“What is Success?” by Evan Czaplicki

What people said

ssivark · 2019-02 · Recommendation

Agreed; I think it's important to realize that a naive bias for action/productivity is not always the best thing. It's imperative to cultivate a good sense of what is worth doing, otherwise one will just produce a lot that will be irrelevant at best or garbage at worst. There are many "productive" people, but a question worth asking is how many of those actions result in lasting value, however you choose to qualify that. A lot of competent and productive people leave lasting negative value, due to misdirected efforts. For some definitions, spending a weekend building sand castles with kids might have more lasting value than working on a coding project. Don't let more visible metrics of productivity (eg: number of Github projects, HN points, etc.) cloud your judgement. If you want to step back and think about this matter (one productive use of the weekend ;-)), I really like the talk by Evan Czaplicki (Elm creator/designer) on "What is success?" which might provide some food for thought [1]. To clarify, doing only things that are worth doing doesn't imply holding back from producing/practicing because you're not yet good enough. I was referring more to the direction than the quantum in that direction. See what Ira Glass said about taste and practice [2]. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]

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ssivark · 2018-08 · Recommendation

Interesting observation by Aaron Swartz. That could happen because the barrier to entry for adding to a text blurb is much lower than that for contributing to a code base — maybe because we practice the former for a decade in school. For code, ease of access (edit ability) is non-obvious and therefore, an important axis along which to evaluate open source projects. So, funnily enough, I agree with you because the data you quoted for Wikipedia is much less likely to apply to code :-) Btw, I recently came across a talk by Evan Czaplicki (creator of Elm lang) on “What is success?” for an open source project like Elm, and he raises some interesting points about how measuring projects by Github activity is strongly biased by a model of how the larger Javascript community works: [VIDEO]

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antouank · 2018-07 · Recommendation

Why is the pace of releases an important metric for using a programming language? Focus on code quality, and maintenance simplicity. If anything, being able to use the same version for x years and having it be consistently better than any JS library/framework I used, means that the work done is of high quality. Maybe you should watch Evan's talks from various Elm conferences ( search on youtube, for example [VIDEO] ) He addresses that concern that some people have, and why it has the pace it has. As I understand it, it's better to do things right and take as long as it needs, rather than hurry and ship fancy things just to ship them. Elm is perfectly production ready as is, and beats any JS stack for me. Both in code quality and maintenance cost.

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