What have you changed your mind about in the last decade?

I changed my mind about what constitutes a fulfilling life for me. I realized that I personally could not live a life consisting solely of devotion to work and consumption of luxury goods. I started a family and have two wonderful children.

I still believe that investing in work is necessary and rewarding, and indulgences are a somewhat important part of life, but those alone are all kind of meaningless for me in the end. It’s the endless chase of another dragon.

With my children, I feel a greater sense of joy and accomplishment when I watch them grow. I’ve had higher highs raising kids than I ever did finding the next excursion I could go on or the hottest new company to work for.

So many things became painfully clear in the past decade, mostly bursting my bubbles and naive beliefs:

The financial system is broken and will remain so

Social media are broken and will remain so

Our ability to control pandemics is nill and will remain so

Our ability to control war mongering is broken and will remain so

Our overall ability to live sustainably is missing and will remain so

There is only one positive thing i realised: open source is not a niche or a fad, it will keep growing despite the challenges

I dont know how many of the ills it can fix but at least its there. Its not completely dark.

I guess I'll kick it off. One thing I've changed my mind on over my career is the practical importance of specific technologies.

There are languages I love and languages I think are wet garbage. But when I look at products succeeding in the world, there's just a very low correlation between "great technology" and "product delivering a lot of value". I've seen bad teams fail with great tech, and I've seen great teams succeed with tech I dislike.

That hasn't made me any less critical of bad tech. I could write a book on the flaws of some of the popular things I've used in prod. But it does mean I've learned to put aside my personal aesthetic offense and say, "Ok, let's focus today on making things better for the users."

COVID caused a lot of mind-changing. For example, we thought that plain cloth masks were somewhat effective at stopping transmission, but now we know that they are not. It's surreal to think back on wearing them even outside at times, when someone would pass on the sidewalk, for example. But it may have been rational to take extreme precautions at first, when we didn't know better. It's just too bad that there weren't many real-world studies done on masking efficacy, so that we could know what would and would not make a difference.

Changed my mind on band aiding your mouth for the night to promote nasal breathing

The value of bread rich in fiber.