The Most Interesting Tech Reads (February 2022)
The aim of this page📝 is to share the most interesting (mostly) tech reads for February 2022.
1. EXTREME PROGRAMMING 20 YEARS LATER BY KENT BECK
- Extreme Programming 20 years later by Kent Beck — YouTube
- One of my favorite talks, the often black humor and an interesting Facebook “patriotism” of 2015 is noteworthy
- Also summarized my blog post The History Of Extreme Programming, Feb 2022
2. DIGITAL ADVERTISING IN 2022
- Digital Advertising in 2022
- In a dialectical conversation with past self from 6 years ago. Adding Amazon to Google and Facebook master of digital advertising, making it a triumvirate. Witnessing this conversation from one own’s thinking of the past is another reason why longevity matters so much and as Malcolm Gladwell puts is
longevity, I have come to believe, is the most important and most often underestimated indicator of genius
— Why Paul Simon? — Meta Bulletin
3. COCKTAIL PARTY IDEAS
- Cocktail party ideas — Dan Luu
- Another contrarian piece. Dan seems to understand the old marketing adage that says something like if you want an audience start a fight:
To validate someone’s great idea see if they understand what subproblems need a solution for the problem.
4. STEWART BRAND ON STARTING THINGS AND STAYING CURIOUS
- Stewart Brand on Starting Things and Staying Curious (Ep. 142) — Conversations with Tyler
- I found this intriguing, some weird Californian marriage of socialism and capitalism that fuelled the idealism of many computer pioneers?
I don’t think people know the extent to which the mob took over (Bay Area in the 1960s). At first pornography — there was some creative pornography coming out of basically hippie artists having a good time and turning the camera on. Then the whole dope culture. “No hope without dope.” Everybody was selling or buying marijuana and these other drugs from each other. Then one of the guys, named Super Spade — his arms and legs cut off, and his torso was hung out by Ocean Beach from a tree. And this knowledge of, well, those amateur days of drug sales are gone now, and the big-time players are here in town, and “Do not f — with us.” That was the end of that. Everybody who had been selling dope and learned a little bit of business from doing it, then went into a business — legitimate business — and they were good at it. Hippies became, basically, very good commercial startup folks, partly because of that sequence of experiences.
5. NOBODY CARED ABOUT MY SPREADSHEETS
- Excel has been my passion and obsession and I consider the Excel bashing to be uninformed/opportunistic
- …but always great food for thought, here is a recent thread with Bryan Caplan’s complaining that nobody looked into his spreadsheets that served as evidence for his Case against Education
- No one cared about Bryan’s spreadsheets — Marginal REVOLUTION
- No One Cared About My Spreadsheets — Econlib
- On Bryan Caplan’s spreadsheets
- I consider to be the final verdict this
If the initial data set is small, and you don’t know that much about what kind of data you’re storing, use a highly flexible, easy-to-modify format to store it (Excel). When the data set gets bigger and/or your knowledge about the data starts to crystalize, then migrate it (Database).
6. SEBASTIAN MALLABY ON VENTURE CAPITAL
- Sebastian Mallaby on Venture Capital
- As a software/tech history fan I did enjoy the following association of Yahoo and Apple which I was not aware of previously
The first example of this is Yahoo, where Jerry Yang and David Filo were in their port-a-cabin on the Stanford campus. They thought they were building a hobby-type thing, and they were proud of Yahoo as a directory of the emerging internet. But Moritz showed up, listened, understood, and said, “This is the new Apple. You are going to make something with a quirky name. Apple was quirky, Yahoo is quirky. You’re going to have a brand, and you’re going to be the face of a new phase in tech history.” He enlarged their sense of themselves.
- On Yahoo and early search engines, see Chapter 4 of Internet History Podcast; also noting their rootedness in academia (internet before browsers was largely academic/UNIX-based and search algorithm is a major academic research problem in computer science)
- Apart from interesting info about VC I fount it interesting how he plans his career in 5-year stints (5-year research dives into a topic followed by a book on the subject)
7. WORLD WAR WIRED
Welcome to World War Wired — the first war in an interconnected world. This will be the Cossacks meeting the World Wide Web. As I said, you haven’t been here before.
- A cross-section of purely professional interests. Another version of This time it’s different, right after Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male for the mental health, but this time technology seems to have a much more positive role.
