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[1] Jim Nielsen’s Blog Verified ($10/year for the domain) [2]Archive [3]About
[4]RSS Preferences
Theme: This feature requires JavaScript as well as the default site fidelity
(see below).
Fidelity:
Controls the level of style and functionality of the site, a lower fidelity
meaning less bandwidth, battery, and CPU usage. [5]Learn more.
[6](*) Default [7]( ) Minimal [8]( ) Text-Only Update
Cold-blooded Software
2024-01-04
Patrick Duboy has an interesting post making the rounds titled, [10]
“Cold-blooded Software”.
He analogizes the idea of warm-blooded software:
projects that are warm-blooded: everything is great when there’s constant
motion on the project, generating heat. But put warm-blooded software in
the freezer, and you’ll pull out a corpse six months later.
Against cold-blooded software:
[Other] projects are different. You work alone, make some changes when
you’re inspired, and then don’t touch it again for another year, or two, or
three. You can’t run something like that as a warm-blooded project. There’s
not enough activity to keep the temperature up.
[With] A cold-blooded project…You can freeze it for a year and then pick it
back up right where you left off.
I like both warm-blooded and cold-blooded. Both have their benefits and
drawbacks. Context, as ever, is key.
Biology is not my strong suit, but I’m sure you could spend a lot of time
contrasting the trade-offs of being a warm-blooded vs. a cold-blooded animal in
nature.
A cold-blooded animal relies on its environment to regulate its body
temperature. You rely on what’s provided by your external environment or you
die.
Similarly, cold-blooded software lives off what its platform supplies natively
— in the case of the web, that’s vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS.
A warm-blooded animal, in contrast, has flexibility. It can regulate its own
body temperature allowing it to go above and beyond what its immediate
environment offers. However, this comes at a cost: a lot of energy must be
expended keeping its body at a consistent temperature.
Similarly, warm-blooded software is not wholly dependent on what the platform
supplies. It can make its own way — in the case of the web, that means
languages, build tools, and whatever else you can dream of that is above and
beyond what the platform offers natively. But there’s a cost in energy, and if
you can’t continually pay that cost — well, you die.
I like how [11]datarama on lobster.rs put it:
One of [cold-blooded’s] most important benefits over [warm-blooded’s] is
that they can have extremely low energy needs…
“Cold-blooded software” would, I think, be software that tolerates the
world around it changing because it’s adapted to have very modest needs
that don’t get invalidated easily. But just like there are barely any
reptiles in the Arctic, there are going to be parts of our software
ecosystem that will be less hospitable to “cold-bloodedness”.
So pick the context that’s right for you and your project. There’s no universal
right or wrong, just trade-offs.
As for me and my personal projects, I’ve lived long enough to say: give me
cold-blooded web pages or give me death.
But seriously, I will die inside if I have to re-open that webpack project from
2015.
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Comment? Reply via: [12]Email, [13]Mastodon, or [14]Twitter.
References:
[1] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/
[2] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/archive/
[3] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/about/
[4] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/feed
[5] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/website-fidelity/
[10] https://dubroy.com/blog/cold-blooded-software/
[11] https://lobste.rs/s/hitos3/cold_blooded_software#c_mxjzwh
[12] mailto:jimniels%2Bblog@gmail.com?subject=Re:%20blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/cold-blooded-software/
[13] https://mastodon.social/@jimniels
[14] https://twitter.com/jimniels

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[1] ● ● Patrick Dubroy
• [2]About
• [3]Archives
[4]Cold-blooded software
December 28, 2023
It’s 2004 and I’m sitting in one of the largest lecture halls at my university.
I’m a computer science major but I’m taking a course on natural history —
plants and animals — as one of my electives.
The professor tells us that he’s brought something from home, something he
found in his freezer. He reaches down behind his desk, and then holds his arm
out to show us what’s sitting in his palm: a baby painted turtle. We’re
learning about cold-blooded animals, and it turns out that painted turtle
hatchlings are pretty special — they’re one of only a few species that can
survive being frozen.
Now, the lecture hall is pretty modern for 2004: there’s an overhead camera at
the podium, where the professor can write notes that are displayed on screens
around the hall. But instead of writing notes, he puts the turtle under the
camera and starts his lecture.
Over the next hour, we watch this little reptile slowly come to life as the
professor lectures. The first movements were nearly imperceptible. An eyelid
cracking open, a leg inching forward. By the end of the lecture, the turtle has
moved about halfway across our screens.
I’ll never forget that class, because it’s where I really understood what it
means for an animal to be cold blooded. You see, warm-blooded animals — like
humans or mice — have a stable body temperature that stays within a pretty
narrow range. For humans, it’s around 37 degrees Celsius. A few degrees higher
or lower and we’re in big trouble. Cold-blooded animals like the painted turtle
can adapt their metabolism to the temperature around them. They’re active when
it’s warm out, and as the environment (and their bodies) get cooler, they move
more slowly. Very few of them can survive being frozen like the baby painted
turtle can.
I see a similar dichotomy with software projects. Certain technology decisions
lead to projects that are warm-blooded: everything is great when there’s
constant motion on the project, generating heat. But put warm-blooded software
in the freezer, and you’ll pull out a corpse six months later.
Maybe your CI isn’t working because one of the services you depend on got
bought or ran out of money. You add a new dependency and find yourself needing
to upgrade your compiler. Another package you depend on is deprecated, and
doesn’t work with the latest version of the compiler.
Some projects are different. You work alone, make some changes when you’re
inspired, and then don’t touch it again for another year, or two, or three. You
can’t run something like that as a warm-blooded project. There’s not enough
activity to keep the temperature up.
A cold-blooded project is like the baby painted turtle. You can freeze it for a
year and then pick it back up right where you left off.
A cold-blooded project uses [5]boring technology. The build and test scripts
don’t depend on external services that might change, break, or disappear
entirely. It uses [6]vendored dependencies.
The software that powers this blog is cold-blooded. The first commit was nearly
twelve years ago — a simple little static site generator to replace my
out-of-date Wordpress installation:
commit 68949229ad426c1e8795ee640808db9987ab30ab
Author: Patrick Dubroy <[7][email protected]>
Date: Sun Jan 8 19:10:24 2012 +0100
Add templates and site-building script.
It’s written in Python (2, not 3). It depends on four third-party modules, and
they’re all committed to the project repository. Everything runs locally, and I
deploy the result with rsync over ssh.
And boy am I glad I decided to do it that way. I’ve made a few small
improvements over the years, but otherwise it’s continued to work without
modification. And I fully expect that it will still be working in another
twelve years.
🐢
👉 You might also want to check out [8]the discussion on Hacker News.
Thanks to Thorsten Ball for helpful suggestions on this post.
Pssst! I'm working on a book called [9]WebAssembly from the Ground Up. It takes
you from hand crafting bytecodes to writing a real compiler for a simple
programming language. If you're interested in WebAssembly, you should
definitely check it out.
© 2006–2024 Patrick Dubroy · Powered by [10]Butterbrezn and [11]Augustiner.
Subscribe: [12]RSS · [13]email
References:
[1] https://dubroy.com/blog
[2] https://dubroy.com/blog/about
[3] https://dubroy.com/blog/archives
[4] https://dubroy.com/blog/cold-blooded-software
[5] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
[6] https://go.dev/ref/mod#vendoring
[7] https://dubroy.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection
[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38793206
[9] https://wasmgroundup.com/
[10] http://www.butterbreze.de/zutaten.html
[11] http://www.augustiner-braeu.de/
[12] https://dubroy.com/blog/rss.xml
[13] https://buttondown.email/pdubroy

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• [1]Apps
• [2]About
• [3]Archive
• [4]Contact
• [5]RSS
[6]Hypercritical●
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I Made This
January 11, 2024 at 1:51 PM by [7]John Siracusa
While the utility of [8]Generative AI is very clear at this point, the moral,
ethical, and legal questions surrounding it are decidedly less so. I’m not a
lawyer, and I’m not sure how the many [9]current and future legal battles
related to this topic will shake out. Right now, I’m still trying to understand
the issue well enough to form a coherent opinion of how things should be.
Writing this post is part of my process.
Generative AI needs to be trained on a vast amount of data that represents the
kinds of things it will be asked to generate. The connection between that
training data and the eventual generated output is a hotly debated topic. An AI
model has no value until it’s trained. After training, how much of the model’s
value is attributable to any given piece of training data? What legal rights,
if any, can the owners of that training data exert on the creator of the model
or its output?
A human’s creative work is inextricably linked to their life experiences: every
piece of art they’ve ever seen, everything they’ve done, everyone they’ve ever
met. And yet we still say the creative output of humans is worthy of [10]legal
protection (with some fairly narrow restrictions for works that are deemed
insufficiently differentiated from existing works).
Some say that generative AI is no different. Its output is inextricably linked
to its “life experience” (training data). Everything it creates is influenced
by everything it has ever seen. It’s doing the same thing a human does, so why
shouldn’t its output be treated the same as a human’s output?
And if it generates output that’s insufficiently differentiated from some
existing work, well, we already have laws to handle that. But if not, then it’s
in the clear. There’s no need for any sort of financial arrangement with the
owners of the training data any more than an artist needs to pay every other
artist whose work she’s seen each time she makes a new painting.
This argument does not sit well for me, for both practical and ethical reasons.
Practically speaking, generative AI changes the economics and timescales of the
market for creative works in a way that has the potential to disincentivize
non-AI-generated art, both by making creative careers less viable and by
narrowing the scope of creative skill that is valued by the market. Even if
generative AI develops to the point where it is self-sustaining without
(further) human input, the act of creation is an essential part of a life
well-lived. Humans need to create, and we must foster a market that supports
this.
Ethically, the argument that generative AI is “just doing what humans do” seems
to draw an equivalence between computer programs and humans that doesn’t feel
right to me. It was the pursuit of this feeling that led me to a key question
at the center of this debate.
Computer programs don’t have rights^[11]1, but people who use computer programs
do. No one is suggesting that generative AI models should somehow have the
rights to the things they create. It’s the humans using these AI models that
are making claims about the output—either that they, the human, should own the
output, or, at the very least, that the owners of the model’s training data
should not have any rights to the output.
After all, what’s the difference between using generative AI to create a
picture and using Photoshop? They’re both computer programs that help humans
make more, better creative works in less time, right?
We’ve always had technology that empowers human creativity: pencils,
paintbrushes, rulers, compasses, quills, typewriters, word processors,
bitmapped and vector drawing programs—thousands of years of technological
enhancement of creativity. Is generative AI any different?
At the heart of this question is the act of creation itself. Ownership and
rights hinge on that act of creation. Who owns a creative work? Not the pencil,
not the typewriter, not Adobe Photoshop. It’s the human who used those tools to
create the work that owns it.
There can, of course, be legal arrangements to transfer ownership of the work
created by one human to another human (or a legal entity like a corporation).
And in this way, value is exchanged, forming a market for creativity.
Now then, when someone uses generative AI, who is the creator? Is [12]writing
the prompt for the generative AI the act of creation, thus conferring ownership
of the output to the prompt-writer without any additional legal arrangements?
Suppose Bob writes an email to Sue, who has no existing business relationship
with Bob, asking her to draw a picture of a polar bear wearing a cowboy hat
while riding a bicycle. If Sue draws this picture, we all agree that Sue is the
creator, and that some arrangement is required to transfer ownership of this
picture to Bob. But if Bob types that same email into a generative AI, has he
now become the creator of the generated image? If not, then who is the creator?
Where is the act of creation?
This question is at the emotional, ethical (and possibly legal) heart of the
generative AI debate. I’m reminded of the [13]well-known web comic in which one
person hands something to another and says, “I made this.” The recipient
accepts the item, saying “You made this?” The recipient then holds the item
silently for a moment while the person who gave them the item departs. In the
final frame of the comic, the recipient stands alone holding the item and says,
“I made this.”
This comic resonates with people for many reasons. To me, the key is the second
frame in which the recipient holds the item alone. It’s in that moment that
possession of the item convinces the person that they own it. After all,
they’re holding it. It’s theirs! And if they own it, and no one else is around,
then they must have created it!
This leads me back to the same question. Where is the act of creation? The
person in the comic would rather not think about it. But generative AI is
forcing us all to do so.
I’m not focused on this point for reasons of fairness or tradition. Technology
routinely changes markets. Our job as a society is to ensure that technology
changes things for the better in the long run, while mitigating the inevitable
short-term harm.
Every new technology has required new laws to ensure that it becomes and
remains a net good for society. It’s rare that we can successfully adapt
existing laws to fully manage a new technology, especially one that has the
power to radically alter the shape of an existing market like generative AI
does.
In its current state, generative AI breaks the value chain between creators and
consumers. We don’t have to reconnect it in exactly the same way it was
connected before, but we also can’t just leave it dangling. The historical
practice of conferring ownership based on the act of creation still seems
sound, but that means we must be able to unambiguously identify that act. And
if the same act (absent any prior legal arrangements) confers ownership in one
context but not in another, then perhaps it’s not the best candidate.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, but I think I’m getting closer to the
right question. It’s a question I think we’re all going to encounter a lot more
frequently in the future: Who made this?
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1. Non-sentient computer programs, that is. If we ever create sentient
computer programs, we’ll have a whole host of other problems to deal with.
[14]↩
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[15]← Previous
© 2010-2024 John Siracusa
References:
[1] https://hypercritical.co/apps/
[2] https://hypercritical.co/about/
[3] https://hypercritical.co/archive/
[4] https://hypercritical.co/contact/
[5] https://hypercritical.co/feeds/main
[6] https://hypercritical.co/
[7] https://hypercritical.co/about/
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence
[9] https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/27/24016212/new-york-times-openai-microsoft-lawsuit-copyright-infringement
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
[11] https://hypercritical.co/2024/01/11/i-made-this#fn:1
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering
[13] https://nedroidcomics.tumblr.com/post/41879001445/the-internet
[14] https://hypercritical.co/2024/01/11/i-made-this#fnref:1
[15] https://hypercritical.co/2023/10/29/apples-blue-ocean

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Tom MacWright
tom@macwright.com
Tom MacWright
• [1]Writing⇠
• [2]Reading
• [3]Photos
• [4]Projects
• [5]Drawings
• [6]Micro
• [7]About
Work hard and take everything really seriously
Every few months on Twitter, there’s some dustup about work-life balance and
whether it’s a good or bad idea to work hard when you’re young. Like most of
these recurring debates, it has generated two opposite archetypes:
The anti-capitalist tells the young worker not to trust HR and not to buy into
the idea of work as family. Your employment contract is the only thing that
binds you to your job, and that can be terminated on either side. Arrive at 9,
leave at 5. Prioritize the family.
The hustlebro tells you to wake up at 7am and get to work, and give it your
all. Hustle, and earn as much as you can, build those connections. You can get
work-life balance when you’re older, your early 20s are the time for making
that cheddar and staying up till 1am.
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In the short form, it’s hard to take a stance and not get grouped into either
extreme. It’s also hard not to feel baited by someone who’s engagement-farming
their social media presence by using time-tested bait questions.
This last time I responded something like:
work really hard and take everything very seriously
But I deleted it. A truism as an answer will lead people to all kinds of
unintended conclusions about me and whatever I’m saying. I’ll need to use more
words.
Wisdom is acquired by experience
I think the honest answer is that most people can’t gain perspective and
moderation and maturity by reading someone’s advice online. The wise 35-year
old dads on Twitter can follow their own advice about work-life boundaries
because they’ve suffered the consequences. There’s no shortcut to perspective:
you have to [8]acquire it by experiencing bad things and suffering consequences
.
Energy begets energy
I attribute a lot of my career path to my working really hard and caring a lot
about things. I quickly internalized the lesson that a 9-5 job wouldn’t teach
me enough, and wouldn’t give me all the intellectual stimulation or rigor that
I wanted – so I worked longer hours, worked on side projects, hunted down my
interests like a puppy chasing a squirrel.
The thing is, when you find a good thing to focus on, a thing to pour energy
into, it can be positive-sum. It can give you energy in the rest of your life,
give you a sense of purpose. The human body is [9]not like a battery with a
finite amount of energy. There are lots of things you can do, like exercise,
learning, and practice, that can be rewarding and increase your ability. This
is obvious, right?
If you have that thing that drives you, and that thing isn’t work and can never
be work, then sure – get the lightest-duty job you can. Pour time into that
thing. Maybe what you do at work is your main output, or part of your output,
or just what you do for money.
Most jobs don’t give you time to learn
Many jobs, especially in technology, don’t have real, intentional, educational
components. There is no time set-aside for learning, no time to practice, and
no dedicated instructor.
It’s unlikely that what you learned in college fully prepared you for the job.
It’s possible that you’ll have a wonderful mentor with lots of time to spare,
but probably not.
I’ve worked with people who are smart enough to learn everything on the job,
from 9-5. I’m not one of them. For me, to really understand something, I need
to build it two or three times, write about it, use it incorrectly, and learn
the consequences. Working hard meant playing around, having fun, but
essentially playing with a lot of things that were not directly part of what I
was paid to do at that time. This, honestly, worked out extremely well and some
of those things led to jobs and opportunities that I never would have had
otherwise. Writing this blog is one of those things.
Working hard on boring repetitive stuff is bad
Probably the biggest caveat to this whole post is that working hard in my
experience was never working double-shifts or “hustling” for money or having
multiple jobs. There are a million kinds of work that you simply don’t learn
anything from, after a point. Thankfully, technology work is usually accretive,
as are other sorts of knowledge-work.
Maybe you don’t want to do this, but I did
Maybe you don’t want to follow that path. That’s fine: not everyone is
compelled by learning or intellectual rabbit-holes or exists in an industry
where it’s pretty easy to self-educate. Or wants to “max out” their career. And
it’s dangerous to generalize from a single experience. And it’s also dangerous
to judge “a career” based on external appearances, which don’t tell you whether
the person turned out to be happy, or rich. I haven’t maxed out either of those
things, but I have few career regrets: I’ve always cared most about building
useful things and learning and I think I’ve nearly maxed out those categories.
This is the answer to that question, of what advice could I have for someone in
their early 20s. Well, that’s what I did – I worked pretty hard and was pretty
unrestrained in pursuing interests. It worked out fine. Now that I’m older, my
priorities have shifted slightly and I spend a little more time on other
things, and am slowly becoming more balanced. But balance isn’t how I got here.
Balance isn’t how a lot of the people I admire got to where they are now.
I’m all for moderation, but sometimes it seems
Moderation itself can be a kind of extreme - Andrew Bird
When your priorities shift, you’ll know
In the end, most people gain responsibilities. You’ll have a baby or a family
member to take care of, or a thriving social life that demands more of your
time. Your priorities will snap into place and you’ll realize that you care
about new things. This is great. This will probably happen. But before you have
those new responsibilities, you don’t have those new responsibilities. You have
time to try and build a ‘rocket ship’ startup or chase down silly projects or
learn a new instrument or run a thousand miles a year. Do that stuff. You don’t
have to prematurely act like you’re older.
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So, heed the warnings of those 30-somethings about burnout and workplace
boundaries. And don’t work 24/7 on busywork for a startup if you’re not
learning anything.
You can burn out by going too fast, or your flame can dim because you don’t let
yourself spend silly amounts of time on silly projects to satisfy your
intellectual curiosity. Beware of both outcomes: cultivate your enthusiasm for
the things you want to hang onto.
It isn’t a revolutionary idea that people who are excellent in their fields
often get there by trying really hard. If you can figure out the difference
between busy-work that only benefits your employer, and the kind of work that
makes you as a person feel like you’re making progress and becoming more
skilled, then you’re ready to learn.
January 28, 2024  [10]Tom MacWright ([11]@tmcw, [12]@tmcw@mastodon.social)
References:
[1] https://macwright.com/
[2] https://macwright.com/reading/
[3] https://macwright.com/photos/
[4] https://macwright.com/projects/
[5] https://macwright.com/drawings/
[6] https://macwright.com/micro/
[7] https://macwright.com/about/
[8] https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/07/pinboard_turns_five/
[9] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-body-finite-energy/
[10] https://macwright.com/about/
[11] https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=tmcw&user_id=1458271
[12] https://mastodon.social/@tmcw

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Tom MacWright
tom@macwright.com
Tom MacWright
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Paper notes
From 2006 to 2016, I wanted to be the kind of person who carried a paper
notebook around. I bought nice notebooks and consistently got halfway through
each one before abandoning it and giving up again.
In 2016, everything changed all at once. Every month since I’ve finished a
paper journal. Here’s what I changed and the flaws that I discovered in my
previous attempts.
Time not topics
Paper notes are append-only: treat them as such. The unlimited flexibility of
computer note-taking gave me warped expectations of paper notes, and early in
my journey I’d try to maintain notebooks about certain subjects. I tried to
keep notes about a certain book in one contiguous section, add a table of
contents at the beginning, and stay organized.
Organizing paper notes like digital notes is a fool’s errand. The only
organization strategy that I’ve found that works is this one.
The only consistent structure is time. Notes go forward in time. You write the
date span of notebooks on the cover, and the date of notes on the pages, and
keep the notebooks in order. Try to keep all notes from a certain point in time
in the same notebook.
Summarize topics when you finish notebooks, never when you start. Add a list of
topics to the front cover (inside or outside), and then after a year, summarize
the topics from all notebooks in another notebook.
Simplicity not heaviness
Durability, portability, and capacity are part of the same continuum. An
80-page notebook will probably need a rigid cover, like the kind on a Moleskine
or Leuchtturm notebook. That’s the kind that I tried using for a long time – I
was hesitant to sacrifice the fanciness of that for something that was
pocketable. I was completely wrong about that: when I finally switched to Field
Notes, I understood the other, personally better corner of the space. The small
notebooks are delicate, and start breaking down after a month being carried
around in a pocket or a backpack, but – at 48 pages long, by the end of that
month, you’re about finished using it anyway.
Note box
Taking notes is useless without a place to put them when you’re done.
Continuing on the theme of Field Notes fandom, I bought their ‘Archival Wooden
Box’, a wildly overpriced but perfectly-sized… box… made to hold finished
notes. Key to this strategy is that your notebooks are precisely the same size,
so that they line up neatly and if you mark a corner of the notebook with its
start & end date (as I do), that corner will fall in the same place for each
notebook in the stack. This also gives you a place to add structure with dated
& labeled dividers, so it’s easier to hunt down a specific notebook later on.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I also take digital notes: [8]Day One as a digital journal, and [9]The Archive
for work-related or reference notes. Like with [10]todo lists, I suspect those
applications will change and be replaced over time, but thankfully as I’ve
started to understand my own habits and preferences, that change has slowed.
January 2, 2019  [11]Tom MacWright ([12]@tmcw, [13]@tmcw@mastodon.social)
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Paper notes
Published April 10, 2022
3 minutes read
I recently discovered [13]Tom MacWright's blog, and I read some of his
blog-posts, and found one about [14]paper notes. I highly recommend checking it
out.
In 2018 I discovered [15]bullet journaling. I've been trying to write
consistently ever since, with a somewhat success, but always miss some months/
weeks every year. I've used this to remember what I've done for specific days,
what appointments and events I'm attending or going to attend. And it works,
but I usually don't write in it everyday, I write every two or three days,
depending on how busy I've been that week.
And when it comes to notes in general, I've been trying to use my reMarkable 2
to write notes about work related stuff and other "discoveries" I come upon on
the interwebs. But I always seem to forget it when going to work and I think
it's a hassle to take in and out of my backpack and remembering to charge it.
And like Tom, I bought nice notebooks for my bullet journaling and managed to
write a lot, but suddenly I abandoned it. I never brought my bullet journal to
work or when I travelled, it was just too much of a hassle, and what if I lost
it?
Then a few weeks ago I found a Norwegian store that sells Field Notes, which
fit my back pocket perfectly, and I thought maybe I should try to keep a small
notebook with me at all time. So I bought six, because I'm going all in.
And I've written notes everyday, and I've had a blast, it just works. Whenever
I just remember something I just write it down and forget about it. In meetings
I use it for the same thing. I use it for todo-lists for the day or future. The
other day a colleague and I were going through a presentation we were preparing
for the University of Bergen and I wrote down all the comments and ideas I came
up as we were presenting for each other, instead of trying to remember all of
them in my head. And man did that work wonders! I made it into a list and we
adjusted everything and nailed the presentation!
My field notes. Photo My field notes with my Space Pen.
Like Tom, I treat them as append-only, and when I started doing this, it came
naturally for me to only write down my notes in the paper notebook instead of
having to rely on a digital notebook. No more needing to organize my notes, if
it's more important and useful in a project sense I add it to its specific
place when I get time. I flip through my notes every now and then, and weirdly
enough, I started to flip through the notebook instead of checking my phone.
And now, after a week I flip through my notes and add what's interesting to my
bullet journal and keep the other stuff in the field notes. It's quick and
easy, and I don't have to spend a lot of time trying to remember what I was
doing earlier that week.
Again, I highly recommend reading [16]Tom's post, and checking out his [17]blog
in general.
Tagged with
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[16]Jan 20, 2024 ∞
How I Pocket Notebook
Many different creativity systems^[17]1 stress the importance of the “capture”
or “inbox” step — whatever you call it, it’s a place where you gather your
ideas. It should be frictionless and ubiquitous.
Though we exist in an age where technology has wrested the “frictionless and
ubiquitous” narrative away from analog tools, I maintain that the old ways can
be the best ones in this case. Enter the pocket notebook.
Much has been written by smarter minds about the pocket notebook and its myriad
uses. For this post, I’ll be focusing on my particular setup and sharing how I
use it in the hopes you might also find it useful.
First, the pocket notebook itself. My rules are minimal: The paper has to take
fountain pen ink well, and the notebook can’t be something too fancy to use for
any old thing. Currently I’m using a [18]Lochby Pocket Notebook refill for the
dot-grid Tomoe River paper, which is more fountain pen ink friendly than others
I’ve tried.
And this would be enough for my frictionless and ubiquitous capture notebook,
except I am very rough on notebooks and wanted a cover to keep it somewhat
intact. My local stationery store, [19]Oblation Papers and Press, sold me a
beautiful leather cover by [20]Goby Design that fits pocket-sized refills like
the Lochby one I use as well as pocket notebooks from Field Notes, Goulet Pens,
and Moleskine. The leather is sturdy and has worn beautifully.
OK, notebook in a cover.^[21]2 That’s enough, right? Well ... not quite. As I
started to use this combination, I realized that I needed something to keep it
closed when I wasn’t using it, and open while I was. There are fancy brass
clips that Traveler’s Notebook aficionados have shared, but I’m lower-fuss than
that. I had a couple large-size magnetic [22]OliClips lying around, so I tried
affixing one to the front cover and another to the back. Et voila! A makeshift
magnetic closure plus bookmark plus notebook-holder-opener (whatever that’s
properly called).
an open pocket notebook in an olive green leather cover with iridescent
OliClips on front and back and an iridescent Kaweco Sport fountain pen
Now we have a notebook in a cover with a magnetic closure and bookmark. We’re
done, right? But but but ... what if it had a pen loop? I tried sliding on a
spare pen loop, but it bulked everything up awkwardly. I stared at this a long
time until I simply slipped the clip on my Kaweco Sport onto the edge of the
OliClip on the back cover. And it stayed! I haven’t tested the pen-clippiness
with something larger than a pocket pen, so exercise caution here.
an olive green leather pocket notebook cover with OliClips and an iridescent
Kaweco Sport fountain pen
OK, now I’m done. 😂
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1. I’ve stopped using the phrase "productivity systems" because it implies
that our most important work is that of production. Creation is much more
important to me. [23]↩︎
2. And now I have The Smiths’ “Girlfriend in a Coma” in my head: “Notebook in
a cover, I know, I know, it’s serious.” [24]↩︎
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[22]The New Yorker
[23]Office Space
The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done
How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to.
[undefined]
By [24]Cal Newport
November 17, 2020
A bunch of hands each handling a single task
As the obligations of knowledge work have grown increasingly frenetic, workers
have flocked to productivity tools and techniques.Illustration by Timo Lenzen
Save this story
Save this story
In the early two-thousands, Merlin Mann, a Web designer and avowed Macintosh
enthusiast, was working as a freelance project manager for software companies.
He had held similar roles for years, so he knew the ins and outs of the job; he
was surprised, therefore, to find that he was overwhelmed—not by the
intellectual aspects of his work but by the many small administrative tasks,
such as scheduling conference calls, that bubbled up from a turbulent stream of
e-mail messages. “I was in this batting cage, deluged with information,” he
told me recently. “I went to college. I was smart. Why was I having such a hard
time?”
Mann wasn’t alone in his frustration. In the nineteen-nineties, the spread of
e-mail had transformed knowledge work. With nearly all friction removed from
professional communication, anyone could bother anyone else at any time. Many
e-mails brought obligations: to answer a question, look into a lead, arrange a
meeting, or provide feedback. Work lives that had once been sequential—two or
three blocks of work, broken up by meetings and phone calls—became frantic,
improvisational, and impossibly overloaded. “E-mail is a ball of uncertainty
that represents anxiety,” Mann said, reflecting on this period.
In 2003, he came across a book that seemed to address his frustrations. It was
titled “[27]Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,” and, for
Mann, it changed everything. The time-management system it described, called
G.T.D., had been developed by David Allen, a consultant turned entrepreneur who
lived in the crunchy mountain town of Ojai, California. Allen combined ideas
from Zen Buddhism with the strict organizational techniques he’d honed while
advising corporate clients. He proposed a theory about how our minds work: when
we try to keep track of obligations in our heads, we create “open loops” that
make us anxious. That anxiety, in turn, reduces our ability to think
effectively. If we could avoid worrying about what we were supposed to be
doing, we could focus more fully on what we were actually doing, achieving what
Allen called a “mind like water.”
To maintain such a mind, one must deal with new obligations before they can
become entrenched as open loops. G.T.D.’s solution is a multi-step system. It
begins with what Allen describes as full capture: the idea is to maintain a set
of in-boxes into which you can drop obligations as soon as they arise. One such
in-box might be a physical tray on your desk; when you suddenly remember that
you need to finish a task before an upcoming meeting, you can jot a reminder on
a piece of paper, toss it in the tray, and, without breaking concentration,
return to whatever it was you were doing. Throughout the day, you might add
similar thoughts to other in-boxes, such as a list on your computer or a pocket
notebook. But jotting down notes isn’t, in itself, enough to close the loops;
your mind must trust that you will return to your in-boxes and process what’s
inside them. Allen calls this final, crucial step regular review. During
reviews, you transform your haphazard reminders into concrete “next actions,”
then enter them onto a master list.
This list can now provide a motive force for your efforts. In his book, Allen
recommends organizing the master list into contexts, such as @phone or
@computer. Moving through the day, you can simply look at the tasks listed
under your current context and execute them one after another. Allen uses the
analogy of cranking widgets to describe this calmly mechanical approach to
work. It’s a rigorous system for the generation of serenity.
To someone with Mann’s engineering sensibility, the precision of G.T.D. was
appealing, and the method itself seemed ripe for optimization. In September,
2004, Mann started a blog called 43 Folders—a reference to an organizational
hack, the “tickler file,” described in Allen’s book. In an introductory post,
Mann wrote, “Believe me, if you keep finding that the water of your life has
somehow run onto the floor, GTD may be just the drinking glass you need to get
things back together.” He published nine posts about G.T.D. during the blog’s
first month. The discussion was often highly technical: in one post, he
proposed the creation of a unified XML format for G.T.D. data, which would
allow different apps to display the same tasks in multiple formats, including
“graphical map, outline, RDF, structured text.” He told me that the writer Cory
Doctorow linked to an early 43 Folders post on Doctorow’s popular nerd-culture
site, Boing Boing. Traffic surged. Mann soon announced that, in just thirty
days, 43 Folders had received over a hundred and fifty thousand unique
visitors. (“That’s just nuts,” he wrote.) The site became so popular that Mann
quit his job to work on it full time. As his influence grew, he popularized a
new term for the genre that he was helping to create: “productivity pr0n,” an
adaptation of the “leet speak,” or geek lingo, word for pornography. The hunger
for this pr0n, he noticed, was insatiable. People were desperate to tinker with
their productivity systems.
What Mann and his fellow-enthusiasts were doing felt perfectly natural: they
were trying to be more productive in a knowledge-work environment that seemed
increasingly frenetic and harder to control. What they didn’t realize was that
they were reacting to a profound shift in the workplace that had gone largely
unnoticed.
Before there was “personal productivity,” there was just productivity: a
measure of how much a worker could produce in a fixed interval of time. At the
turn of the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor and his acolytes had studied
the physical movements of factory workers, looking for places to save time and
reduce costs. It wasn’t immediately obvious how this industrial concept of
productivity might be adapted from the assembly line to the office. A major
figure in this translation was Peter Drucker, the influential business scholar
who is widely regarded as the creator of modern management theory.
Drucker was born in Austria in 1909. His parents, Adolph and Caroline, held
evening salons that were attended by Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter,
among other economic luminaries. The intellectual energy of these salons seemed
to inspire Drucker’s own productivity: he wrote thirty-nine books, the last
shortly before his death, at the age of ninety-five. His career took off after
the publication of his second book, “[28]The Future of Industrial Man,” in
1942, when he was a thirty-three-year-old professor at Bennington College. The
book asked how an “industrial society”—one unfolding within “the entirely new
physical reality which Western man has created as his habitat since James Watt
invented the steam engine”—might best be structured to respect human freedom
and dignity. Arriving in the midst of an industrial world war, the book found a
wide audience. After reading it, the management team at [29]General Motors
invited Drucker to spend two years studying the operations of what was then the
world’s largest corporation. The 1946 book that resulted from that engagement,
“[30]Concept of the Corporation,” was one of the first to look seriously at how
big organizations actually got work done. It laid the foundation for treating
management as a subject that could be studied analytically.
In the nineteen-fifties, the American economy began to move from manual labor
toward cognitive work. Drucker helped business leaders understand this
transformation. In his 1959 book, “[31]Landmarks of Tomorrow,” he coined the
term “knowledge work,” and argued that autonomy would be the central feature of
the new corporate world. Drucker predicted that corporate profits would depend
on mental effort, and that each individual knowledge worker, possessing skills
too specialized to be broken down into “repetitive, simple, mechanical motions”
choreographed from above, would need to decide how to “apply his knowledge as a
professional” and monitor his own productivity. “The knowledge worker cannot be
supervised closely or in detail,” Drucker wrote, in “[32]The Effective
Executive,” from 1967. “He must direct himself.”
Drucker’s emphasis on the autonomy of knowledge workers made sense, as there
was no obvious way to deconstruct the efforts required by newly important
mid-century jobs—like corporate research and development or advertisement
copywriting—into assembly-line-style sequences of optimized steps. But Drucker
was also influenced by the politics of the [33]Cold War. He viewed creativity
and innovation as key to staying ahead of the Soviets. Citing the invention of
the [34]atomic bomb, he argued that scientific work of such complexity and
ambiguity could not have been managed using the heavy-handed techniques of the
industrial age, which he likened to the centralized planning of the Soviet
economy. Future industries, he suggested, would need to operate in “local” and
“decentralized” ways.
To support his emphasis on knowledge-worker autonomy, Drucker introduced the
idea of management by objectives, a process in which managers focus on setting
out clear targets, but the details of how they’re accomplished are left to
individuals. This idea is both extremely consequential and rarely debated. It’s
why the modern office worker is inundated with quantified quarterly goals and
motivating mission statements, but receives almost no guidance on how to
actually organize and manage these efforts. It was thus largely owing to
Drucker that, in 2004, when Merlin Mann found himself overwhelmed by his work,
he took it for granted that the solution to his woes would be found in the
optimization of his personal habits.
As the popularity of 43 Folders grew, so did Mann’s influence in the online
productivity world. One breakthrough from this period was a novel
organizational device that he called “the hipster PDA.” Pre-smartphone handheld
devices, such as the Palm Pilot, were often described as “personal digital
assistants”; the hipster P.D.A. was proudly analog. The instructions for making
one were aggressively simple: “1. Get a bunch of 3x5 inch index cards. 2. Clip
them together with a binder clip. 3. There is no step 3.” The “device,” Mann
suggested, was ideal for implementing G.T.D.: the top index card could serve as
an in-box, where tasks could be jotted down for subsequent processing, while
colored cards in the stack could act as dividers to organize tasks by project
or context. A 2005 article in the Globe and Mail noted that Ian Capstick, a
press secretary for Canada’s New Democratic Party, wielded a hipster P.D.A. in
place of a BlackBerry.
Just as G.T.D. was achieving widespread popularity, however, Mann’s zeal for
his own practice began to fade. An inflection point in his writing came in
2007, soon after he gave a G.T.D.-inspired speech about e-mail management to an
overflow audience at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Building on the
classic productivity idea that an office worker shouldn’t touch the same piece
of paper more than once, Mann outlined a new method for rapidly processing
e-mails. In this system, you would read each e-mail only once, then select from
a limited set of options—delete it, respond to it, defer it (by moving it into
a folder of messages requiring long responses), delegate it, or “do” it (by
extracting and executing the activity at its core, or capturing it for later
attention in a system like G.T.D.). The goal was to apply these rules
mechanically until your digital message pile was empty. Mann called his
strategy Inbox Zero. After [35]Google uploaded a video of his talk to [36]
YouTube, the term entered the vernacular. Editors began inquiring about book
deals.
Not long afterward, Mann posted a self-reflective essay on 43 Folders, in which
he revealed a growing dissatisfaction with the world of personal productivity.
Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end
in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an addiction. “On
more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish,”
he wrote. Part of the problem was the recursive quality of his work. Refining
his productivity system so that he could blog more efficiently about
productivity made him feel as if he were being “tossed around by a menacing
[37]Rube Goldberg device” of his own design; at times, he said, “I thought I
might be losing my mind.” He also wondered whether, on a substantive level, the
approach that he’d been following was really capable of addressing his
frustrations. It seemed to him that it was possible to implement many
G.T.D.-inflected life hacks without feeling “more competent, stable, and
alive.” He cleaned house, deleting posts. A new “About” page explained that 43
Folders was no longer a productivity blog but a “website about finding the time
and attention to do your best creative work.”
Mann’s posting slowed. In 2011, after a couple years of desultory writing, he
published a valedictory essay titled “[38]Cranking”—a rumination on an illness
of his father’s, and a description of his own struggle to write a book about
Inbox Zero after becoming disenchanted with personal productivity as a concept.
“I’d type and type. I’d crank and I’d crank,” he recounted. “I’m done cranking.
And, I’m ready to make a change.” After noting that his editor would likely
cancel his book contract, he concluded with a bittersweet sign-off: “Thanks for
listening, nerds.” There have been no posts on the site for the past nine
years.
Even after the loss of one of its leaders, the productivity pr0n movement
continued to thrive because the overload culture that had inspired it continued
to worsen. G.T.D. was joined by numerous other attempts to tame excessive work
obligations, from the [39]bullet-journal method, to the explosion in
smartphone-based productivity apps, to my own contribution to the movement, a
call to emphasize “deep” work over “shallow.” But none of these responses
solved the underlying problem.
The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems
to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which
individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group
outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she
can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or
disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the
cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively
harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work
unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem.
A worker might send fewer e-mail requests to others, and become more structured
about her work, but she’ll still receive requests from everyone else;
meanwhile, if she decides to decrease the amount of time that she spends
engaging with this harried digital din, she slows down other people’s work,
creating frustration.
In this context, the shortcomings of personal-productivity systems like G.T.D.
become clear. They don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the
insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They
only help individuals cope with its effects. A highly optimized implementation
of G.T.D. might have helped Mann organize the hundreds of tasks that arrived
haphazardly in his in-box daily, but it could do nothing to reduce the quantity
of these requests.
There are ways to fix the destructive effects of overload culture, but such
solutions would have to begin with a reëvaluation of Peter Drucker’s insistence
on knowledge-worker autonomy. Productivity, we must recognize, can never be
entirely personal. It must be connected to a system that we can study, analyze,
and improve.
One of the few academics who has seriously explored knowledge-work productivity
in recent years is Tom Davenport, a professor of information technology and
management at Babson College. Many organizations claim to be interested in
productivity, he told me, but they almost always pursue it by introducing new
technology tools—spreadsheets, network applications, Web-based collaboration
software—in piecemeal fashion. The general belief is that knowledge workers
will never stand for intrusions into the autonomy they’ve come to expect. The
idea of large-scale interventions that might replace the mess of unstructured
messaging with a more structured set of procedures is rarely considered.
Although Davenport’s 2005 book, “[40]Thinking for a Living,” attempted to offer
concrete advice about how knowledge-worker productivity might be improved, in
many places his advice is constrained by the assumed inviolability of autonomy.
In one chapter, for example, he explores the possibility of routinizing or
constraining the tasks of “transaction” workers, who perform similar duties
over and over, by using a diagram to communicate an optimal sequence of
actions. He adds, however, that such routinization simply won’t appeal to
“expert” workers, who he says are unlikely to pay attention to elaborate
flowcharts suggesting when they should collaborate and when they should leave
each other alone. In the end, “Thinking for a Living” failed to find an
audience. “It was one of my worst-selling books,” Davenport said. He soon
shifted his attention to more popular topics, such as big data and artificial
intelligence.
And yet, even if we accept that people don’t want to be micromanaged, it
doesn’t follow that every single aspect of knowledge work must be left to the
individual. If I’m a computer programmer, I might not want my project manager
telling me how to solve a coding problem, but I would welcome clear-cut rules
that limit the ability of other divisions to rope me into endless meetings or
demand responses to never-ending urgent messages.
The benefits of top-down interventions designed to protect both attention and
autonomy could be significant. In an article published in 1999, Drucker noted
that, in the course of the twentieth century, the productivity of the average
manual laborer had increased by a factor of fifty—the result, in large part, of
an obsessive focus on how to conduct this work more effectively. By some
estimates, knowledge workers in North America outnumber manual workers by close
to four to one—and yet, as Drucker wrote, “Work on the productivity of the
knowledge worker has barely begun.”
Fittingly, we can derive a clear vision of a more productive future by
returning to Merlin Mann. In the final years of 43 Folders, Mann began dabbling
in podcasting. After shuttering his Web site, he turned his attention more
fully toward this emerging medium. Mann now hosts four regular podcasts. One
show, “Roderick on the Line,” consists of “unfiltered” conversations with
Mann’s friend John Roderick, the lead singer of the band the Long Winters.
Another show, “Back to Work,” tackles productivity, mixing some early 43
Folders-style exploration of digital tools with late 43 Folders-style
digressions on the purpose of productivity. A recent episode of “Back to Work”
combined a technical conversation about TaskPaper—a plain-text to-do-list
software for Macs—with a metaphysical discussion about disruptions.
Mann no longer uses the full G.T.D. system. He remains a fan of David Allen
(“there’s a person for whom G.T.D. is a perfect fit,” he told me), but the
nature of his current work doesn’t generate the overwhelming load of
obligations that first drove him to the system, back in 2004. “My needs are
very modest from a task-management perspective,” he said. “I have a production
schedule for the podcasts; it’s that and grocery lists.” He does still use some
big ideas from G.T.D., such as deploying calendar notifications to remind him
to water his plants and clean his cat’s litter box. (“Why would I let that take
up any part of my brain?”) However, his day is now structured in such a way
that he can spend most of his time focussed on the autonomous, creative,
skilled work that Drucker identified as so crucial to growing our economy.
Most of us are not our own bosses, and therefore lack the ability to
drastically overhaul the structure of our work obligations, but in Mann’s
current setup there’s a glimpse of what might help. Imagine if, through some
combination of new management thinking and technology, we could introduce
processes that minimize the time required to talk about work or fight off
random tasks flung our way by equally harried co-workers, and instead let us
organize our days around a small number of discrete objectives. A way, that is,
to preserve Drucker’s essential autonomy while sidestepping the uncontrollable
overload that this autonomy can accidentally trigger. This vision is appealing,
but it cannot be realized by individual actions alone. It will require
management intervention.
Up until now, there has been little will to instigate this shift in
responsibility for productivity from the person to the organization. As
Davenport discovered, most knowledge-work companies have been more focussed on
keeping up with technological breakthroughs that might open up new markets. To
get more done, it’s been sufficient to simply exhort employees to work harder.
Laptops and smartphones helped these efforts by enabling office workers to find
extra hours in the day to get things done, providing a productivity
counterbalance to the inefficiencies of overload culture. And then [41]COVID-19
arrived.
In a remarkably short span, the spread of the coronavirus shut down offices
around the world. This unexpected change amplified the inefficiencies latent in
our haphazard approach to work. Many individuals responded by immersing
themselves in a 43 Folders-style world of productivity hacks. As we attempt to
juggle percolating crises, endless [42]Zoom calls, and, for many, the
requirement to somehow integrate both child care and homeschooling into the
same hours, there’s a sudden, urgent need to carefully organize tasks and
intricately synchronize schedules.
But it’s becoming clear that, as Mann learned, individual efforts are not
enough. Although offices are now partially reopening, a significant amount of
work will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be performed remotely. To
survive the current crisis, knowledge-work companies may finally be forced to
move past Drucker’s insistent autonomy and begin asking hard questions about
how their work is actually accomplished.
It seems likely that any successful effort to reform professional life must
start by making it easier to figure out who is working on what, and how it’s
going. Because so much of our effort in the office now unfolds in rapid
exchanges of digital messages, it’s convenient to allow our in-boxes to become
an informal repository for everything we need to get done. This strategy,
however, obscures many of the worst aspects of overload culture. When I don’t
know how much is currently on your plate, it’s easy for me to add one more
thing. When I cannot see what my team is up to, I can allow accidental
inequities to arise, in which the willing end up overloaded and the unwilling
remain happily unbothered. (For instance, in field tests led by Linda Babcock,
of Carnegie Mellon University, women were found to take on a disproportionate
load of “non-promotable” service tasks, such as organizing office parties, and
to be more likely than men to say yes when asked to do so, leading to their
being asked more often.)
Consider instead a system that externalizes work. Following the lead of
software developers, we might use virtual task boards, where every task is
represented by a card that specifies who is doing the work, and is pinned under
a column indicating its status. With a quick glance, you can now ascertain
everything going on within your team and ask meaningful questions about how
much work any one person should tackle at a time. With this setup, optimization
becomes possible.
In software development, for example, it’s widely accepted that programmers are
most effective when they work on one feature at a time, focussing in a
distraction-free sprint until done. It’s conceivable that other knowledge
fields might enjoy similar productivity boosts from more intentional
assignments of effort. What if you began each morning with a status meeting in
which your team confronts its task board? A plan could then be made about which
handful of things each person would tackle that day. Instead of individuals
feeling besieged and resentful—about the additional tasks that similarly
overwhelmed colleagues are flinging their way—they could execute a
collaborative plan designed to benefit everyone.
The ability to better visualize work would also enable smarter processes. If
you notice that the influx of administrative demands from other parts of your
company is overwhelming you and your co-workers, you’re now motivated to seek
fixes. Such optimizations are unlikely to occur when the scope of the problem
is hidden among in-box detritus, and when productivity is still understood as a
matter of personal will.
Whether or not coronavirus-driven disruption provides the final push we need to
move away from our flawed commitment to personal productivity, we can be
certain that this transition will eventually happen. Even if we convince
ourselves that the psychological toll of overload culture is acceptable
collateral damage for a fast-paced modern world, there’s too much latent
economic value at stake to keep ignoring the haphazard nature of how we
currently work. It’s ironic that Drucker, the very person who extolled the
potential of knowledge-worker productivity, helped plant the ideas that have
since held it back. To move forward, we must step away from Drucker’s
commitment to total autonomy—allowing for freedom in how we execute tasks
without also allowing for chaos in how these tasks are assigned. We must, in
other words, acknowledge the futility of trying to tame our frenzied work lives
all on our own, and instead ask, collectively, whether there’s a better way to
get things done.
[43][undefined]
[44]Cal Newport is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and an associate
professor of computer science at Georgetown University.
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