nico λ

When we dress our beliefs up in rational argument, we ironically end up constructing an iron-clad fantasy world. We convince ourselves that we’re immune to emotional appeal, that we alone have the pragmatic sobriety needed to see the situation clearly. But often all we’ve done is add a protective layer of reason around something that feels true.

It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the... See more

misses the religious challenge to complacency, the heart and soul of faith. Instead of discouraging moral inquiry, religious prompting can just as easily stimulate it by calling attention to the disjunction between verbal profession and practice, by insisting that a perfunctory observance of prescribed rituals is not enough to ensure salvation, and... See more

Never be afraid to say that you don’t know something

Don’t be afraid to ask for help

We all suffer(ed) impostor syndrome

Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs

I’ve always been pretty good at debugging weird issues, with the usual toolkit of println and the debugger. So I never really looked at git much to figure out the history of a bug. But for some bugs it’s crucial.

I recently had an issue with my server where it was leaking... See more

Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code

It’s really easy to write terrible code. But it’s also really easy to write code that follows absolutely every best practice, which has been unit, integration, fuzz, and mutation-tested for good measure – your startup will just run out of money before you finish.... See more