Tech — Work — Ramblings

by Mike Kalvas

I see you're not using JavaScript (which is awesome!) on one of my pages that uses it to provide a better experience. If you see something not working right, please let me know. My site should work exactly the same without it apart from any exceptions noted here.

I use prism.min.js to do syntax highlighting. It clocks in at 23kb total in size. Since the majority of the writing I do involves coding, I personally find this to be a worthwhile trade off. If you choose to keep this disabled, rest assured, the code examples are still there, they just may have some extra whitespace and obviously no syntax highlighting.

I do no tracking at all and am a zealot about keeping my pages as small as possible. If you're reading a page of mine that transfers more than about 250kb over the wire (including my most gratuitous indulgence — fonts) I've messed up.

So, if you'd like to have a slightly richer experience, consider enabling javascript for my site and I promise your trust won't be misplaced.

202203210831 Models are immutable but reality isn't

Remember that the world is ever changing and our models aren’t. Models say “this is how this works, put some input in and get some output”. They simplify the context and fluidity of reality (202203210832 Models are necessarily incomplete). The context and shifting nature of the real input and output of events are not so clean cut. What once was a sure-fire way to achieve something, might be totally ridiculous today.¹

This simple truth implies that 202203210830 When your model and reality conflict, reality is always right and you should adjust your model.

Larson, W. (2021, October 7). How to safely think in systems. https://lethain.com/how-to-safely-think-in-systems/ ↩