add to it. I already use Obsidian for general note taking so that’s going to be what I use there. Everything else must build off that. This means markdown, bonus points if it is easy to translate Obsidian flavoured markdown to whatever standard the renderer uses. Markdown is great but every tool seemingly has their own variants or additions to the language so it’ll be a challenge making sure compatibility is 100% across everything

Astro

I started trying to use Astro because I know people have talked about that a bit recently. However I’m not a frontend dev so I decided very early on to rely on AI tools to generate at the very least an initial template I could build off. I found a theme I liked and set it up. But once I got to customising it I ran into roadblock after roadblock and soon gave up. I’m not interested in spending hours and hours getting started so I’m not doing that now. Perhaps down the line I’ll revisit this and redo

13k ARR from an app that implements syncing for Obsidian!

This service allows users to swiftly capture ideas and notes on various platforms, including web, mobile, and browser extensions, with features to highlight text, share links, and paste images or files. It is built to seamlessly integrate with Obsidian MD software, employing a dedicated plugin for syncing and processing notes, thus enhancing the overall note-taking experience for users who require an efficient and organized system for managing their digital information.

I use obsidian for all my notes and sure syncing between devices is a pain but I’ve got dropbox for desktop at least. Not sure how they do iOS syncing but getting 13k ARR seems a bit mad for this. Maybe they got in early before the native Obsidian syncing and had some good marketing to get people onboard.

I wouldn’t hold much hope in that app being worth the 50k asking price long term though as surely the native Obsidian sync would be a huge competitor like the way Apple takes out a lot of third party apps with native features. And in this case I would prefer that to be the case, just so Obsidian can go on being a great app. Maybe their syncing takes away from development of the main app by the small dev team there but I like the way the app is and with extensions you can rely on the community to build features that you might want.

Either way, shows you can make a fair bit by developing obvious and not

I picked up this book and started to read it without really expecting myself to get far. I started it on a whim where it got recommended through some random blog post I came across that I cannot even remember now where that was. I downloaded the kindle preview and started the first chapter. Soon thereafter I found myself enjoying it enough that I just kept on going and kept reading. Usually these kinds of books I find myself having to push through but this I just didn’t really have to at all. Maybe just the way it was written was easy enough for me to understand and read that it was just easy to keep going. Even then, its not a normal book for me to read. Its not like anything else what I’ve read recently or further in the past apart from one book, The History of Thailand which I picked up before an upcoming trip there. Against that, here I just did not have any reason to read it.

I did wonder about this book and what I don’t know is if these characteristics are unique to France or if they are mirrored in many other nations. For sure England industrialised before France but I don’t know were the closed off nature of the French people unique to it. Many people barely left the area they were born in and the dialects of each place meant they practically had a unique language per small region (pays) but was this just a uniquely French thing

We take for a given that big projects will go over budget and over time. The core idea of this book is that does not need to be the case. The main reasons given for projects not going according to plan are: bad plans in the first place, making changes as they go along and bad estimations on how long the plans will take to implement. Most of these can be overcome by proper planning.

The core premise is make sure you plan out properly beforehand. Consider the scope of the project and why you want this to be done. If you properly consider the “why” then you won’t want to change it half way through, avoiding one of the largest cause of delays to large projects. The example project for this sort of thing is a kitchen renovation project gone wrong. The owners ended up spending millions on what they planned to be a kitchen renovation but turned into a full home remodel. The main reason was when a complication, such as rotten floorboards, came up they increased the scope instead of trying to find ways for reducing the scope or keeping the roadblock to a minimum

Bad estimations also often derail projects as it gives people a false sense of security in knowing how long the project might take and cost. Oftentimes the estimate is deliberately lowballed to make it more palatable for whoever is paying for the project. The big idea for estimating is to use reference estimation. Instead of thinking of your project as

I read this ages ago as a teenager and I didn’t like it as much as other people seemed to. It just portrayed this ultra capitalist guy playing the game so much better than everyone else he amassed an insane amount of wealth. And all for what because I don’t know. I’m not against capitalism just I think maybe that wealth could be put to good use rather than just shares of Apple. Start companies and take some bets rather than hoarding it at the top of the market.

But anyway the part that stuck with me was when he had taken over a struggling newspaper. I don’t have a memory for these sort of details but he bought out the company and put in money so it could turn around. If you know anything about Buffett you know how much he loved newspapers as they were the original monopoly. If you had the best distribution in a city then everyone would buy that paper and advertisers would then follow. You’d end up with the entire market as who wants the second best paper. Anyway in this case the workers were not really happy at the beginning and I remember some sort of strikes but in the end the company was turned around and he made some fantastical amount of money. All great and all that. But then it came time for him to collect his chips and take his winnings. He kept the paper around but profits went to him so he could invest elsewhere. I