Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

Category: Thoughts

  • Paranoia ahead of revolution

    I find the French Revolution particularly fascinating (it’s my Roman Empire, I suppose). Recently, I’ve been listening to the Revolutions podcast—which I seriously cannot recommend enough—and the host, Mike Duncan, spends a lot of time in the years and month leading up to the armed uprisings and tyrannical hold that would cast France into its brutal revolutionary era. During that time, the leaders of the revolution on every which side devised some rather crazy conspirancy theories.

    If anything went wrong—if a battle was lost, or a revolt broke out or a mob of people stormed the convention (and this type of thing happened quite a lot)—it was always the fault of some dark, shadowy movement lurking just beneath the surface.

    If you were a Jacobin or a radical, then it was the royalists behind everything. If you were a royalist or moderate, then those crazy radicals were brainwashing the masses against you. No one acknowledged the intricate and subtle dynamics or the shifting opinions that were truly driving events. Instead, everyone held their ideology as sacred and infallible, unable to fathom that opposition could exist without some hidden manipulation at play.

    Anyway, recently Nancy Pelosi told a bunch of pro-Palestinian protestors to “go back to China” where their “headquarters are.” . And Vivek Ramaswamy has openly suggested (or at the very least, strongly implied) that he believes Taylor Swif and Travis Kelce may be at the enter of some sort of Biden led psyop.

    Now I believe that they believe that at least part of what they’re saying is actually true. Their own beliefs are far too sacred and beloved to be subject to any real scrutiny, of course. As political discourse becomes more entrenched, this will be true more often than not. And though it will surely lack the fervor and terror of late 18th century France, we may be on the verge of revolution ourselves.

  • Mapping out my ideal notebook format

    I’ve experimented with a lot of different notebooks and a lot of different formats. Over the years I’ve adapted an almost bullet journal approach that I quite like. With the new year coming up, I’m going to jot down how I want to approach this year coming up.

    We’re going to go with a Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook. Why? The paper is nice but honestly it’s mostly because it has two page markers. Dot grids, though I’ve spent plenty of time with blank ones.

    First things first is a calendar view. I’ve tried both the running calendar down the page and a full calendar layout. I’m going to draw out a full calendar layout. I almost got the Monthly planner for this reason, but it was a little big for my mind. So I’ll just draw it myself. I like just having all the days laid out because otherwise you end up having to write in dates outside of chronological order, and that can be frustrating.

    Then some sort of Project List. I just kind of want a project list with maybe some way to mark things as completed. Not any description of the projects, but they’ll match my current and archived projects in Obsidian.

    Then each month I do a month view. It has that months events, project focuses, and list of tasks. Task get copied from month to month.

    Then a weekly view which outlines the days of the weeks. For each day, write down any meetings I have, then my primary project focuses for each day. Throughout the day I can use it to mark tasks and track those as well.

    Once I get things going, maybe I’ll post some pictures here.

  • Clubhouse, and the audio social platform

    Clubhouse is, I think it’s safe to say, going to be the next big source of social platform growth. Twitter Spaces will be a competitor there, possibly even the dominant one, but audio is clearly winning out here. Which makes sense in a year that a) had people be on video calls all day (I’m generalizing but Zoom fatigue is real) and b) where podcast growth doesn’t seem to have a stopping point. And I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with that.

    I have a problem with Clubhouse though. There is a major problem with harassment on the platform, largely because audio formats mean that you can be a little looser in what you say, and a little more performative in what you play up. Taylor Lorenz has been the biggest single target of this harassment, but Clubhouse as an inner circle of VC bros is hostile towards journalists generally. Ed Z attributes this largely to VC culture and its evolving relationship with the press, which is obviously part of it. But I think that Silicon Valley is also largely stuck in a techno-utopian view of the web and what it brings to the table. So, the just don’t like negativity, or this idea that its okay to be critical of the tech industry.

    So it will be interesting to see if the audio format goes the way of the always optimistic, branded life influencer, or if it actually becomes a medium for conversation. I suspect it will be the former.

  • Hemingway’s Advice for Coders

    I’m an avid reader of Brain Pickings (check it out if you haven’t heard of it), and one thing caught my attention a few weeks ago. In the mid-1930’s a young writer by the name of Arnold Samuelson caught up with his hero, Ernest Hemingway. Rather then cast him away, Hemingway took him on as a sort of protege, and gave him some invaluable writing advice along the way. There was one thing that resonated with me in particular because I find myself in this trap all the time.

    The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time… Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.

    I mostly write code for a living, not prose. But this rule still applies. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been coding away when I finally get myself to a good place. Everything’s perfect. The bug is patched, the feature is solid.

    Then I go just a little bit further. And that’s when I blow it. I get frustrated and lost. My motivation goes into free-fall and I alternate between my code editor and Twitter every five seconds. And no it’s late. It’s dinner time, or my wife is calling me, or the office is closing.

    So don’t be me. Take Hemingway’s advice. It doesn’t matter if you have a little extra time, find that place where you still have some juice left and just stop. If you really need to keep going, go over the code you just wrote and refactor a bit. Or look at the next step enough to get pumped about it, but don’t write any code. When you get up and walk away from your computer, the levers in your brain will keep moving, even when you sleep through the night.

    The next morning, when you’ve had a good sleep and you’re feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before. When you come to the interesting place and you know what is going to happen next, go on from there and stop at another high point of interest. That way, when you get through, your stuff is full of interesting places and when you write a novel you never get stuck and you make it interesting as you go along. Every day go back to the beginning and rewrite the whole thing and when it gets too long, read at least two or three chapters before you start to write and at least once a week go back to the start. That way you make it one piece.

    More sound advice. When you start up again fresh, instead of jumping straight into a problem, go back over the work you did the day previous. Take 10 or 15 minutes and tweak little things, just enough to get the ball rolling. When you start developing the next step, you’ll already be in a good place. And by going back over code you’ve written before, you can make sure to keep things fluid and connected.

    I’ve started to do this (when possible) and it feels really code. All of this, of course, requires nice blocks of time devoted to your tasks, not distracted by email and social media and meetings. That can be tough, but it is well worth it. You might not write For Whom the Bell Tolls, but your code will be a lot better for it. Give it a go.

  • Bringing Back the Personal Site

    There have been quite a few articles recently about the importance of the personal site, and the blogging community. It’s a sentiment I’m super excited about.

    Rian Van Der Merwe has probably the simplest point. Blogs are the front page of the internet, and it’s their freedom that gives them their strength.

    All this to say that I think it’s time we bring blogging and personal sites back. Some of my favorite sites are the ones that give me a glimpse into everything a person is interested in… It’s a way to get to know someone through their interests, and to learn a bunch of things along the way. So I invite you not just to follow along here as I expand into topics beyond design and technology, but to start your own personal blog up again if you’ve been neglecting it for a while.

    Tom McFarlin pointed out that a personal site was a great way to ensure that you own your own data, so that it can outlive and outgrow the third party, walled gardens we’re all used to.

    Imagine being able to continue sharing information, but also continuing to own all of the information for yourself by simultaneously bringing it back into a database into an area you own.

    Pretty exciting, right? At least for those of us who are tin foil hat types.

    Reacting to Twitter’s plan to keep long form content on their own site, Mandy Brown discussed the magic of the hyperlink and the journey that is the open web.

    In addition to places to talk… they have also been places to venture off from—you start in your feed, but you end up in a browser, half a dozen clicks away. If everything comes to your feed instead, will you never leave? Will this be like working in one of those startup buildings with their own coffee houses and cafeterias and laundry services, where the streets outside could flood and you wouldn’t notice for days?

    Then, Dave Wisner lashed out at Medium, but I think more importantly, talked about the opportunities for a new blogosphere, one that is more connected then ever, (and that the WordPress REST API can certainly play a part in).

    But there is another approach, to have WordPress accept as input, the URL of a JSON file containing the source code for a post, and then do its rendering exactly as if that post had been written using WordPress’s editor. That would give us exactly what we need to have the best of all worlds. Widespread syndication and control over our own writing and archive.

    As a bit of a retort in The State of the Casual Blogger, Ghost founder John O’nolan was quick to point out that people use services like Medium because they’re easy, fun and simple. And, hey, maybe we should try that, but at the end of the day both will continue to exist side by side:

    There is more than enough room in the publishing industry for open and closed platforms to exist in harmony, catering to different types of writers with their individual advantages.

    In 2016, I want to start writing again, and sharing things as I come across them. I always want to work on tools that can help personal websites become a central hub for all of our data and content that’s currently distributed all around the internet. Looking around, I guess I’m not alone.

  • The Responsibility a WordPress User

    Last week, WP Tavern posted an article about how Matt Mullwenweg was addressing concerns over WordPress development moving too quickly. Matt more or less shrugged the question off in his State of the Word, but it is still a rising sentiment. And it’s not just a concern in the WordPress community, but in the larger web community as well.

    There was a lengthy discussion that followed the post. It’s worth a read if you’re into that kind of thing, but to me, it highlights a growing divide that gets right down to the core of what’s expected of a WordPress user. 

    Several users noted that even small changes can ripple out to larger ones or break expectations without even a remote need. Similarly, users don’t have the time or capacity to keep up with every little development and when things change they have to go through and check the changes against all of their sites and client sites, then update tutorials, then let their clients know. Every. single. time.

    Others, including a handful of core committers, pointed out (rightfully so) that even small changes are heavily considered, and that they often solicit feedback about these things on places like WP Tavern and mailing lists.

    The response was that these where places developers and coders hang out and WordPress users can’t be expected to check every little thing. But of course, if a site is code to WordPress conventions, it shouldn’t break anyway. And so maybe we all need to just trust WordPress a bit more.

    And so on.

    I’m (over)generalizing. But time and time again, we see mention of two groups. The first are the end users, the Average Joe with a laptop and a dream. The second are the developers, programmers on the bleeding edge of web applications. So really, the conversation comes down to what is the responsibility of the WordPress user? Is it the user’s job to ensure that their site is up to date, or it WordPress’ job to ensure that nothing ever breaks on existing sites? That’s a trick question, but it’s part of a continuing identity crisis in the WordPress community.

    At this point, WordPress is trying to handle two pretty distinct use-cases. For the end users, a better admin experience, a fast install, and a quality controlled theme and plugin marketplace are of utmost importance. For the coder, extendability, speed of updates, and frankly, a trendy toolset are held in highest esteem. The article’s discussion focused on finding a balance and a place to draw the line between these two groups. The central theme being:

    How can we maintain a strong pace of development with new features, while still leaving things simple (and relatively unchanged) and for the average user?

    Wrong question. To pit two user types against one another implies some sort of mutual exclusion. It obfuscates the nature of the web and website development. And it puts the community at odds with one another.

    Think about some of the things that WordPress does well out of the box. User authentication, media management, commenting, routing, and a pretty well thought out admin interface to boot. None of these components are good for just one group. In fact, a lot of the differences between these groups is just about how we want to render HTML on a page. But it’s the open web all the way down.

    Let’s stop defining the “average” WordPress user. Let’s work on ways to elevate the WordPress user instead of insulting their intelligence at every turn. Let’s drop the assumption that these users don’t have the will or interest to learn more about how their site comes together. We don’t need to speak in techno-babble or build confusing interfaces. We can use the WordPress admin and site building process as teachable moments, to educate users on the types of things they can do. We can find better ways to reach out to everybody that uses WordPress and gather feedback. The WordPress core community is already working on this, and of course, they could always use some help.

    We make it sound as if the REST API is only useful for NodeJS wielding front-end developers. What about the user that wants to use it to wire WordPress to Facebook, or connect to a third-party app, but doesn’t know how? WordPress just brought responsive image potential to 25% of the web. That’s a win for everybody. We have whole teams working on accessibility and localization. There’s no one group that benefits from any of the work that’s done.

    As WordPress continues to grow, it will be its diversity of spirit and community that keep it alive. Take a look around at the next WordPress event that you’re at and note the multitude of voices and opinions. Remember that the role of the WordPress user is to make websites, and love doing it. We should encourage that.