Clark Kampfe

Fleeing One Step Ahead of Fascism

• "Leo Szilard: How quickly things move you can see from this: I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April, 1933. The train was empty. The same train on the next day was over-crowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don't have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier than most people. This is all that it takes."

• "Werner Heisenberg: The golden age of atomic physics was now fast drawing to an end. In Germany political unrest was increasing. For a time I tried to close my eyes to the danger, to ignore the ugly scenes in the street. But when all is said and done, reality is stronger than all our wishes."

• "Otto R. Frisch: Disturbing rumors were rife. Some of my Jewish friends had warned me not to be out at night because Jews had been beaten up in the dark. I remember walking home late one night when I heard fast footsteps ring out in the empty street; I wondered if it was one of those anti-semitic brutes on the rampage. Of course to break into a run would have given me away at once; I kept my speed though the footsteps rapidly came nearer and finally pulled up beside me. A burly fellow in S.A. uniform pulled off his cap and greeted me with great politeness; it was the son of my landlady. He explained to me that he had to join this para-military force because otherwise he would not have been allowed to complete his law studies; there were many like him who disliked the Nazis but couldn't afford not to join."

Locality of Behaviour (LoB)

• "It is difficult to know exactly what the button does without a total knowledge of the code base."

• "The LoB will often conflict with other software development principles."

If Not React, Then What?

• "These are not serious people. You do not have to entertain arguments offered without evidence."

• "Frameworkism preaches that the way to improve user experiences is to adopt more (or different) tooling from within the framework's ecosystem. This provides adherents with something to do that looks plausibly like engineering, but isn't."

• "Non-idiomatic patterns that unlock wins for users are bugs to be squashed, not insights to be celebrated."

• "Realism requires reckoning with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be."

• "All of this casts the product manager's role in stark relief. Instead of suggesting an endless set of experiments to run (poorly), they must define a product thesis and commit to an understanding of what success means in terms of user success. This will be uncomfortable. It's also the job. Graciously accept the resignations of PMs who decide managing products is not in their wheelhouse."

• "Teams that get stuck tend to fail to apply controls over which team members can approve changes to critical-path payloads."

• "This is why it's caustic to product success and brand value to allow a culture of disrespect towards users in favour of venerating developers (e.g., "DX")"

• "Managers trapped in these systems experience a sinking realisation that choices made in haste are not so easily revised. Complex, inscrutable tools introduced in the "move fast" phase are now systems that teams must dedicate time to learn, understand deeply, and affirmatively operate. All the while the pace of feature delivery is dramatically reduced."

• "To a statistical certainty, you aren't making Facebook. Your problems likely look nothing like Facebook's early 2010s problems, and even if they did, following their lead is a terrible idea."

• "The tech industry has just seen many of the most talented, empathetic, and user-focused engineers I know laid off for no reason other than their management couldn't figure out that there would be some mean reversion post-pandemic. Which is to say, there's a fire sale on talent right now, and you can ask for whatever skills you damn well please and get good returns."

• "The only bulwark against uncomfortable surprises is to consider NPM dependencies a high-interest loan collateralized by future engineering capacity."

• "Organisations looking for a complicated way to excuse pre-ordained outcomes should skip the charade. It will only make good people cynical and increase resistance. Teams that want to set bales of benajmins on fire because of frameworkism shouldn't be afraid to say what they want."

• "For their part, contemporary product managers seem to spend a great deal of time doing things that do not have any relationship to managing the essential qualities of their products."

• "Following the herd is an adaptation to prevent their specific decisions from standing out — tall poppies and all that — and it's uncomfortable when those decisions receive belated scrutiny."

• "One team shared that avoidance of React was tantamount to a trade secret. If their React-based competitors understood how expensive React stacks are, they'd lose their (considerable) margin advantage. Wild times."

The vibe coder's career path is doomed

• "If AI soon becomes good enough at building software on its own, software engineering as we know it is dead. If AI replaces me, I'll be sad. But I have no interest in becoming a glorified project manager, orchestrating AI agents all day long. If it does happen, I am now competing with anyone who can type a prompt. I'm not betting my career on being slightly better at prompting than millions of others."

• "As the project got more complex, things changed. Claude kept repeating the same mistakes, getting stuck in loops."

• "There's no lasting competitive advantage. No deep technical skills to master."

• "Did you ever work on a project where nothing moves forward? Everything's just slow. The app is slow. Adding features is slow. Fixing bugs takes forever. Did you think “this is because devs can't write code fast enough”? Or was it wrong architecture, wrong culture, broken communication, unclear requirements, poor technology choices?"

The Rising Cost of Child and Pet Day Care

• "On a recent trip, it cost me about $82 per day to board my dog."

Situated Software

• "Now, though, I think we're starting to see a new software niche, where communities get form-fit tools for very particular needs, tools that fail most previous test of design quality or success, but which nevertheless function well, because they are so well situated in the community that uses them."

• "The idea that software should be built for many users, or last for many years, are cultural assumptions not required by the software itself."

• "Situated software is a way of saying 'Most software gets only a few users for a short period; why not take advantage of designing with that in mind?'"

Yes In My Bamako Yard

• "The resulting Nairobi Integrated Urban Development Master Plan was so complex that several of the officials who drafted it expressed doubts that it could ever be implemented."

• "The idea is that a basic, implementable plan is preferable to a comprehensive master plan that's never implemented. And it is definitely better than no plan at all."

The Untold Impact of Cancellation

• "Group action coordinated by powerful authority figures against an individual has to be recognized for what it is, and understood for the dangers it poses to its target."

It's rude to show AI output to people

• "Now, AI has made text very, very, very cheap. Not only text, in fact. Code, images, video. All kinds of media. We can't rely on proof-of-thought anymore."

Who's Afraid of a Hard Page Load?

• "As a user, I'm always much happier when presented with a form that is entirely on one page, or has a “hard” submit button for each step that takes me to a new page, as opposed to a “seamless” form that exists as a blob of JS state."

Objects should shut the fuck up

• "May the gormless cock-up who created this absolute potato of a device spend his entire life walking on legos."

James Baldwin's Apotheosis

• "The last years of Baldwin's life were not edifying. Embittered and out of step, he seemed a figure from the past, overshadowed by (though just as angry as) the more militant and macho voices of the Black Power movement, exiling himself in Istanbul and Saint-Paul-de-Vence and surrounding himself with admirers and gigolos."

• "The Styron/Baldwin friendship would make an excellent subject for a strong writer to tackle, but Abdelmoumen, a novelist, essayist, and editor who holds a PhD from the University of Montreal in literary studies, has produced a work of startling inanity. Not only is she separated from her two subjects by culture, language, and a couple of generations, but she also appears to be totally without humor, a powerful facet of both these men, without which they would probably have committed suicide."

• "It is ludicrous for a woman of extreme naïveté, without the imaginative resources or the discipline to conceive of what social and intellectual life might really have been like in the early 1960s, to put words into the mouths of two of the most articulate and sophisticated thinkers of their generation."

Why does a fire truck cost $2 million?

• "In January, as wildfires ravaged L.A., its fire chief appeared on national news to explain that 100+ of its ~200 fire trucks were sitting out of commission on a nearby lot. They'd fallen into disrepair, or were too old to keep on the road, and the department couldn't afford to fix or replace them."

• "Wait: what's a roll up? It's when a company buys up a spate of smaller businesses and merges them together to create a conglomerate."