DEV Community: Lucas Gonze

paradoxical products (ephemerapost)

Lucas Gonze — Wed, 26 May 2021 18:36:46 +0000

I have not been appreciative enough of impossible goals, like autonomous time-telling networks. I have pursued achievable goals at the expense of interesting ones. Paradoxical goals are especially powerful.

A long time ago I was in love with the problem of decentralized but ordered claims. How can you put things in a definite order without any authority? I filled a notebook with ideas.

After a year or so I decided there was no definite win for me personally. How would this problem help make me a living? I am not an academic. I am not a writer. I am a developer, and the problem I was in love with was not a good idea for a product.

So I stopped.

15 years later I realize how inspiring that paradoxical problem was. If I had kept going it might well have - paradoxically - earned me a better living than the tactical projects I switched over to.

This is an emphemeral blog entry: I always rewrite the same one. It is a long-lasting mount point for writing that comes and goes.

Counting the Internet

Lucas Gonze — Tue, 25 May 2021 19:17:27 +0000

It is a struggle even to know your limitations, much less engineer systems bigger than you can imagine, but that is your own problem. The size of the Internet isn't constrained by understanding.

How many packets are received in a second? You can count them - not easy, but not impossible - but you can't imagine the number. Now picture the number of packets in an hour, day, year, decade.

What does a decade's worth of packets look like? It's an immense flow, and it's only a small part of the total.

The first packets were exchanged in 1973, 48 years ago at this writing. What is the size of the Internet? One way to answer that is to count all the packets since 1973 to your present moment.

The beauty of this method is that it fits in a neat mental package. If you can think it, if your machinery can handle it at all, that is a victory.

To Succeed Love Process

Lucas Gonze — Sat, 15 May 2021 16:27:51 +0000

As a product designer I often have to stiff-arm impatient alphas on the left side of sywx' curve asking for simplicity this way: "just make it simple". Just. "What you don't get," they say, "is that all this labcoat gobbledygook language about running experiments is a-complexificating an issue that a goat could solve in ten minutes."

I just have to hope for time to keep running fancy experiments until I find the simple solution. One falls to the left, the next to the right, the next to the left but closer, the last hits the target.

The difference between left-side simplicity and right-side simplicity is autotelic love of the process. Workmanship, patience, insight, the slow accumulation of skill are ends in themselves.