flossing
Table of Contents
1. Flossing
Organization is incremental, has to be performed opportunistically, because “organizing things” is one of those nice-to-have things that people never get around to ⇒ it represents time-consuming overhead work with no clear return or impact, just like flossing
1.1. Software correctness is a lot like flossing • Hillel Wayne
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/flossing/
The surrounding communities all have the same problem: they can’t get people using these techniques. They all ask “Don’t people care about correct software?” To which the insiders usually answer “programmers don’t care about correctness, they just care about shoveling out garbage to make money!”
Experienced people are willing to tolerate more inconvenience for more power.
That tolerance might be why insiders don’t see inconvenience as a serious issue and prefer “easier” explanations, like developer laziness. But inconvenience is a serious barrier to beginners and interested outsiders.
- Barriers (why people avoid “convenience” explanations for tool adoption)
- Once you’re an expert in something, it’s really easy to work around the inconveniences, so people may not even realize that things are inconvenient This is sometimes called expert blindness.
- Convenience sounds like “polish”, a nice-to-have that gets pushed to the wayside when budgets are limited. Performance and security are thrown out under time crunch, so why should usability be any different?
Similarly, in academia, UI/UX is low prestige work. Academics can’t publish papers about how they made a tool easier to use, even if improving usability would dramatically improve industry adoption. The incentive structures are all messed up. - UI/UX is really hard and requires a skill set completely distinct from the skills required to technically address software correctness. This means a lot of the core contributors and early adopters of a tool aren’t equipped to make it more convenient.
- Once you’re an expert in something, it’s really easy to work around the inconveniences, so people may not even realize that things are inconvenient This is sometimes called expert blindness.
1.2. Just-in-time Organization
1.3. Mise en place
https://fortelabs.co/blog/p-a-r-a-viii-core-principles/
The same is true for chefs: “cleaning” is not a one-time activity done late at night, with piles and piles of dirty dishes like in the movies. Mise en place is about integrating cleaning into every moment of a chef’s work, peppering the entire day with small actions that maintain the system of organization no matter how crazy things get.