Issue 32 - Liminal State
Gut feelings at stakes
Sometimes we have this feeling: the feeling of asking the question that creates more questions. The feeling of being close to the answer. Still not getting it.
It's the feeling when going for a walk in nature. The limits of explanation, whether it’s rational or spiritual, for grasping reality and ultimately making sense of life.
We often find ourselves in this liminal state in our daily engineering jobs.
When a night of sleep finally makes the code work.
When a figure out of a hundred lines of SQL makes sense and allows us to be closer to our subjective reality.
When this great colleague presents an idea you never thought of. Enlightening us.
While the rational-scientific method deserves our respect, we must also appreciate the value of gut feeling; that inner headlight. It's often in this space that we gain insights into our work and uncover solutions.
📡 Expected Contents
Publishing your work increases your luck
Most of the work I did on my time was for pleasure. I didn't expect to work in a football club while making soccer data-viz. I didn't expect to work 80% of the time in English while starting to write in the Shakespear lingua. I didn't expect to be able to work fully remotely for a great startup while making this newsletter and writing code.
I love this formula: Luck = [Doing Things] * [Telling People].
Good or bad events, a lot of things in life can be credited to luck.
But I believe good luck can be gardened. Not only by doing our work - that's the prerequisite. But also by putting it out there.
I can't count how many times I met great people - often smarter and more mature than me - just by speaking out of my toys.
Recently some of my friends started to put words on paper too. I'm so glad they do.
Our work is nothing if we don't publish it.
Motif
I feel the analytics story hasn't ended at all. Especially on the tooling side.
While a lot of analytics drama has to be credited to human matters, our tools are still underlining what could be done. What we really want in our daily analytics job.
I recently feel a lot of potential from the discussion I had in working at Kestra and also using tools like Malloy or Rill.
I feel the promise of Motif Analytics resonates in the same way here. I didn't get the opportunity to try the tool yet, but just their headlines hit perfectly:
“Explore event sequences, naturally”
“Query how you think”
“Tune query precision and speed”
It's just plain developer experience, to explore raw data and make sense of them quickly.
That's all we want. AI and automation can come just afterward.
Normalization Vs Denormalization — Taking A Step Back
Very good read on normalization vs denormalization.
I am still split between the two; the answer is probably, like always: it depends.
Reverse Proxy the right way
One of my best friends started to put his experimentations down on paper.
If you want to learn more about Ops, server management, and networking, Louis wrote a great series of posts around the Caddy framework.
📰 The Blog Post
No blog post this time: I'm writing three of them at the same time 😅. Be sure to get them very soon!
🎨 Beyond The Bracket
Ambient Co-presence
Closing this issue's introduction, I recently came across this great post from Maggie
She explores how creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web will be decisive soon.
I love async communication, it's working really well for long-term projects. But it's not making it for the human-daily life. We are a social species and we should, more than ever, acknowledge it.
January was blazing fast.
I hit February already tired but also fully in a liminal state. Being closer to myself more than ever.
Maybe it's because my favorite artist is about to release an album. Music is to me the better medium to reach the "liminal" state.
Maybe it's because I've thousands of open projects in mind.
Maybe it's because I'm more mature within my relationships.
I recently felt that being nuanced, and putting "conditional" tense in my expressions, was taken as a sign of non-confidence.
It's actually quite the opposite to me. It's a sign that you're human, that you're enlightened and understand how luck plays its role.
Being confident is acknowledging life's complexity while doubling down on our work and feelings.
So please, go f*** them and take care of yourself.
This means taking care of others by listening, collaborating, and playing. It also means to be closer to your inner self, whatever others are doing. Whatever happens in the world 🌎
See you very soon 😉
