Posts tagged "essays" - nolan caudill's internet house

Thoughts about Twitter

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 11:36:44 +0000

I write this as thousands of Twitter employees learned in the past day that they no longer had a job. They were dumped unceremoniously, the result of the addled whims of a walking meme. I wanted to write this to remind myself what Twitter was because what it’s about to be will be a different, more chaotic and more toxic place. I mostly feel anger and frustration towards Elon and the yes-men he put around him, and sadness for the people that worked there that truly believed and worked towards the idea of what Twitter could be.

(If you’re a Twitter person that is looking for a job, needs a resume reviewed, or needs an introduction, let me know.)

First, what I believe is already happening.

The illusion of Elon Musk, David Sacks and Jason Calcanis as savvy operators is gone. This endeavor will be one of their lasting legacies: taking a much-loved, revenue-generating cornerstone of the web and smothering it within weeks, while likely losing billions of dollars and ultimately needing to sell the site for parts. They thought they were rolling out some grand experiment in social discourse, forgetting that brands, users, and speech are all tightly intertwined in somewhat important things like revenue and profit.

Further, the same cast of characters is also acting out some of the worst takes to management, leadership and business that the VC thoughtleaders and hustlehards regularly regurgitate. Those who actually work in the industry have always seen how detached from reality these aggro-fortune cookie tidbits are, and now we’re getting to watch a play unfold where we already know how the ending goes.

And those who have worked on social networks recognize that the problems in social media extend past “Why can’t I say whatever I want?” Seeing them try to learn how to operate something as big and complex as Twitter in today’s political environment from first principles (which VC thoughtleaders can’t resist) is not unlike watching a toddler learning how gravity works, except in this case I spare no soothing encouragement or helpful grace because it is no secret how difficult it is to run world-scale social networks

Topping it off, I am not confident the company will be able to keep the service itself up. Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop. Working software is as much as what’s in the head of the people that work on it as it is in the code, and it is a near guarantee that Twitter will be seriously degraded soon (days? weeks?) and the people they need won’t be there.

But, what is gone? Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit filled with a mix of truly important cultural moments and the most inane things you’ve ever seen. It was weird and it was special and it’s going to soon be a memory. With employees gone, with the clowns running the circus, with a reduction in trust and safety, and the exodus of advertisers starting, Twitter will likely go from Elon’s new toy that is too difficult for him to play with, to being passed on to his legal and finance advisers to sort out.

Twitter was flawed but I believe many of those flaws are inherent in running an ad-supported social network. Seeing the new management believe they have the one weird trick to balance their own version of “free speech” and the revenue-generating machinery is like a random person taking over a restaurant chain because they didn’t like how their burger was presented: expensive, ill-advised and likely to end up with people dining elsewhere.

Rules over Safety

Fri, 15 May 2015 07:00:00 +0000

Last year, MUNI removed a few seats from the front of its standard electric buses by permanently locking them upright. They did this due to safety reasons: “these seats do not have a barrier in front of them to protect a person from falling in the event of a sudden stop or collision.” (link) It’s easy to read through the lines to glean that the bus manafacturers and likely the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency have done this to protect themselves from litigation in the case of an accident, and not in the true spirit of making the bus safer. The bus makers have said: “Here’s the way you should use our buses. If you color outside these lines, it’s on you.” What happens in reality? For those who have an even passing knowledge of SF transit knows that the buses get incredibly crowded — if there’s a place to stand where a seat isn’t, someone will stand there. Now, instead of someone sitting on a seat where they might be thrown forward, that person is now standing in a spot where they may be thrown forward, and due to centers-of-gravity and torque and all those other fun Newtonian physics concepts, it is more dangerous. It is a common sight to see someone half-sitting, half-leaning on the raised seat, poking at their phone. A sudden stop would send this person over top a row of sitting people versus hitting the single person in front of them. This is a good example of a policy enacted by fear of litigation over safety but still publicized as being done “for your safety.”

Afternoon Chats with the Navy

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 07:00:00 +0000

This morning, I read Claire Vaye Watkins’ essay The Ivy League Was Another Planet about the college application process for an American rural high schooler. Her story was nearly identical to my experience. My high school had one overworked guidance counselor that also doubled as a college counselor. She was a very nice woman that seemed concerned about our futures, but there were only so many hours in the day for her. I vaguely remember my one or two sessions with her consisting of showing me the SAT testing calendar and pointing me towards the federal aid forms. Through some of confusion of mine, I didn’t think I needed to fill out these aid forms. These turned out to have been a prerequisite for many merit-based scholarships as well, which would have been useful information. Somehow I escaped these sessions with only applying to one school, the main state school in North Carolina. I chose this school because a couple of my good friends were going there and I knew it was a “good school.” No one let me know that applying to just one university was a bad idea. I did really well in high school and not going to college if I had missed on this one application would have been a disaster. Even the only application I filled out was a disaster-in-waiting. Like most college applications, it required an essay. I don’t remember getting anyone to proofread mine. I can barely write my name without a grammar mistake so I’m surprised they even let me on campus. Who knows, maybe they saw me as a great fixer-upper. Watkins’ memories of taking the SAT were reminiscent of my own. The test was paid for out of pocket, and it didn’t seem to be guided by any internal force in school. It was just one of those things that we knew we needed to look into and apply to take. Afterwards, I learned from people that went to other high schools that the SAT was something that was taken multiple times and that taking preparation classes was commonplace. I took the sample test in the SAT packet and felt like I was being extra studious by even doing that. I had college friends that had studied hard for the math portion, rested during the verbal sections, and then did the inverse on another taking since you’re allowed to combine your best scores from your sittings. We could have probably figured out this strategy for ourselves, but the thing is we shouldn’t have had to. Even so, taking a $50 test multiple times would definitely have been out of reach for most of my classmates. Our entire class also took the ASVAB. This test was administered in the school cafeteria and we got out of an afternoon’s worth of classes to take it. I did well on this test and within a week I had military recruiters calling me. The Navy must have called dibs on me as every afternoon after school, a Navy recruiter would call and we would chat. He was an excellent salesmen. He nearly convinced me that living in a submarine for months at a stretch was a completely normal life choice. The military’s rigid environment appealed to me at the time and I was probably a 60/40 split between going to college or joining the Navy. I realized this morning that if I had enlisted, I would have probably been at basic training during the September 11th attacks. My high school ended up sending roughly half of my graduating class to college, half of those to the local community college and the other half going to a four-year school. Half of the four-year students went to Appalachian State University, which is a great school up in the mountains about an hour’s drive from the high school. I imagine the high application rate to this school was the same phenomenon that Watkins mentioned in that it was the closest four-year college to our high school and there were a lot of alumni around. I know people who went to elite private schools that applying to college was a multi-year process with the school helping you research colleges that matched your academic needs, keeping track of application dates, paying for tests, and generally herding you through the often-confusing and always-expensive process of something that is still one of the best ways to improve one lot’s in life. Colleges in the US, I believe, are welcoming and available to everyone with the wide range of diversity and financial aid scholarships they offer but, like too many things, some are already starting a few steps closer to the finish line.

Growing up with Guns

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 07:00:00 +0000

I have no interest in guns. I’ve never owned anything more powerful than a BB gun. I’ve never been hunting. Growing up, I was more of an exception to the norm – people around me loved guns.

My father owned a double-barreled, break-action 12-gauge shotgun propped up in the closet with buckshot shells in a nearby dresser drawer. Part of the physical education course we all had to take in high school involved a hunter’s safety section that culminated by skeet-shooting on the football field with real rifles with real ammunition. People would call out of work or school on the beginning of hunting seasons.

My brother is not like me in that he loves guns. He collects them and now has a small arsenal consisting of handguns, a shotgun or two, and a few rifles. He has a concealed carry permit, meaning that he has a legal right to carry a handgun on his person. One of the guns he owns, I bought for him, meaning I’ve gone through distinctly American process of purchasing a weapon.

It was the Christmas after I graduated college and had started to make a little money. I wanted to buy larger gifts for my immediate family than my former college student budget could afford, so I decided to buy my brother a shotgun. I walked into a Dick’s Sporting Goods, straight back to the gun counter and got the rundown on the various models in my given price range.

At the counter, I got the various specs of all manner of weaponry: muzzle velocities, magazine counts, and bore sizes. The sales pitch was analytical: scientific and all numbers, vaguely militaristic. Like most things where we don’t want to acknowledge the true nature of, this specific jargon was a disguised way of asking, “If I were to point and shoot this gun at something, how big of a hole will it leave? What kind of damage can I, as a small human, do to something?”

The gun I selected was a Mossberg 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun: a black, all-metal, military-looking affair. The man behind the counter took my driver’s license to the computer, entered in my information, and then a few minutes later gave me a ticket to take to the front registers in order to pay for the gun. I was a bit confused by the process so I asked him to clarify. He said, “For safety reasons, we don’t want our customers carrying guns and ammo around the store.” That seemed perfectly reasonable.

He walked up to the front counter with me, carrying the gun and ammunition. He waited until I had paid, then, while standing not 6 feet away from the register, he handed me the gun and wished me a good night. So here I was, standing in a crowded store, near registers overflowing with Christmas money, holding a very powerful weapon. I was shaking from nervousness, not because I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but from the complete disjointedness of holding a gun in a public place and how it all just felt wrong.

Getting a gun was too easy and I had to prove too little about my skills and mental capacity to be an owner of that weapon. For comparison, in North Carolina, in order to get my full driver’s license, I had to take a multi-week written course, followed by a multi-week driving course, with a multi-month probationary period, followed by another written course and one more in-car test, just in order to legally drive a car. I probably waited longer in line at the DMV than it took for me to go from non-gun-owner to gun-owner. Our bureaucratic government showers every piece of its workings with red tape yet, for some reason, makes it simple to acquire something that is so closely associated with crime, civil unrest, and some of the worst massacres outside of acts of war on American soil.

As an American, from a gun-loving area of the country, do I know why Americans are so weird about guns? No, not really. I honestly believe that the overwhelming majority of gun owners I’ve met are well-trained and take proper precautions (Dad with the shotgun in the closet not withstanding). But it’s the crazy people that I worry about. And people aren’t always crazy. Some perfectly sane, say-hi-at-the-market people have minds that turn and need professional help. Combine this with how easy it is to acquire guns with a society that has choked down that visceral reaction to weaponry, and in fact celebrates it (either through movies that glorify outlaws or war, or as some twisted symbol of citizenry in contentious political times), and the ingredients are there for the terrible things like the past few months happening.

Caleb

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 07:00:00 +0000

In middle school, there was a boy named Caleb who would routinely eat things off the cafeteria floor, claiming it helped his immune system. He never got sick so maybe he was right.

During lunch one day, another boy reached for a chicken nugget off Caleb’s hard plastic cafeteria tray. Mid-reach, Caleb stabbed the other boy in the hand with his fork, causing a bit of bleeding and a lot of bruising. To Caleb, this was hilarious.

A few of us would go over to Caleb’s house where we pretended to be professional wrestlers and play paintball, at the same time. I never got the connection between Hulk Hogan and shooting balls of paint at one another from way too close range, but the others had no problem making that leap. The whole spectacle probably had something to do with our endocrine systems just starting the flood of testosterone, pushing us as children towards manhood, and impersonating costumed, steroid abusers prancing around in their underwear on TV, combined with shooting each other in pretend-war was, in our hormonally-hazed minds, what Men did. Caleb had the best paintball gun, had the best aim with his good gun, and also knew all the catchphrases and signature moves of every wrestler. He dominated this “game” and I was glad to be included in this make-believe world.

Caleb moved to South Carolina during middle school and years went by and we forgot about him.

During our senior year of high school, a bunch of us skipped class on a day we dubbed “Senior Skip Day” (for obvious reasons). Senior Skip Day not-so-coincidentally fell on the opening day of trout season. Stone Mountain State Park, with its many rivers and creeks flowing through it, was a 15-minute drive from the high school, so the bulk of the kids skipping ended up here, with their trucks and fishing gear in tow. The teachers knew about it but didn’t stop it, partly because I think they were jealous but mostly because they were glad to be rid of us for the day.

We were walking along one of the rivers, and we noticed a few people lazily floating by in inner tubes. One of the men in the tubes yelled up at us and out of the river came Caleb.

There was a lot to catch up on in the time spanning shooting each other with paintballs when we were 11 years old and nearly-grown men finishing up high school, too much, in fact, to exchange anything but the high-level details. Indeed he had moved to South Carolina and was currently working in construction (as he had dropped out of school). Behind the short, awkward sentences, I could still tell Caleb had a wildness about him, but, at that age, wildness was less paintball guns and re-enacting fake wrestling matches, and more something else entirely.

Without saying it, we both seemed to decide that our friendship and commonalities were from a different time, so we politely said our goodbyes as he pushed back off into the river and that was the last I ever saw Caleb, just floating away.

A New Razor

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

As a Christmas gift, Meghan gave me a new razor, one of the “old-fashioned” safety razors, complete with a shaving brush and soap that smells vaguely of tobacco. I had actually been eyeing this setup for a few months as I’ve been using one of the modern razors with 3-5 blades for years, and I was always disappointed with the quality of the shave, as well as how quickly my coarse facial hair would wear down the blade. I watched a few YouTube videos on optimal lathering technique with the brush and soap and the proper angle and direction to pull the razor. (I’m sure our grandfathers learned the same way…) And just like any ritual, there are as many ways to do it as there are are people performing it. So wanting a possibly better shave was a major reason for wanting (and receiving) this shaving setup, but I’d be lying if I said that was the only reason. Sure, there’s that slightly Mad-Menish flair of dragging a sharp blade across your throat with a chromed-out razor, but for me, it appealed to my love of little rituals. Up to a year or so ago, the pieces of my day were mostly the same, many of them spent in front of my computer. Like I’d imagine a lot of people that “live” on the Internet, I divided my chunks of time into roughly 15 second slices: read 1 email, switch to Twitter and read the top few most recent messages, switch to the feed reader and skim a dozen headlines, oh look a new Twitter message, ooh more email, and so on and so on. I knew I needed a reprieve from getting that constant stream of endorphins from making all the numbers go down. The first little ritual I introduced was brewing a cup of coffee and making oatmeal on the stove every morning. Such a little thing became a real meditation. I could only do one thing at a time and I had to pay attention. This was a complete flip from the non-stop information gluttony I usually participated in and this was good. So this new shaving process in the morning is a similar thing. (And as a side benefit, I’m getting a better shave!) Another thought, that might be related: Over the holidays, Meghan and I went and stayed with her parents in a beach house on the Florida Panhandle. Her brother would turn the TV own after our afternoon walks on the beach and around 6pm, Meghan’s mother would ask for him to to change the channel to the news. Ten years ago, this would have seemed commonplace, but today, the idea of sitting down with the frame of mind of “now, I will consume the news for 30 minutes” is noteworthy. With an always-on, usually-tuned-in Internet connection, there’s no official news time. It’s all the time, whether you like it or not. Instead of watching the talking heads, I tried to decide which mode is better. With the Internet, I can know of any world event within seconds of it happening. With the TV, I get a daily condensed version of the highlights. I think I decided that getting the news, in whatever form, once a day in a solid chunk might be the best way. Beyond living in ignorance for a few hours in the day, not knowing normal news events until later usually has very little direct impact on my life. It’s also another ritual, a devoted time set aside for one purpose. Do I need to be constantly awash in world news? I’d say no. Getting that dose of information in one chunk probably also lets you digest it better and it also lets others (definitely for better or worse) filter out a lot of the noise. I also realized that a big reason that I would constantly refresh cnn.com or nytimes.com was that I was bored. Why was I bored? Because there was nothing new on those pages. I realized that’s a pretty harsh cycle to be caught up in. So that’s why I’m taking solace in what little rituals like shaving with a safety razor, or sitting down to watch the evening news, or grinding and pressing a pot of coffee has on my always plugged-in attitude. And I’m learning that the old saying is true: sometimes you need to stop and smell roses, or, in this case, the tobacco-scented shaving soap.

The Cat in the Laundry Room

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 08:00:00 +0000

My parents have a cat that I cleverly named “Dipstick”, due to her solid blackness with a white-tipped tail. This cat was born at our house in the laundry room which is an exterior room off the garage. With a washer and dryer in there, it was always warm and with the garage door closed, wild animals weren’t a concern, so it was a safe spot to birth and raise a litter of kittens. Dipstick was the runt of the lot and was born not breathing. My father was watching over the natural progression of things and quickly swooped in, as naturally, this would have been that for that kitten. He held it upside down and pumped its chest, and fluid poured out, and it started mewing. We’ve always had multiple cats wandering around the house, and we’ve let them decide if they wanted to be indoor or outdoor cats. We’ve had some cats that would only go outside once a week or so (and less than that in the winter), and some cats that stayed completely outside, only swinging by to eat. Dipstick was a cat that lived in limbo, not really an indoor nor an outdoor cat, instead deciding to live entirely in the same laundry room she was born in. So where she could have a warm house to sleep in, or dozens of wooded acres to wander through, she has instead decided to spend her entire existence in a 48 square foot room. Dipstick is now approaching 12 or 13 years old. This cat has spent all but a few minutes per day in this crowded little room. This makes me sad on some level, as she’ll pass on eventually within a few feet of where she was born, but she doesn’t seem to be in bad spirits at all about it, and she knows both what the inside and the outside holds, and she’s chosen her lot. I’m not sure why I think so much of this cat when I’m home. Now that I’m only coming home once a year or so, things are always slightly different and off from the last time I visited, but that black cat with the white-tipped tail is always curled up in the same spot she’s literally spent her entire life in and that kind of constancy is reassuring, especially when my own travels have taken me very far away from home.

Yearbook

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

So I’ve been working on gathering the bits and pieces of my online life from the past year and getting them together into a book that I’m tenatively calling “Yearbook: 2011” (creative, I know).

I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing this, but I’m enjoying it and the fact that I might have a real, physical thing that I built after it’s finished is frankly exciting.

The process, like a lot of a lot of processes where you take something you’re familiar with and then turn it on its head, has already changed the way I approach what I put online, or at least my perceived impact of it. Now when I write a Twitter message or a blog post, my first thought is, “Well, that’s going in the book,” and I pause, realizing that this will be a concrete thing soon.

So, I have this website, with the occasional blurb or essay, and my Twitter account where I post mostly inane one-liners (as that’s all I’ve got room for and the message fits the medium, in my experience) and they are both entirely public. I also like to tell myself that these pieces of content will also exist forever at their current addresses, so that people thousands of the years in the future will be able to read my scribblings. But the fact that it’s “out there”–as I do a gesture that’s vaguely like batting a fly away–has never really felt like it was built to last or that it had any gravitas.

And with this perceived slightness, I tend to treat things slightly.

But now these things are going in a book and a book is a Real Thing. It’s what holds history, not just in libraries and bookstores, but in your grandparent’s attic. It’s also art, with illuminated works hundreds of years old behind glass in museums. And now I’m making one of those, too.

I don’t have any visions of grandeur that what’s in my book is going to interest anyone but myself, and it will likely never be in a museum, but it’s an assemblage of atoms that’s going to be on my bookshelf, and will probably outlast me. That’s a completely different feeling than pushing some bits from my phone or laptop to some hard drive in a distant data center that I then have to use a computer to look at again.

And unlike a computer, a book is a self-contained thing. Where my browser will load everything from pictures my friends upload, to emails sent to my landlord, to the daily news, a book is made of its pages, and that’s it. When I pick up a novel, I know I’m getting an unbroken experience of reading just one story. So I’m taking what would normally live beside everything the Internet has to offer, and putting it in its own chunk of dedicated space.

Something I didn’t realize until I started to see the parts go together in the book is that it’s also a much better attempt at a truer self-portrait. None of these services by themselves gives a clear view of me as a person, but once you start piecing them together, the previously fuzzy image starts to firm up a little. It’s exactly like the blind men and the elephant, each trying to determine the whole by the description of its parts. I’m putting the pieces together, and, even though it’s still a bit dim, you can start to make out details in the silhouette.

So, this book project has changed the way I look at these bits of content I’ve scattered around the web. None of those pieces have to be transient, and actually collecting them all and putting them side-by-side actually offers a bit of gravitas that separately they might not have.

Thanksgiving

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:00:00 +0000

As I’ve gotten older, Thanksgiving Day has become one of my favorite holidays as there’s a simplicity in the day that I’ve really grown to appreciate. The center point of the day can easily be summed up as “a day to pause and to remember the good things in our lives”. This creed easily crosses any divide humans have declared, not belonging to any race or religion, amplifying what we have in common, which is being humans connected to one another, whether by blood or by chance. This is also the one day of the year where cynicism disappears, thank god. You’re allowed to express genuine and outward emotion to people around you, and these little gestures of appreciation get no sideways looks, as, sadly, they might on any other day. Consumerism hasn’t managed to make any major inroads into this holiday. It’s hard to sell things to people where the day is fundamentally about intangible things like family and friendships. I love Christmas, with its anticipation of gift giving, and I love Valentine’s Day (though I try to shower excessive attention on my wife on more than just one day of the year), but TV and magazines have convinced us that these holidays are best expressed with money spent. Thanksgiving has escaped relatively unscathed. Unlike New Year’s and its list of resolutions that people make and break, I have no problems reading lists of what others are thankful for, as I undeniably, and thankfully, find it difficult to enumerate everything good that I have. So here’s my short list of things and people I’m thankful for, and in no particular order.

I’m thankful that I’m still able to call and talk to both my parents and my brother on the phone whenever I like (barring time zone differences) and we’re still excited to catch up with one another. I sometimes take that for granted but I know it won’t always be the case and today I get to remember that.
I’m thankful for Meghan’s fantastic in-laws, who are absolute pleasures to be around and have been nothing but kind towards us.
I’m thankful for relatively smooth arc of my life, and that it seems to be still trending upwards. I’m working my dream job in one of the best cities on Earth, and though some days are better than others, I have to pinch myself occasionally that I’m working daily on something that millions of people, including myself, love.
I’m thankful for my incredible co-workers, past and present, that are so gracious with their patience in teaching me to not only to be a better engineer, but a better professional. I’m thankful that Simon took a chance on my resume, flew me out, and changed the course of my life more than most people have. Specifically, I’m thankful for what Neil, Trevor, Dunstan, Henry, Bogan, Eric, Timmy, Pancakes and Bert have taught me about loving what you work on, and have proved to me, once again, that some of your best friends can come from your place of work.
Lastly, I’m incredibly thankful for Meghan, who continually makes me attempt to be a better person. For reasons I still don’t understand, she decided to marry me, and then follow me across the country, and put up with my curmudgeonly ways, and I’m thankful that I have my best friend accompanying me along these journeys.

So, today, I’m going to enjoy the company of good friends and I hope you can do the same. It’s nice to pause and think of how good we all have it. Cheers.

The Summer of Radiators and Incidental Complexity

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0000

During the summer between high school and college, a very important summer in most people’s lives, I worked as a radiator mechanic. The guys I hung out with in high school talked mostly about two things: girls and cars, and the latter was the only thing they could speak of from any experience. Me? I knew nothing about girls and even less about cars. At the start of the summer, I worked at a lumber yard, but when they cut hours down to just a handful a week for the summer crew, my uncle offered me a job to help out at his radiator shop and as a kid that needed gas money, I accepted, even though I didn’t know the difference between a radiator cap and a hole in the wall. There were three of us in the shop: my uncle Wayne, Terry, and me. Terry told me that God helped him find the money to buy the red 1969 Gran Torino he drove to work every day. With a car that nice, I believed him.

Every customer’s issue was a puzzle and I loved solving these puzzles. People would come in with a complaint, usually that their car was running too hot or too cold. From these high-level complaints, we’d start digging down, armed with the knowledge of how the fluid, heat, and metal played off each other. Car running too hot? Make sure there was enough fluid. If the coolant looked ugly brown instead of neon green, there was probably chemical build-up in the radiator core. If the fluid looked okay, the thermostat was probably busted since it wasn’t opening up and letting the hot water into the radiator to cool. That’s how every job worked. If this, then that. Just like the machines themselves, diagnosing them became mechanical.

The heating-and-cooling system of every car is basically the same. They all have radiators, thermostats, water pumps, and heater cores. A fresh-off-the-lot Honda’s radiator works the same way as the radiator in a 50-year old Chevy truck. Everything else around this simple system has changed, though. Someone would bring in a newer-model Honda Civic and want their heater core replaced. (The heater core is a mini-radiator that sits behind your dashboard that blows hot air when you turn the heat on.) We would quote a full day’s labor to do this. This same job on any vehicle before the 1980s would be more in the range of an hour’s worth of work. Honda Civics were built to be small, light, safe, and environmentally friendly. These are all good things but the complexity these new features added made the other simpler systems more expensive to maintain. In this case, since these things were built so compactly, you’d have to remove the entire dashboard of the car, including rolling up the carpet and removing pieces of the door, keeping track of dozens of little screws, panels, and trim pieces, just to get to the heater core. In older trucks, built with neither weight nor size considerations, the heater core was usually behind a little panel under the passenger side dashboard that involved removing four screws, popping the heater core out, putting the new one in, and then replacing the panel. Easy. Some of the jobs on newer cars would actually be a significant portion of the total value of the car. If it costs you several hundred dollars to replace a fifty dollar part on a car that’s only worth a couple thousand dollars, people often decide that’s it’s just cheaper in the long run to just buy a whole new car.

Even though the basic concept of moving water through an engine to control temperature has held across a 100 years of automobiles, cars in the past 15 years have made working these jobs longer, more cumbersome, and thus more expensive. Like a lot of pieces of modern culture, things seem to be built to be replaced, and not to fix. Some people may attribute this to our “throw-away culture”, but I think that it’s more of a symptom, and not the cause. In the cause of advancement, we’ve built things that are cheaper to replace than to fix.

This relates perfectly to building large software systems. You often hear tales of the Big Rewrite: when a group decides that in order for a piece of software to be improved, it needs to be rewritten from scratch. Their problems don’t exist at the component level. Writing to a database probably works fine. Displaying a web page probably works fine. Uploading a photo and storing it away probably works fine. But when these things need to exist alongside one another, software people tend to make them unnecessarily depend on each other. And when things are tightly coupled, you can’t change one without affecting other seemingly unrelated things, and not without great cost.

Complexity of one system affects complexity of the overall system in often unforeseen ways and most complex systems are made up of simple, but overlapping, systems. I’m sometimes nostalgic for when I was debugging and fixing a physical machine, since dealing with concrete matter made thinking through these complex systems easier. But when you’re dealing with such an abstract thing as code, it’s easy to write yourself in a corner, where you sometimes have to remove the whole dashboard just to replace a cheap part.