I'm very much an environmentalist and am very concerned about climate change, and I feel like this article completely put me at ease about sea level rise. I suspect this was the opposite of the intent.
I feel like in comparison to intensified weather phenomenon and especially heat waves, sea level rise sound very manageable.
Author here. That was definitely not my intent! How can a sea level rise of potentially 1.6 metres (approx 5 feet) within the next 75 years, possibly put you at ease, or sound "very manageable"?!
While I can’t speak for GP, I had a similar reaction - though admittedly I wouldn’t describe it as “relieved,” more of an “okay, good to know this isn’t anywhere near the top of the priority list” feeling.
Essentially, in comparison to the other potential/likely effects of climate change I’m aware of (mass deaths of pollinators causing a collapse of the global food infrastructure, large percentages of the world’s arable land becoming non-viable leading to mass famine, heat waves bringing lethal wet-bulb temperatures to large populated areas, collapse of the AMOC, increased wars and global conflict due to space pressure, large-scale droughts and water scarcity, etc) it just doesn’t seem that bad. It’s awful and terrifying, to be clear, but it doesn’t really compare to some of the other effects we’re going to be dealing with over the same timeframe.
Fair enough. My point in penning the article was simply: "sea level rise to date has been not much, sea level rise yet to occur is a lot". I don't disagree with your argument, that "a whole lot more sea level rise" may be the least of our problems. Although, sea level rise is interrelated with many of the other effects that you mentioned. It will result in a loss of land (duh). A lot of that lost land will be once-very-fertile land. So it will be a big part of the food insecurity picture. Increased salinity will be another bad one, and most of that extra salt will come from the risen-up sea getting into fresh water tables. And that in turn will be a big cause of fresh water scarcity. So, sea level rise is about much more than just "millions of houses (and some entire countries!) will be under water".
Logically, if sea level rise somewhere of 5-9" has resulted in imperceptible rise anywhere we care enough about to have pictures of (zero sea level rise on landmarks), then extrapolated that out to the next 100 years expected rise of 15" more, i expect there to be again almost imperceptible rise in the sea anywhere we care about.
The headline worked for me, and then it sort of teased me along with details that ultimately ended without a conclusion and a feeling of "why did I just read this?"
From memory and a little grepping of the Weekly Kiwi archives, I found: "Project Null Terminator", Aardvark, B??, Caribou, Dingo, E??, Flying Fox, Giganotosaurus, ??
Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks[1] is a delightful time capsule of 2005 software development. It includes interviews with @pg, the Reddit founders, and other delights. It's available on youtube now.
When I interviewed at Fog Creek, they had a DVD copy of Aardvark'd in a care package in my hotel room. I watched it that night, and for my interview day in the morning it felt like everyone I interviewed with was a movie star. Sneaky plan, Joel. Well executed.
FogBugz's evidence-based scheduling always resonated with me too. Back in grad school I remember writing a paper arguing how it was a fundamentally better way to manage project estimates and schedules. Curiously, even at Fog Creek, something happened over time where we kind of migrated away from using it and instead favored more kanban-style project management systems.
I think a few forces came together to diminish the relative importance of EBS in project management:
- Rapid shipping got easier; rather than uploading executables (or minting CDs!) we shifted to the SaaS model and with that, continuous delivery, etc. In this world, coordinating a "big release" became more of a marketing/communication topic than an engineering one. In the FogBugz customer base, it was the game development companies that held on to EBS the longest.
- Developer tools in general got easier and faster to use, and along with that all of our tolerance for managing timers and estimates went down. Estimation and work tracking I think are still hugely valuable, but there's an ever-higher UX bar to hit to actually have people use the software, and we want the computer to be smart enough to figure it out on its own. EBS never achieved that fluency of UX and it really needs diligent users for it to perform well.
For the last ~10 years of Fog Creek, we were largely structured so that we had core groups of developers focused on our mainstay products, like FogBugz, which were happily profitable revenue sources and could fund all of our assorted bits of inventiveness. After pushing on FogBugz and Kiln in an innovative way for a few years, we came up against an adoption wall of sorts--- changing those products to increase their user base was harder than inventing entirely new products. Trello, in many ways, represented our next stab at productivity and software development tools, and making FogBugz more Trello-like was never going to be as compelling as Trello already was. This pattern kept repeating, and so we did our best to stabilize FogBugz while inventing other sorts of things that would show us a more compelling path to growth.
Glitch was the biggest next invention and its interest and adoption so greatly outpaced what growth we could achieve in FogBugz that it make sense to reorient around it. But of course FogBugz paid the bills and Glitch wasn't doing so yet, so that lead to a VC raise for Glitch and, ultimately, a sell-off of FogBugz and Kiln.
I still love FogBugz, and all of the users of FogBugz were ultimately the seed funders of inventions like Kiln, Stack Overflow, Trello, Glitch, HASH, CoPilot, and a dozen others that we never let past internal testing. Thanks, FogBugz :-)
Fog Creek renamed to Glitch as we transitioned from being a bootstrapped product-incubation lifestyle company to a single-product VC-backed startup. I think of the Fog Creek storybook closing with that rename, since Glitch always had a very different business focus, but technically (and perhaps culturally) they're of the same lineage.
In other Joel track record exploits, he's also our co-founder over at HASH.ai [1] and a driving force behind the Block Protocol [2][3]
hash.ai and the "block protocol" sound like crypto shams. Nice to see something different, although I feel like the branding really, really makes it seem like crypto.
"Producing Artifacts" is definitely what we called that at Fog Creek, and I think our cousins at Stack may have used a different term but followed much the same spirit. I didn't realize until now that that was a term from our little software microcosm, I had assumed it was one of the terms that was known broadly in the startupverse.
I definitely came to my opinions around it through my interactions with the Business of Software conference and (later) Microconf, and I think in parallel Stack Overflow came to much the same conclusions as we did at FC. Stack also lead with something in its early days which pushed us to go further, which was that they had a "default open" policy on all their artifacts-- code, company writing, etc. This specifically was inspiring for us at FC and many of us sort of implicitly adopted it. We doubled-down on our artifact publishing, leading to a bunch of open source contributions, blog posts, conference talks, etc. Interestingly (and to your point!) I think that those public artifacts for the most part didn't impact the company very much (as much as we did try to harvest the artifacts for blogging/marketing/recruiting purposes), but they unquestionably strengthened the careers of the folks who created them.
"Make sure your work is creating artifacts; Collect and share your artifacts to multiply their impact." Remains among my top items of career advice for software folks.
In my experience, I have pointed people to a vast array of shipping (and formerly shipping) software, and even hardware. I have a StackOverflow story (check my ID) that is a mile long.
There are complete, top-to-bottom, ship-ready apps, with localization, testing, documentation, provisioning, etc. Someone can, literally, clone any of my repos, and produce a full-feature, ready-to-ship application.
I have many, many, articles and blog posts, explaining, in great detail, how I work, think, design, test, collaborate, and develop. I'm a fairly decent writer.
Also, in my experience, no one has ever actually looked at any of this, when it comes to evaluating me. I'm not famous, I'm not young, and I guess I don't "present" too well, so I assume that my work is not compelling (I think it is, but that's just me).
After a few of these, I realized that I am better off, not looking to work with someone else. Makes me sad, but accepting that was one of the best things I ever did for myself. As it turns out, I have found a team, working on a 501(c)(3) startup, that gave me a chance to develop an application. They seem happy with the work I'm doing (ecstatic, even).
These days, I never go a day without working on ship. I have been shipping for decades. My GH id is pretty much solid green (and it's not gamed). I just love to code, and there are few joys more comprehensive, than releasing product, and seeing it used.
Even my small projects (like the one I just released) involve full branding, testing, and documentation. Even my test harnesses are full release-quality applications, with localization.
It's just that, these days, I do it for myself; not someone else. I'm fortunate, in being able to do that. The scale, out of necessity, is much more humble, but it feels quite gratifying.
Yeah, I know. I just don't feel that it's constructive to complain about it. I don't deny it; I just won't let it stop me.
Despite all that, I have it real good. I am able to do work that I love (and not get paid a dime for it), and live a life that includes friends, health, wonder and joy.
I may not be a TED-talkin', man-bunned, skinny-jeans-wearin' jargonaut, but the folks that end up working with me are very, very happy to do so.
I've (not exaggerating) been shipping (as in "delivering finished product") software my entire adult life.
Thanks for sharing, Chris. Honestly it sounds to me like you're living the dream-- you're secure enough in your abilities that you can pursue the projects you're excited by rather than having to play career games as an employee for someone else. I hope it keeps working out for you :-)
Well, lots of people would write me off as an idiot for following my own muse, but I worked long and hard, to be where I am, and I don't think I could be coaxed back into the rat race again.
The biggest thing that I miss about working on tech teams, was being surrounded by people that made me feel like the dunce. Being the smartest guy in the room is overrated. If I wanted hero worship, I would have become a Cub Scout leader. It has no place in my tech work.
