It’s not quite yet a tradition but this year and last we dropped our daughter off for an end of Summer week at the Grandparents and then went to Rhode Island. Last year it was 

, this year Newport. It was a shorter trip this year, as we planned on spending the latter half of the week doing house projects / staycationing, but it was a good two days.

. We would definitely go back, it was close to everything, had a nice roof deck, and every room is a suite. We started to prefer suites after traveling with a child — it’s nice to be able to put them to bed and sit in a separate space — but even without the kid if feels more relaxing to be able to spread out in a small apartment’s worth of space. Also we did in-room massages, and it was set up great for that.

They also did an in-room Continental breakfast, which is exactly the amount of effort I like to put in to getting breakfast when on vacation.

Because we were only there for one full day, and got in late on a Sunday where a lot of things were closed, we primarily planned on doing a few mansions and walking around. On Monday we went to 

, and then before heading home we stopped at 

It is tradition that you take a photo that makes it look like you're moving in to your new house, of course.

If we had more time (and they had been open!) I would have liked to go to the 

. Also for all the times I’ve been to Newport I’ve still never made it around the Southern tip of the Cliff Walk to the beach!

I will note that one of the very appealing things about Newport if you’re staying in the heart of it is that you can walk everywhere, and if you don’t feel like walking there’s decent public transportation too. Obviously the weather has to cooperate, and you should avoid any weekends where some sort of boating event is going on that will push the restaurants to 300% capacity, but it’s a good town for wandering.

Trip notes from a quick little vacation in Newport, Rhode Island.

Newport, RI

. Start of the second paragraph this had me interested:

As a former English major and a sometimes writer, I had always been drawn to the idea that code is like literature…

I’m a former English major, and I’ve made the argument that coding and writing are similar in the past. But the author of this post went in a different direction than me:

…and that we ought to learn to write code the way we learn to write English: by reading good examples.

To which I recoiled, a bit. The article gets to a conclusion that matched my immediate reaction — no one reads code. We understand it by working with it, but it’s rare to even read it and rarer to appreciate it by reading it.

The overlap between coding and writing, to me, are the mental models you make while doing both. I keep application state in my mind the same way I do characters, locations, plot points. I look at a class with the mindset of “given this class, and the known business logic, how should this method behave”, and to me it runs down similar mental pathways to “given this character, and their known backstory, how would they behave in this situation”. In both writing and coding you’ll produce better output if you take multiple looks and pare down everything to its essentials. Kill your darlings is relevant in writing and code.

I like thinking about coding this way because it makes it easier to understand the challenges of coding collectively, or explaining to someone who doesn’t program one of the fundamental challenges of programming. Books with a single story are rarely written by multiple authors, although they might be worked on by many people. But code is rarely written by a single person — all of those mental models of backstory, plot, character models, need to be shared and internalized by everyone contributing. And that’s hard! Programming might be easier because you can’t argue at length about the motivations of an addNumbers method, but we also often shove the working notes into a “done” column, never to be seen again, or authors leave for new works, and expect new contributors to look at the final work and discern the why from only the how.

The post comes around to the conclusion that rather than reading code, in depth, we should approach it as naturalists:

I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found: “Look at the antenna on this monster! They look incredibly ungainly but the male of the species can use these to kill small frogs in whose carcass the females lay their eggs.”

Which I agree with. But if you want to keep the idea of code as literature, or writing at least, consider giving your code a director’s commentary. Record the little bits of deep knowledge about why a particular line got written that might be missed in scope of the full, final work, but will be dearly appreciated by a fellow programmer.

The overlap between coding and writing, to me, are the mental models you make while doing both.

Code is not literature

. I’m not halfway through it yet, and maybe it’s a bit of a 

 going on, but now I’m noticing the notion of shifting the perception of time in more places.

When I first heard about Empath units, I assumed that their main contribution to mental-health care was empathy. This isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. In my experience, nearly every caregiver aims to show empathy; the question is whether, in an emergency, we have the space and time to do so. In Minnesota, I started to think that the Empath unit’s real innovation is a structural shift in how we think about space and time. We usually consider drugs, devices, and procedures the kinds of medical care that make a difference, but physical spaces can be therapeutic, too. It’s also easy to forget that, in a crisis, every minute matters.

Speed is evidently important in many contexts. Quick reactions and instinctive responsiveness aid survival. But we also have a subsequent ‘slow’ response, which is conscious and deliberative, and may be beneficial for more complex social interactions and moral emotions. Perhaps ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ thinking are really two sides of the same coin – intrinsically related, but with their own independent virtues. In our fast-moving society that frequently prioritises speed, the importance of slowness should not be forgotten.

Not online, it’s August 1st, and someone today said “August already, it feels like Summer just started”. Maybe it did? The humidity finally broke — I’m sitting on the back porch writing this because it’s finally nicer outside than in. What’s Summer but a state of mind anyway.

I’ve been reading Saving Time by Jenny Odell. I’m not halfway through it yet, and maybe it’s a bit of a Baader–Meinhof thing going on, but now I’m noticing the notion of shifting the perception of time in more places.

built with coffee

Posts from: August 2023

Newport, RI

Code is not literature

Time Warp