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Comment by kyllo

6 years ago

I read it differently--this is not targeted at founders trying to validate a business plan, it is targeted at engineers whose job it is to build the product, and he's saying to quit fiddling around with your tools and focus on building the product--which is more fun anyway.

"It's important to learn how to use your tools well, but once you have, stop prioritising that. They're good enough now, you know how to use them. Don't get trapped in this local maximum of optimisation. Go and build stuff."

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kyllo

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bluedino  6 years ago

10 years ago, I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails, so I bought my first MacBook Pro. Just grabbed it off the shelf at the store.

I got my first software development job, and everything was great. I thought it was odd that the other guys didn't know much about Macs (and didn't really seem to care), so when they'd upgrade the OS I'd have to fix everything for them, or they'd have issues with gems etc.

I started buying every MacBook as they were relased. Installing beta software, upgrading the RAM and HD just because I could. Spending countless hours reading reviews, posting on forums...

The other guys just wrote code. Eventually I got tired of keeping up with the crap (or maybe I just got older) and now I crank out code on my far-from-the-latest MacBook, running Mojave. shrug

It was fun stuff, but I could have spent that time (and money) more productively.

  • shantly  6 years ago

    It's really funny to me that someone could get excessively sucked into tinkering with and "nerding out" over Macs, the desktop/laptop platform that's by far the least inclined toward that. Usually stories like this start on Windows or Linux and end up on Macs precisely to minimize time & brain space lost to tinkering and esoteric platform knowledge just to keep things basically working OK, as the appeal of that sort of thing wears off.

    I don't mean that in a bad way! It's just one of those "huh, so many different experiences out there, who'da thunk it" things.

    • chefandy  6 years ago

      I've used Windows, Linux/FreeBSD, and MacOS (and heck, even Solaris) extensively as desktop OSs. Windows is only better than for MacOS for tinkering if you're not comfortable using the command line.