Member-only story
Every computer program is also a persuasive essay & a work of interactive performance art, and if you don’t consider it through those lenses when writing it you run the risk of persuading people of something you don’t agree with. A lot of my criticisms of Medium & Mastodon basically come down to this: there’s an admirable and explicitly-stated philosophy that hasn’t really been allowed to transform deeper technical decisions, resulting in a contradiction between intent and function, because certain things are assumed to be ‘the way things are’ instead of a decision.
In computing, nothing is ‘the way things are’ (save the halting problem, NP-completeness, & other similar mathematical restrictions taught to every freshman CS student). Not only that, but doing things the right way yourself is usually actually easier than using pre-made components that are a poor fit for the problem — standard components actually waste more time in many cases. Some baseline willingness to expand the mind is a necessary skill for anyone who identifies as ‘technical’, and with this baseline, use of poor tooling is rarely justified on the grounds of engineer-time: it creates the kind of technical debt that reliably produces technical bankruptcy (as the resulting code must inevitably be torn down to minimize damage).
The two key components to this kind of failure are an emphasis on sunk cost (manifesting as an unwillingness to reinvent the wheel or an exaggerated sense of the value of existing third party tools) and a lack of imagination (manifesting as an…
