Musings

Iteration > from scratch

I’m increasingly convinced that it’s usually a bad decision to start from scratch.

There are a lot of reasons behind this belief, but the primary one for me is: Usually the old way is doing pretty well. Rather than risk losing what is already going well in a full redesign, it’s usually better to focus on improving what’s lacking. Secondly, starting from something causes one to avoid the blank page syndrome.

This rule of thumb applies to product-level thinking all the way down to code implementation itself. Following this rule of thumb and avoiding redesigns may make you much more efficient and able to ship more.

I was skimming Hacker News and read this article about microfeatures. This blog already had several of these features, but one I didn’t think about adding until I read the article is an icon to visually indicate external links. As you can tell, I added this feature to my blog!

My pre-Subsonic era

Remember the days when all the music you owned was on some hardware in your home (computer, iPod Shuffle, CD, etc.)? Before streaming was the norm every person had to be their own music curator.

I never stopped doing that. I’ve always had music that was not on every streaming services: music from NewGrounds, music I made, custom edits of others’ music (mostly just cutting out sections of songs), or music that are only available on one streaming service. This made me never want to transition to streaming services as the primary way that I listened to my own music.

The Stanley Parable

Have you played The Stanley Parable? I highly recommend it if you haven’t.

The Stanley Parable’s gameplay is simple. Most of the gameplay is just walking around, experiencing a somewhat dull office environment, and occasionally interacting with an object or two while a narrator (a non-playable character or NPC) narrates. The player repeats the “same” scenario again and again.

However, depending on the player’s choices and overall state of the game, the scenario will likely change in some way. Variations can include the narrator saying something different, a new opportunity or decision being available, or a different ending.

I’ve now been married to my lovely wife, Avery, for over 5 years! I’m so thankful for her and for our marriage.

We decided to throw a party in celebration of this milestone with some of our friends at our apartment in NYC. We made it more unique using a theme + technology!