Werd I/O

Here’s how I think about software development:

All code is an assumption until it meets its real-life context: its user, real-world data, the situation it’ll be used in.

The goal in a startup should be to prove all your core assumptions as quickly as possible. Whereas in an agency setting, say, or perhaps even in a larger company, there’s a defined deliverable, code in a startup is never done: you’re constantly iterating on it to get closer and closer to the right fit for its context.

You could spend months or years meticulously developing the perfect codebase before release, but the truth is, no matter how many automated tests you run, no matter how much QA you’ve built in, you won’t know if it really works until a real user uses it. That’s true of websites, applications, back-end server demons, you name it. If you’ve spent all that time writing code and it’s not the right thing - well, then you’ve probably wasted a ton of time and money.

Before the internet era, that was the only way software could be written. A company would work hard on a release, which might even then be shrink-wrapped and sent to stores. These days, we’re constantly connected, and software (whether it’s on the web or not) can be continually updated. Some of the best platforms I’ve worked on have released multiple times a day. The internet gives developers superpowers.

The right thing to do, then, is to write the simplest, smallest thing you can, get it out there, learn from how people are using it, and iterate quickly. This iterative feedback loop is at the heart of agile development, but it’s also just good common sense: you always want to shorten feedback loops as far as you can. The question is always: what’s the shortest distance to proving or disproving your assumption?

Otherwise you’ll end up chasing perfection in silence. In the worst case, your product might not even get released: the context will likely change during a long development process, which means you’ll need to continually adjust the code until you get there. Then the world changes again, and you have to adjust again, and so on and so on and so on. The world will always change - that’s a given - so it’s better to release early and often.

Every software developer in a startup needs to have an inherent comfort with imperfection and a mindset of “failing fast”.

That’s true of every aspect of startups, of course. The core proposition, the underlying business models, the culture, the team - all of those things need to be tested early and iterated upon until you find the right thing. The best startups deeply ingrain these learning loops so that everyone is iterating quickly. The worst just spin their wheels forever.

To do that effectively, you have to let go of your ego. Yes, you’re smart: your insights and past experience will inform how you react to new information. But you can’t operate in a vacuum. Even the smartest people in the world need to approach problems with a growth mindset and let the people they’re trying to build for be the ultimate arbiter on whether they’re building the right thing. Nobody can sit in an enclosed room and come up with the right thing all or most of the time. Whether you’re in the C-suite, an individual contributor, or an intern, you’ve got to figure out how to test your ideas in the real world as quickly as possible.

And then learn, grow, and repeat.

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I donated to Equality Texas. Based in Austin, Equality Texas “works to secure full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Texans through political action, education, community organizing, and collaboration.”

It describes its work as follows:

‌Equality Texas is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, serving as the largest nonpartisan statewide political advocacy organization working for the elimination of discrimination targeting the LGTBQ+ community. This work occurs primarily within, but not limited to, odd-numbered years when the Texas Legislature is in session. During the session, Equality Texas works to advance the rights of LGBTQ+ Texans alongside pro-equality legislators and protects LGBTQ+ Texans from legislative attacks.

I wrote a little about the adverse situation trans kids are facing in Texas earlier this week. Equality Texas is helping through political change, media advocacy, a crisis fund, education, and more.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

I’m not remotely qualified to talk about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in any level of competent detail, but I am qualified to discuss my feelings about it.

These things seem to rarely be fought on real principles; instead, war puts ordinary peoples’ lives on the line in the name of political and financial dominance. It’s always an atrocity. That this, or any, conflict couldn’t be resolved without killing innocent people is a failure on every level: diplomatic, moral, human.

I’m not sure there’s a single leadership voice out there that can be trusted. Russia’s interests largely relate to energy and economic supremacy. Ukraine has aligned itself with NATO but also has allowed literal Nazi battalions to join its national forces. The US has a famously self-interested foreign policy and would prefer Ukraine was allied to it, and that, ideally, it was the only global superpower.

When I say they can’t be trusted, I mean it in two ways: the first is that we can’t believe anything they say. The second is that I don’t trust them to not spill blood in service of those interests. The conflict may be on the level of Russia’s temporary invasion of Georgia (a war that involved war crimes), or it could be more. I’m a computer programmer, not by any means an expert in international relations, so I’m a little bit scared and trying to read what I can.

I’ve noticed some voices that seem to be excited for a reconfigured Cold War - hey, nostalgia is big right now - which doesn’t, to me, seem like what we should want either. The fact that Russia and the US were at loggerheads for a significant portion of the 20th century doesn’t mean they should always be. Which doesn’t in any way make apologies Russia’s behavior or hardline political stance: I’m not arguing in favor of Russia here. I’m really just hoping that everyone can be smart and that all parties come to the table looking for equitable, collaborative peace rather than 20th century style dominance.

I can dream.

Regardless, people will lose their lives, and many more will lose their homes. There’s nothing good or noble about war. There’s nobody to root for except for the people who will be collateral in the face of conflict conducted in the name of someone else’s wealth and power. It’s not a sports game with teams and scores, although the TV news will report on it as such. It’s just death and human suffering.

And my biggest worry is that nobody with power really cares about that.

Anyway, I suppose I should do some computer programming.

NBC News:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is calling on “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to report the parents of transgender minors to state authorities if it appears the minors are receiving gender-affirming medical care.

Trans kids and their supportive parents need to be protected. This is the kind of brutal statement that - toothless as it might be legally - has real world effects that endanger lives. It’s obvious, noxious bigotry, as reckless as it is stupid.

As the New Republic points out:

Genital surgery, in almost all cases, is only available to adults. But this basic factual error is only the beginning—if also the foundation—of the problems with Paxton’s stigma-fueling decision.

The implication that parents of trans children, and the people who provide gender-affirming services, are “definitionally abusers” is horrifying. It derives from a mindset that should have no place in the 21st century, and one that is not limited to Texas.

In the face of this kind of rhetoric, I think it’s important for everyone to be vocal. Write your representatives, post on your own sites, and if you can, give to organizations doing important work on the ground. (I gave to Equality Texas and would love other suggestions.) This backwards dogma must be stopped in its tracks.

This is far more than “culture wars”, although we hear this phrase a lot. It comes down to protecting the lives of children. Trans children and their families are vulnerable, and need our support.

They say grief ebbs and flows and sneaks up on you unexpectedly, and lately I’ve been missing my mother a lot.

Today my phone showed me memories from this time last year. I was glad to see them, but they also made me cry.

It’s been, what, eight months? Close to a year. And I feel nothing close to okay. So much has happened. But even if I hadn’t, there’s a giant hole in my life. Everything feels wrong, like I’ve stumbled into an alternate universe. I don’t know when I’ll feel anchored or right again, but I’m certainly not there now.

Every day I want to tell her something, or ask her advice, or hear what she has to say. I often think that I will, until I remember. It’s awful. Selfishly, I still need her. And I just miss her presence.

She’s here, of course. Just not in the way I would like.

The only way is forwards. Unfortunately.

One of my firmest beliefs about the web as it emerged was that it could be a force for peace: learning happens, I argued, when contexts collide. People who didn’t know or understand each other would meet, talk, and connect. We would all have a deeper understanding, rooted in justice and empathy.

A lot of ink has been spilled over the incorrectness of that original utopian vision for the web, but I’m still not sure that belief was entirely wrong: the internet helped give birth to restorative justice movements like Black Lives Matter, and movements for justice around the world, which I truly believe are a prerequisite for a just peace.

It did, however, undeniably also bring together some of the darkest aspects of society: bigotry, nationalism, violence. It helped hate find hate; white supremacist organizations and thinkers were able to grow their communities too. Propagandists were able to share mis and dis-information swiftly for their own ends. Viral content became an integral part of statecraft, movement-building, and the manufacturing of consent.

Nationalism is a fundamentally toxic idea that can only lead to division. The simple idea that humans who were born inside one arbitrary diplomatic division are somehow superior to those who were born inside another is ridiculous on its face, and archaic to the core. We’re all part of one single, connected open graph; the internet should have shown us that. Everyone is connected to everyone else. We’re all just people, doing our best, trying to live our lives.

That we should fight each other based on where we were born or where we live or which deity we choose to believe in is absurd 17th century stuff. And the thing is, the people who sew these divisions know that. They’re created in the name of profit: to help secure energy rights, or a section of coastline that empowers a trading route, or to boost the shares of some corporation or other. It all comes down to cynical manipulation in order to establish dominance.

Faced with this landscape of internet-enhanced manipulation, those of us who build platforms for information and sharing have a choice to make. It’s not dissimilar to the choices made with respect to disrupting any incumbent industry. We can either choose to put a nice new face on existing power dynamics, or we can disrupt them entirely. A fintech company must decide whether it should works with incumbent banks and simply provide a shiny app that sits on top of the existing financial system, or build an entirely new system that serves people better. An information company must decide whether it should work with the existing dynamics of power, or build an entirely new system in service of truth and justice. Not nationalistic truth or justice, in service of a single nation’s interests above others, but truth or justice in the name of all people.

The web is for everyone.

That’s the only way it works.

It will have reached its potential when we can look at each other, or think of another country, and see the humans in their individual beauty and nuance over any tribal allegiance; when we can consider them all to be neighbors, and when their well-being is important to us.

Conversely, if that never happens, if we think in terms of diplomatic friends and foes and choose to accept the dehumanization of those our leaders deem to be the latter, then it will have failed, and maybe even made the world worse.

The internet is people. It’s all about interrelatedness and interdependence. We’re all connected. And if we can’t see that, I don’t know what hope there is for us.

An interesting juxtaposition in my feedreader today:

On one hand:

For its final value, Zuckerberg added “Meta, Metamates, Me” to the list, pushing the company's metaverse rebrand one step further. He said this one relates to “the sense of responsibility we have for our collective success and to each other as teammates.”

And on the other:

“The work that we do is a kind of mental torture,” one current Sama employee that works as an outsourced Facebook content moderator told TIME, who like others who spoke to the magazine did so on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or job loss. “Whatever I am living on is hand-to-mouth. I can’t save a cent. Sometimes I feel I want to resign. But then I ask myself: what will my baby eat?”

So Meta employees should ask themselves: who gets to be a Metamate? And what does that answer say about the company they work for?