Skip to main content

I'm often wrong

Developers should read Ralph Waldo Emerson. By read, I mean listen to a 30-minute podcast and claim expertise.

Emerson says being too opinionated is harmful. The cliche in tech is that the view from the window of kosher technologies shifts quickly. The result is that I've been mostly wrong about any given technical issue in my career. I'm not saying this to be unpretentious but rather a fact. 

Given I'm wrong and write poor code at a given moment is not to be interpreted that something is left permanently broken. The great thing about having loose opinions is that I'm always open to implementing a better solution. It may still ultimately be sub-par but better than the original.

Ralph Waldo Emerson says that we should not imitate others. That may not end up as a quote in a programming book, though. No one likes a genius, and a clever thinker can be an insult in a coding context. Seeing something you have seen thousands of times in your editor is usually desirable.

Widen the lens to look at your deployment setup. Which blog post was it that inspired building that? Would something not being a projection from someone else's organization chart be better? Maybe, maybe not.

Accepting that the half-life of a fact is short can lead to two paths. According to Emerson, having loose opinions can transform one's thinking toward true wisdom. If an individual is not willing to turn their coat and rather cling on to past decisions, they might become an undesirable colleague.

Source: https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-164-transcript

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful.  Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...
Post a Comment
Read more

PydanticAI + evals + LiteLLM pipeline

I gave a tech talk at a Python meetup titled "Overengineering an LLM pipeline". It's based on my experiences of building production-grade stuff with LLMs I'm not sure how overengineered it actually turned out. Experimental would be a better term as it is using PydanticAI graphs library, which is in its very early stages as of writing this, although arguably already better than some of the pipeline libraries. Anyway, here is a link to it. It is a CLI poker app where you play one hand against an LLM. The LLM (theoretically) gets better with a self-correcting mechanism based on the evaluation score from another LLM. It uses the annotated past games as an additional context to potentially improve its decision-making. https://github.com/juho-y/archipylago-poker
Post a Comment
Read more

Careful with externalTrafficPolicy

On a project I am working on is hosted in an EKS cluster with the NGINX ingress controller (the one maintained by Kubernetes). It is deployed using it's official official Helm chart, which I realized, after a lengthy debugging session, was a mistake. The initial setup I aimed to improve had several flaws. Firstly, we were using the AWS Classic Load Balancer in front of the nginx ingress in the cluster, which has been deprecated for some time (years?). Continuing to use it makes little sense to us. The second issue was that we were only running one(!) nginx pod, which is quite sketchy since the exposed web services had essentially no high availability.  I switched to the Network Load Balancer (NLB), which was straightforward - I just needed to change the ingress-nginx service annotation to specify the load balancer type as NLB: service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-type: nlb However, increasing the replica count turned out to be tricky. When I bumped it up to two, I began to ...
Post a Comment
Read more