Abandoned doesn't have to be forever. As I got older I had a longer time horizon and more skill, and found I was picking up and finishing projects I'd laid aside decades earlier.
Now when I put something aside I know there's a chance I might pick it up again in ten years. There wasn't much evidence of that when I was twenty-five.
It's been one of the best things for me about middle age.
Totally. It’s usually a lack of time, lack of energy, general ‘life getting in the way’, that leads me to drift away from a side-project.
These factors can always be reversed. And (whisper it) a bit of vibe-coding can also help unstick a project that ground to a halt because the next step was dull implementation rather than exciting creation.
Sometimes also the project is just 'done'. I many years ago made a windows screensaver (never released to anyone else). Just so I could have a '2001' screen saver. Basically in the background of the movie was all these screens flashing just weird status stuff. It was a cool aesthetic I kinda liked. Spent many weeks getting it to flash 'just right' and have the right animations for the right feel. Then LCD screens basically killed any need to have a screen saver. As basically instant on/off meant there was no reason to have the monitor running all the time. So the project was done.
As someone who feels stressed about not feeling able to finish the side projects I have (that is, working on my music player, learn Arabic, and learning to draw), this is a very refreshing take. Thank you for this.
Last time I looked into this (last week, I think) it was a big wad of nothing. The people had disappeared over a span of many years. They weren't tied to any particular program, employer, or even any particular area of study, just “uh, tech stuff”. Some of them were technical experts, some weren't; one was an administrative assistant. One was killed by a campus shooter who also killed two students.
Typical example: “In the years since, several others connected to JPL have also died or disappeared: Frank Maiwald, a specialist in space research, died in Los Angeles in 2024 at 61.”
If the weather service starts an investigation into Tuesday’s rain shower, that should be reported. But if that rain shower was completely within the normal range of weather for that location and time of year, that should also be part of the reporting. This article takes everything from the government at face value.
The point was that Amazon wasn't independent from the frenzied, leveraged land grab that characterized the .COM bubble. Like many other companies, they were hiring aggressively until the bubble burst. Whether or not the companies went bust, a lot of people lost their jobs in a short time.
XV was excellent, and had some features I've never seen anywhere else. For example, it had a control panel that would allow you to take part of the color space and map it uniformly to a different part of the color space, for example, turning all the reds (and just the reds) green.
When my kid, now almost 22, was very small, she would sit on my lap in front of the computer, with XV displaying a picture of Elmo. “Green Elmo!” she would demand. I would adjust the sliders to turn the reds green, and we would laugh uproariously at green Elmo. Next it would be “Purple Elmo!”, and we would laugh even harder.
That control panel was really great! Particularly for scanning, it was nice to be able to adjust some of the color curves slightly to correct the scanned image.
However, one thing I REALLY used that control panel for was greyscale images, you could adjust the curve so that things that were barely legible in the image suddenly popped way out. Almost like that trick of rubbing a pencil across a blank page to reveal what someone wrote on the page above it. Or smaller adjustments just to make a greyscale more uniform.
There's something so appealing about those fvwm window borders, aliased font, crisp graphics, and the simple and intuitive UI of xv. There's nothing jumping at you to get your attention, no ambiguous UI elements and dark patterns, just a well designed and functional GUI. We truly lost something along the way, as modern GUIs are rarely this user friendly.
Wouldn't you love to see that rendered with antialiasing at Retina resolution, but the same on-screen real size as it was back on a 17" 800x600 monitor? I bet it would look delightful.
Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it.
If a dev produces value for the company, and then the company can automate away the least valuable part of the dev's job, the dev is now more valuable. Why would tbe company get rid of them just at that moment?
Well, some will, because some companies are badly-run. Others will take advantage of the opportunity.
> Or it might mean they produce more valuable product and more of it and therefore need more devs to do it.
You're assuming unbounded demand for whatever product the company is producing. If demand for their product is bounded, having 1 dev produce the output of 5 devs means that the company is going to have devs simply sitting around doing nothing for most of the day.
> If a dev produces value for the company, and then the company can automate away the least valuable part of the dev's job, the dev is now more valuable.
I don't follow this argument - there is a practical limit to how much development a company requires. In the past they may have had a team of 10 to satisfy that limit. If the limit is satisfied by a team of 2 the company... does what exactly?
Every company I have ever worked for has wanted to produce more better stuff to sell for more money. Some couldn't because they were resource constrained.
Where are these businesses that only ever want to sell the same amount of the same stuff forever?
In companies I've worked for, Sales has often come to management saying things like:
* I couldn't sell our product because our competitor's has a certain feature. How soon can we have that feature?
* I can't make any new sales, but prospective customers keep telling me they need a solution for a similar problem. Could we expanded our product line?
* Some customers could be using a certain feature of our product, but they find it too confusing. What could we do about this?
* A big customer told me they have a problem our current product doesn't solve, so I told them we would be able to solve it by the beginning of next month
As you say, the sales department is the driver of development work, not vice versa.
I'm currently in the sales channel, and all customers say things like this, then back off the minute a quote is sent through. It's so common it's even easy to spot now:
1. When a manager at some client says "How much will it costs us for you to add $FOO to the product?" I don't even bother updating the sales forecast with the quote I send them.
2. When they say "How soon can we have this?", that's when I actually update the sales forecasts.
So if your sales guys are saying "Look, customer said they'd go with us if only we had $FOO", they're failing the Mom Test[1] - the person they spoke just didn't want to be too negative, didn't know how to say "No" to a charming and likeable person[2], etc.
Sales is a function of the demand in the market. When the demand is (for example) 200 units/m of something, doubling your output does not let you sell 400 units/m.
Also, it sounds that your argument is for software products only, which is a tiny part of the economy. I was really talking about companies that sell non-software products/services - their sales is not limited by software development, it's limited by their market reach.
Even if those companies doubled their developer headcount, it'll have pretty much zero impact on revenue.
I mean, look, I can see you're arguing in good faith here, so I'm trying to do the same, but IME productivity simply doesn't have any effect on revenue, all it can do is lower costs.
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[1] This is such a short and valuable read, that I recommend it to everyone I meet who is trying to do sales.
[2] If you're not charming or likeable, then you shouldn't be in sales in the first place.
If you liked this, you will be delighted to learn about the “Triangle of U”: the common brassicas are not just tetraploid, they are Frankensteinian mashups of earlier diploid species with different numbers of chromosomes!
Yeah the family is pretty unique for not relying on mycorrhizal fungi but it does still rely on other fungi like Serendipita indica which is a basidiomycete fungus and acts as a facultative endophyte. Meaning it can live on its own in the soil but it can also develop inside plant roots and play many of the same roles mycorrhizal fungi play.
It's actually at the center of a lot of research attention right now for its potential to act as a booster for vegetables that DON'T make traditional mycorrhizal associations
Citrons, Pomelos, and True Manderins are the progenitor wild species that were hybridized to give us everything from clementines to grapefruit to key limes and more
Now when I put something aside I know there's a chance I might pick it up again in ten years. There wasn't much evidence of that when I was twenty-five.
It's been one of the best things for me about middle age.
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