This month I read How to Use a Zettelkasten to Write Stories Packed with Emotion. It inspired me to write something using that technique. The topic that came to mind was Bash redirects. It resulted in the blog post Bash Redirects Explained.

I also started reading How Children Learn by John Holt. He says that children are naturally interested in exploring the world. I started thinking about what environments kill exploration. I though that fear of doing something wrong will discourage exploration. Then I made a parallel to a common practice in software development: pull requests. I thought that pull requests discourage experiments because changes can only propagate after approval, and the idea behind pull requests is to only approve “good” changes. First of all, the learning opportunities of mistakes are gone. Second of all, you might loose interest in experimenting because you are afraid of making a mistake. You build a culture of discouraging making mistakes. I though that a better approach is to focus on making the cost of mistakes small so that we can do lots of them and learn from them.

I also read Debugging Teams by Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick. They talk about the myth of the genius programmer and that all great things are built by teams. I believe that is true, but sometimes I have a hard time to acknowledge it because I also enjoy working by myself.