I had two interactions recently that surprised me in light of how I think about this blog.
In the first interaction, someone referred to me as a “performance expert.” Thank you, that’s very kind of you. I actually don’t think of myself as a performance expert. Maybe one can argue that from some perspective, I have more expertise than some other people. But in the grand scheme of things? No, definitely not. Most of the performance-related things I do happen squarely in the “well this is silly” realm, and not in the “oh, I know something clever” realm.
In the other interaction, someone mentioned that my observations were “not exactly novel.” Oh, I know, and no offense taken. Judging my actions or writing by novelty would be terribly depressing. Honestly, most things I write here you could probably get out of ChatGPT, if you provided the right inputs. If you casually ask ChatGPT about all the things I write here, we should probably be friends! Maybe what I write is still novel to someone, but even that is not something I specifically aim for. Mandatory XKCD (1053):
So if I don’t write things here to promote my expertise, or to show the awesome-and-definitely-novel things I learned, then what is this page? I can tell you: These are my travel logs from stumbling through existence, pointing at things and wondering whether it would be interesting to take them apart, or to play with them, or to maybe just think about them. I enjoy things that are absurd (like big software doing things comically slowly), and I enjoy understanding things, and I enjoy writing about them, because that is an opportunity to interact with others out there before in 80 years or so we will all most definitely be dead.
As you can then imagine, I do not write to speak about performance or software with “authority.” There are a lot of people out there that speak with a claim of authority. To be honest, I am not sure I identify with that crowd. That’s not even saying that I disagree with what they are saying, or that they are bad people: they are merely people that have understood how the internet works and are behaving accordingly to maximize their reach and impact. So what’s the alternative to speaking with authority? Maybe: Speaking with curiosity. Saying, “hey, that’s weird, I wonder why that is?” or “I wonder what happen when I push this button?”
All of this incidentally works well with some of the goals I have set out late last year (Overthinking? No, underdoing): Try more things, do more things, spend more time on action and less on thinking.
To that end, I have recently gotten into a habit to attempt things even when I have previously convinced myself by purely theoretical considerations that it is not going to work/is not worth doing/can’t work/etc.. Even in the cases where I am right, I often learn a ton by just trying anyway: new tradeoffs, compromises, deeper understanding for why it doesn’t work, alternative approaches that fail for interesting reasons. So, I will ask questions where I think I already know the answers to, and maybe try things that should not work, even if it makes me look like an idiot. That’s sort of a feature here, as I pursue my quest to become a little bit more naïve.