In the eponymous song by Barenaked Ladies there’s a great line that I think about - and reference - often. (If you know me you’ve probably heard me say it once or twice.) It goes as follows:
I’m lying here just staring at the ceiling tiles, and I’m thinking ‘bout…what to think about.
Roughly akin to writer’s block, to know the feeling of “thinking about what to think about” is pretty deeply human…and with company shutdown over and the _SiteCon ‘22 CFP deadline approaching in about a week-and-a-half, that line has been swimming ‘round back of my head this week. I’ve reached out to a _ handful of folks to kick around a few ideas. Someone suggested “Maybe something about inGraphs?”, which brought to mind another BNL song. Another suggestion was “cooking, at scale”, which I think is interesting but I’m not sure I can come up with an entire talk’s worth of content that would be relevant to this crowd. (A quick tidbit just to get it off my chest: portion approximations do not scale linearly with the number of mouths you’re feeding. For example, if you’re making pasta for a “normal” amount of people something like 1/4 to 1/5 of a pound is roughly what you’re going to need. …but if you’re cooking for 40 people and you make 10 pounds of pasta then after all of your guests have gone home you’re going to have to figure out what to do with a bathtub full of leftover pasta. Trust me.)
I’ve also been considering doing a talk about a project I worked on that ended up ultimately not shipping - why it failed, what I wish I’d known ahead of time, what I learned along the way. I think it could be an interesting talk, but I’m not sure whether I have the stomach for it.
At any rate, I think I’ve got a couple of solid ideas…and rather than fleshing out proposals for them, I’m writing this.
Man…if someone had told me earlier on in my career what percentage of my time I’d spend writing (and not writing code, just writing proper) I’m not sure I would’ve believed them.
Huh.
That might make an interesting topic for a talk…