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.

202508192317 If you want the best, test everything

It’s simple logic that you have to test everything in a set to find the best of that thing in the set. If you didn’t, then there could be one of the untested things that is better than the ones you tested.

When dealing with open ended things like ideas or songs or creative output, this means that we have to test “everything”.¹ This is obviously technically impossible, but is a good mindset for improving and producing great things.

It also means that 202508192313 You must test an idea to know if it works in reality. We can’t simply think about them or model them out. We need to fail, disprove ideas, produce mediocrity, and work over and over at bringing ideas to life to find the best ones.

Rubin, R., & Strauss, N. (2023). The Creative Act: A Way of Being (pp. 157–159). Penguin Press. ↩