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Writing forces clarity. When I explain a concept to others - in a doc, a talk, a code review comment, even just chatting with AI - I discover the gaps in my own understanding. The act of making something legible to someone else makes it more legible to me. – Addy Osmani in 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google The one quoted above is #12, and I’ve been religiously abiding by it for a long time, but all 21 are well worth reading. If you’ve been in software engineering long enough, they’ll resonate with you. Also, most lessons apply to all kinds of career paths, not just software. ...

As AI generated content becomes the norm, I believe that human-generated content and raw thoughts and emotion will become more valuable. In many ways, I’d rather read a raw, unproduced, and scrappy blog post with grammatical mistakes over perfectly generated content that serves little value. – Armeet Singh Jatyani, Importance of Writing

Every machine serves a purpose. People need purpose. The temptation to become the machine is higher than ever. The promise of the machine is alluring. If I can just keep chugging forward, I will end up somewhere that is not here. If I can turn myself into a mechanism that takes input and consistently works towards some goal, I will make it. [..] You’re not a machine. You’re a person. Play to your strengths. Be sharp and strategic like a scalpel, not blunt like a mallet. Stop fetishizing the grind. Dream bigger. ...

When I’m writing, I write. When I’m cooking, I cook. When I’m talking to someone, I put my phone away. The constant mental juggling that felt necessary before now feels exhausting. There’s something meditative about giving your full attention to a single task. – 47nil

AI can replace most of programming, but programming isn’t the job. Programming is a task. It’s one of many things you do as part of your work. But if you’re a software engineer, your actual job is more than typing code into an editor. The mistake people make is conflating the task with the role. It’s like saying calculators replaced accountants. Calculators automated arithmetic, but arithmetic was never the job. The job was understanding financials, advising clients, making judgment calls, etc. The calculator just made accountants faster at the mechanical part. AI is doing something similar for us. ...

Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album, it was the first album to be explicitly labelled as ‘ambient music’. [..] In this article, I’ll discuss how Music for Airports was created, and I’ll deconstruct and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2. Hopefully, the article will demystify some of Brian Eno’s techniques, and give you some ideas about how to adopt some of his ambient music techniques yourself. ...

I think of it [the usefulness of writing] like breathing but for ideas. We do so much reading all day—there should be a natural balance with producing words too. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale… Joe Boudreau in On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads, an article I agree 100% with.

If you want to understand time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain. Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, and smooth even the sharpest edge. ...

The theory that people no longer read as much as they used to is put forward by people who no longer read as much as they used to. – Francesco Farabegoli

Super interesting. What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working. Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa The ongoing discussion on HN is also worth reading (minus the AI slop complaints).