These are questions for wise men with skinny arms

I wrote this in 2015, but I’m publishing it now. It goes well with my theme of technlogical risk and business rewards. A unicorn company has embraced a technology that I’ve also been following for some time and now I’m becoming concerned with the technology’s perception if this company is to fail for reasons other than their technology choices. I’m hesitant to name the company and technology to jinx it, but it doesn’t change the general effect as I’m sure this applies to other emerging technologies that have their fates locked with an unrelated business.

Working to avoid wasting time can be worse than just wasting it. The pursuit of efficiency in high-scale projects pays immediate dividends, but the exploration lost in the process could negate any of the intended gains. Messy innovation often starts as ‘wasted’ time, but’s hard to know what’s really wasted without a larger context of the problem space. The ability to tolerate failures and take risks can be well worth the loss of some implementation efforts.

Looking at projects I’ve done, it’s easy to attach a story to each one. A learning experience in a technology, a leadership role, a support position, a miscommunication, an unmet expectation. It’s easy to look back and pull something valuable out of anything that I can remember. But what about all those experiences of which I have little memory of? Were those wasted like hours of sleep I couldn’t appreciate or did it just build into a story I haven’t yet told, or a story I don’t know how to tell.

After doing mostly backend work for a number of years, I jumped back into the mayhem that is front-end web development. I had kept a careful eye on it while I was away, but never dove deeper than reading the blog posts. It’s both less bad than some would have you believe and far worse than I remembered. The problem I had was that I had forgotten so much of the arcanery.

I have at least 6 side projects, this blog is one. That count doesn’t include crafty handiwork, maintenance, or learning a new skill. I don’t have a good term for those short sessions, as they are more of a spike instead of a storied endeavor. My side projects are ideas I enjoy working on, but not necessarily complete. I think the difference between that project time investment and the time spent on things like TV seasons, video games, and random social events is an interesting dichotomy.

I used to hate doing ops, it reminds me of doing front-line IT work when I had no idea what was going on and was constantly at the whim of a developer I could never contact or understand. Once I became a developer, I didn’t give ops enough credit until I did independent work. As a developer first, I favored build over buy because I’d rather make my own mess than spend time learning someone else’s.

I’ve been focusing on people management instead of just code development. The switch to human centric processes instead of machine driven requires a real change in attitude towards what is desired and acceptable. I’ve taken a serious amount of time and attention to automate and document all of my technical processes to eliminate as much human interaction as possible. I did this ostensibly to save time in the long run, but I started appreciating it immediately for the reduced mental overhead.

After my most recent F# work, I’ve gone back to working primarily in Python and other dynamic languages. I think I’ve picked up on quite a few new problems, but I’ve also seen that the type differences alone aren’t enough to make or break Python for me. Many of my complaints about F# were tooling and consistency related, and I think Python suffers from the same problems but in very different ways.

Throughout this long learning process of building and rebuilding a program, there have been a few consistent points that I’d trip over when using F#. Some were more noticeable at the beginning and others only became irritating after repeated use. Coming from C++ I’m used to avoiding language features that are more trouble than they are worth, so I was hoping the F# didn’t have as many or as nasty ‘gotcha’ moments.

This is the next step in my journey with F# in writing a small application. I decided to undo most of the reactive extensions work and get back to using simple functions wherever possible. I had let the project sit for long enough again to come back to it with fresh eyes. I saw where I could have made the FRP code more manageable by using bigger blocks in the data stream, but I was already committed to nearly start from scratch and apply everything that I had learned since I started in the hopes of having a complete solution from a single philosophy.