I know I have a weird and kind of skewed view of the world, since I expect nobody else to care about some things, and then the world goes and surprises me by jumping on it anyway. About six months ago, I expected the worst for my whole "let's improve the feed reader ecosystem" thoughts, and figured it would go unnoticed, and yet it's been anything but.
Clearly, I am miscalibrated for what the world is willing to do. So, with that in mind, I figured that I need to bring more things up in this context to see what the reaction is instead of just discarding it early due to my own doubts.
Tonight's concern goes like this: I was flipping through some old posts and ran across something from 2013 where I said "your simple (shell) script is someone else's bad day". It was inspired by the "onboarding" process for dev servers at FB which I was going through that week, and it was a total shit-show. It had plenty of the aforementioned scripts that you couldn't restart without making things worse. It took way too long for me to get my hands on a Linux box that had things set up so I could crank on stupid www stuff.
In re-reading that post the other night, it got me wondering what I could do in this space to try to raise awareness of various topics. Maybe I'd look at a few old posts, decide that there's a cluster of problems ("idempotence" in this case), and that maybe it would be a net win for humanity if more people were slightly better at it. Then I'd try to address that directly... somehow.
My goal would be to get more people in this life who, at least for that topic, look at everything they encounter and go "what if this fails, and is restarted". I basically would love to see more people going "what if" for that particular topic. Worry about the robot and the five quarts of oil. (Go look at the 2013 post if that made no sense.)
I don't know if that's plausible. I actually worry that it's not even possible for most people, and that caring about such things is some weird genetic corner case that is born, not made, and it would be unreasonable to expect it from the rest of the world.
This is where I need input. I have this feeling that such topics are not seen as important by reasonable people, and that they honestly never will be. Just because it matters to me is no indication that it will resonate anywhere else. That much has been made crystal clear over the past few years.
Wouldn't it be amazing, though? Just imagine it: groups of people heading out into the world armed with additional things to consider when designing something, and the resulting improvements in reliability for the things they work on down the road.
Then we'd have to continue on to some other fundamental topic, and try to move the needle on that, too.
Finally, I should mention another possible outcome: those same people go into the world with that knowledge, go to apply it, and run into the same brick walls that some of us have already been hitting because nobody else sees the point. They get all bitter and dejected, emit their own "delightful burnout sauce" (I love that line, btw), and start writing their own screeds on things like this, and we start over.
You can bake an amazing cake, but if they aren't hungry for cake, well, you might have just wasted a bunch of time.
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