The Japanese art of doing cool and amazing things. Surely there’s a word that just represents all of the cool and amazing things, and skills that the Japanese have for art.
Adopting a similar stance of mind yields cool things regardless of culture. I've been known to call Slackware "the shibui Linux distro". Its roughness, lack of ostentation, and exposure of command-line-centric Unix roots is why the distro is so appealing.
This also is the first thing that I thought about when reading this article. I have to admit that I found the kid's fascination with making a round shiny mud ball a bit weird. After reading this article this scene make sense.
A lot of the imagery for that article seems to be screencapped from a 2016 Nat Geo vid on Youtube[0], so if you want to see Bruce in action, check that video out.
Could be the same photographer involved in both the article and the vid.
You can make your own clay out of nearly any soil with a sort of fractional settling process.
Make very loose mud with water in a bucket, let it settle for a minute, pour off whatever is floating on the top, keep whatever hasnt settled to the bottom, let it settle for a few hours, recover the settled portion. Repeat if desired for more refinement. Wrap in cloth and hang for several hours to reduce water content.
After a short period of stirring you throw out whatever floats on the top and what sinks immediately. You keep the water with suspended particulate, you let that settle for a long period (but not too long) and throw out the water this time keeping what settled which will be clay.
You are keeping particles which settle to the bottom after one minute and before one hour (or whatever, the minimum and maximum times are adjusted to suit needs)
You just need to use clay. When I was a kid I made mud pies. But I live in Japan now so my kids make Dorodango.
I have one on my shelf here that I dug out of a river bank and made with my kids... we saved it and I shined it up by sprinkling sifted clay dust onto it and rolling it on a hard surface as it dried
Dorodango is one of my favorite metaphors for operationalizing software. Start with any codebase, no matter how naively or ineptly implemented. Grind administrators against it in production for years and inevitably it will become a smooth, shiny and stable component.
Often we talk about the power of inertia in keeping around old codebases with terrible histories. We talk about how illogical it is that we don't throw things out and start anew. There's a hidden value in a known quantity which has had blemishes polished off. With a nod to mythbusters, even a turd can shine [1] given sufficient effort. We have all dealt with many turds in the course of our careers.
It is of course ideal to polish something more valuable than a turd. Architecture can still be rotten on the inside and necessitate replacement despite having a well polished exterior process. But new systems will always be unpolished no matter how well design. In the end there is no substitute for the smoothing process of constant handling.
My metaphor for how software is actually created is Katamari Damacy (https://katamari.fandom.com/wiki/Katamari_Damacy): a giant ball of random objects that keep getting bigger, and more and more random crap just sticks to the ball. That's all there really is to it.
The metaphor can be refined; there are balls that grow well and balls that fall apart. You reminded me of the old quote from R1RS 1978 (https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6283) page 29:
> APL is like a diamond. It has a beautiful crystal structure; all of its parts are related in a uniform and elegant way. But if you try to extend this structure in any way — even by adding another diamond — you get an ugly kludge. LISP, on the other hand, is like a ball of mud. You can add any amount of mud to it [...] and it still looks like a ball of mud!
> Start with any codebase, no matter how naively or ineptly implemented. Grind administrators against it in production for years and inevitably it will become a smooth, shiny and stable component.
Kind of the culmination of the "Big Ball of Mud" architecture, innit.
The only lesson in suffering under your job duties as a sysadmin is "don't do that". There is little glory in polishing production poo, even if you can. You should be showing a better way, not reinforcing bad decisions because you are a superhero.
I would say there's little glory in quietly polishing poo, in smoothing over problems without visibility. I agree it's not good to suffer in silence.
However, the political reality in any large company means shit will be shipped on a regular basis. This isn't unique to the dev/sysadmin roles. This happens in every area of business.
There's enormous glory to be had in visibly polishing turds - in mitigating well known, well communicated problems. Prevention is very important, yes, but it is not a panacea.
No joke, back in like 1985 or so when I was in high school I found a book in the public library that was a tour of various computer languages. Like all of them. PL/I, SNOBOL, Lisp, Smalltalk, the old ones from ancient times. Each had a sample program and a few pages discussing the features of the language.
The description for Forth had 'ball of mud' in it. That bottom-up design where you start with a tiny core and keep adding little bits and smoothing them out then adding more over and over.
I always thought it was more like a snowball like in making a snowman sort of accumulation. But now... that final step when you have that last written that you give the command and the system removes all the bits that never get referenced from your application, squishes it down, polishes it up and spits out an executable.
Retaining and maintaining a legacy can be the right path when the external processes that interface with them are heavily laden with bureaucracies or qualifications that are slow or expensive to change. Accounting is a great example, as are power plants and telecoms. But it’s important to recognize in industries with rapidly evolving standards, throwing things out can be the answer. This came back to famously bite Joel Spolsky in his defense of legacy code [1] where he argued against Netscape’s complete rewrite, which we now know today as Mozilla.
The article is interesting and well-written, but the author's initial in the sticky navbar difficults the reading. I hope that he notices that, but then again many people pay for an online journal and have a worse reading experience, so it's not that bad.
When you see videos about this they can be quite complicated - they talk about a "core" which includes stuff like straw or hair, and then a shell.
If you're making dorodango you can ignore all of that. You'll just need to dry it out slowly to avoid cracks.
When you make them you'll want to experiment with burnishing at different stages of dryness or with different tools.
If you live in a place with low levels of clay in the soil you can just dump a load of dirt in a bucket, fill the bucket with water and swirl it around. That gets clay from the dirt into the water. You then pour the water off into another bucket and let the water evaporate to leave the clay.
It was fun, they made great gifts. They're extremely fragile, I think one of the three I kept has survived, but won't know for sure until I get back into my storage unit.
HN to me has always been about exploration and craft. This usually ends up manifesting as technology news, but particularly interesting crafts (or explorations) feel like fair game.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDSee1-4bUI (How to make...)
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfBGGuezus8 (Shiny Graphite Ball made from Clay and Graphite)
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7wHTmKtjQ (Textures in Dorodango)