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May You Always

James Socol

Jan 6, 2007

Happy New Year!

I doubt many people read this, but if you do, have a good January.

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A photo of the word Debt spraypainted on a brick wall: multicolor shading, bubble letters.

Tech Debt, Depreciation, and Features

There was some discourse on Twitter (yes, it's still there, for now) yesterday about the nature of Technical Debt and how effective it is as a metaphor. The real seed was the new boss arguing with—and eventually firing—one of the few remaining engineers on the Android team. But
Nov 15, 2022 3 min read

Root Cause, Proximal Cause, or Least Effort to Remediate

I am no fan of "Root Cause Analysis." It's one of the many terms or concepts that software has borrowed from manufacturing—while ignoring the subsequent 70 years of research into human factors and resilience engineering. However, like Lorin, I admit that it has some value during incident response. It's
Nov 14, 2022 1 min read
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Open Source Subway Map

If you don't actually want to read this whole post (no shame at all) the tl;dr is that I'm going to try using a GitHub project to organize and hold myself accountable for open source maintenance. Mental health is a weird thing, sometimes. Like, oh I don't know, everyone,
Nov 5, 2022 3 min read
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