Jonathan B. Thompson

You start to feel like you’re in a real life IRC channel at work when a conversation starts out with the corona virus and mutates through several things, ending with the topic of drywall screwing speed contest winners. Or, just another Friday morning working amidst tech geeks.

Seek to correct your understanding of what someone said instead of tearing them down before what someone said is used to tear you down because your understanding was not correct.

A twitter discussion on commenting code had a reader completely misunderstanding my comment regarding useless comments being worse than no comments, code being only truth, thus unwittingly proving my point. Hope they can read source code more accurately than comments!

Making a decision is like writing to a journaled filesystem: first you say what you’re going to do, then you do what you said you’d do. If you’ve not done what you said you’d do, you’ve not fully decided.

Beware of those that think in ways that blow your mind and blow your mind in ways you’d never think.

Am I the only one that finds it odd to think a so-called “populist” leader lost the popular vote? Seems some terms are abused when seen from that perspective.

Being embarrassed by something that is an asset makes you the liability.

Your wardrobe is incomplete without a steak tunic in your closet.

Cooking without spices is a thymeless tradition practiced by many.

Cooks follow recipes to make meals from ingredients. Chefs create recipes from basic principles. Masters can put it all together into a feast for the senses.

If you hear/read your manager refer to underlings using “fungible” it’s time to demonstrate managers are fungible.

If you make a movie about a semi truck, you’d be negligent to not have a trailer.

Creating beautiful music heard by nobody is like casting your inner light into a black hole.

Pareto Design: a product that has 80% of effort used to support the most commonly used use-cases and enable users to address the 20% of use-cases people need via extensibility instead of trying to be all things to all users. Microsoft Excel with VBA is a great example.

Everybody can be caught by surprise: what’s surprising is how many think otherwise.

I sign work emails with “Best Regards” or perhaps “Thanks” along with contact info, and twice I’ve almost gone too far with a typo where the g became a t. That would be awkward if it got sent...

Why aren’t handcuffs instead called fiendship bracelets?

By the time you realize the present has arrived it has become the past.

I’d love to know who decided TerminateThread should be exposed to external developers and why: if your app is written correctly the API has no reason to exist, but otherwise calling it is almost always a case of entering into a murder-suicide pact for your app and perhaps system.

When you don’t risk failure your successes don’t count for much.