584 karma · joined April 5, 2022
When you're cutting trees, sharpening the saw looks like you're not working. When you're doing software or organizational work, figuring out what actually matters can also look like you're not working.
The hard part is distinguishing between thoughtful idleness and ordinary procrastination. [1] https://www.franklincovey.com/books/the-7-habits-of-highly-e...
In practice, most of the complexity comes exactly from what’s described here: every system has a rich internal model, but the moment data crosses a boundary, everything degrades into strings, schemas, and implicit contracts.
You end up rebuilding semantics over and over again (validation, mapping, enrichment), and a lot of failures only show up at runtime.
I’m skeptical about “one model to rule them all”, but I strongly agree that losing semantics at system boundaries is the core problem.
Yes, staying informed can help in some cases. But there are also many situations where it wouldn’t have made a difference. The amount of noise you have to sift through to “stay updated” is huge. At some point, it becomes a trade-off: consume a constant stream of news to maybe avoid a rare edge case — or tune it out and accept that very occasionally you might get unlucky.