Web Excursions 2021-06-10
A Project of One's Own
Working on a project of your own is as different from ordinary work as skating is from walking.
It's more fun, but also much more productive.
You have moments of happiness when things work out, but they don't last long, because then you're on to the next problem.
So why do it at all?
Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right.
You feel as if you're an animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do
— not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive.
We treat "playing" and "hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work".
It's not clear to a kid building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long) route from that to architecture or engineering.
It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam,
when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams.
When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades.
But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those.
There turn out to be two senses in which work can be one's own:
that you're doing it voluntarily, rather than merely because someone told you to, and
that you're doing it by yourself.
People who care a lot about their work
are usually very sensitive to the difference between pulling, and being pushed, and work tends to fall into one category or the other.
But the test isn't simply whether you're told to do something.
You can choose to do something you're told to do.
Indeed, you can own it far more thoroughly than the person who told you to do it.
Collaboration[s] [can be done] in two different ways.
One way to collaborate is to share a single project.
The other way is when multiple people work on separate projects of their own that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle
The mere expression "work/life" embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct.
It's easy for something new to feel like a project of your own.
That's one of the reasons for the tendency programmers have to rewrite things that don't need rewriting, and to write their own versions of things that already exist.
If you can find the right people, you only have to tell them what to do at the highest level.
They'll handle the details. Indeed, they insist on it.
For a project to feel like your own, you must have sufficient autonomy.
You can't be working to order, or slowed down by bureaucracy.
One way to ensure autonomy is not to have a boss at all. There are two ways to do that:
to be the boss yourself, and
to work on projects outside of work.
Though they're at opposite ends of the scale financially, startups and open source projects have a lot in common, including the fact that they're often run by skaters.
If your projects are the kind that make money, it's easy to work on them.
It's harder when they're not. And the hardest part, usually, is morale.
That's where adults have it harder than kids.
The most important phase in a project of one's own is at the beginning: when you go from thinking it might be cool to do x to actually doing x.
And at that point high standards are not merely useless but positively harmful.
Ideally we can have the best of both worlds: to be deliberate in choosing to work on projects of our own, and carelessly confident in starting new ones.
Multiple-document interface - Wikipedia
[Context: Vivaldi 4.0 | Hacker News, where leokennis says "I was an avid Opera user around 2004. True MDI interface, mouse gestures…"]
A multiple-document interface (MDI) is a graphical user interface in which multiple windows reside under a single parent window.
Such systems often allow child windows to embed other windows inside them as well, creating complex nested hierarchies.
This contrasts with single-document interfaces (SDI) where all windows are independent of each other.
Mac OS and its GUI are document-centric instead of window-centric or application-centric.
Every document window is an object with which the user can work.
The menu bar changes to reflect whatever application the front window belongs to.
Application windows can be hidden and manipulated as a group, and the user may switch between applications (i.e., groups of windows) or between individual windows, automatically hiding palettes, and most programs will stay running even with no open windows.
Indeed, prior to Mac OS X, it was purposely impossible to interleave windows from multiple applications.
Optimizing PDFs for Printers | PSPDFKit
Targeting the Correct DPI
Screens traditionally had a DPI of 72, but today they’re typically anywhere between 96 and 200
your average home printer will generally stick to a DPI of 300 or 600.
One common mistake often made is that of producing a PDF containing an image with a DPI much higher than that of the printer being printed to.
Another is to have data for a large image inside your PDF that ends up being inserted at a much smaller size on the page.
Many printers have limited graphical memory — some might only have 1 GB of RAM
Stripping Unneeded Content
JavaScript and forms
every edit performed to that document even if previous edits aren’t used.
Shared Objects
PDFs support including the data once in the file and sharing it between pages via objects.
When generating your PDF file, if you have an image you want to repeat, insert it into your PDF as an object and then reference it from your other pages.