Articles

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Revision as of 00:56, 28 August 2020 by Joseph (talk | contribs) (Add PermaComputing)

Articles and essays that I found on the web. These are articles of long-term value and worth re-reading.

If any of the articles are missing at the provided hyperlinks, please search the hyperlink in Internet Archive's WayBack Machine.

World-wide Web

Rediscovering the Small Web

This essay is a nostalgic trip back to the 90s when the web was still free and for the people. It wasn't taken over by the marketing departments of corporations yet. There were no gatekeepers like Google back then. The web was a bit weird but it was diverse and thriving. It was like a solarpunk version of the current corporate web. I didn't really use the WWW till about 2005, but I wish I had seen the times when the web was completely indie.


Software Engineering

Choose Boring Technology

Every organization gets 3 innovation tokens. Every cool new technology you add to your application's tech stack uses up one token. We try to keep our language choices minimal, but somehow don't apply the same principle when it comes to other parts of the tech stack. A lot of our old boring tools can serve more than their primary purpose. You have to read the second page of the manual. Also, the old boring tools fail in predictable ways. New tools fail in unpredictable ways and are much riskier. Their unknown issues are far harder to deal with than the known issues of old boring tools.

PermaComputing

Applying the principles of PermaCulture to computing. How to give computers a meaningful and sustainable place in a human civilization that has a meaningful and sustainable place in the planetary biosphere.


Productivity

Zettelkasten note-taking method

The Zettelkasten (paper + box) note-taking method uses a system of linking together ideas. Each idea is written on one note. Notes are tagged and there's a way to list all notes of a tag. The notes also form a web. They are linked to each other. Most of the popular note-taking apps do most of these, except the linking.

GTD in 15 minutes

The GTD system needs a revisit from time to time. The book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen is full of details that one might forget within a few months of reading the book. It is nice to have a refresher to go through every once in a while.


Main website: https://zettelkasten.de/

Distributed Systems

Local-first Software

Local-first software doesn't rely on being connected to a server to be able to do its basic functions. All data is stored locally first and then synchronized. The authors say that collaborative writes in local-first software can be achieved through the use of CRDTs.

My notes: Local-first Software