Personal essays
My first word for 2025 is about not responding right away
Conferences
One of my early beats as a reporter was Java on the Mac.
Even if those words mean nothing to you, it meant that I got to go to the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, Boston, and New York and write articles for O’Reilly web sites and JavaWorld Magazine.
This is before many people had blogs and podcasts and video weren’t a thing yet.
I would get to watch Steve Jobs do a keynote and poke around the convention and then I’d write an article that would appear later.
I loved it.
At first I worried because we and other publications had reporters who would write articles right away.
What could I possibly add in an article that didn’t appear until a day or two after the event?
Time.
There are many aspects of time. Here I mean that there was a significant amount of elapsed time. I’ll call that “distance”.
Cooking
I made pizza dough the other day.
After letting it rise and punching it down, I split the dough into four balls and put it in the refrigerator overnight.
The next day, the dough had more flavor. The pizzas I made that night were really good.
Later in the week I took another dough out of the refrigerator and that pizza was even better. The next day I took out the last one and that pizza was the best of all.
Time.
The night I made that first pizza, I also made a second lasagne with Bolognese sauce. (I was told that it couldn’t be lasagne because it wasn’t a tomato-based sauce but that’s not the point.)
The meat sauce was a wonderful mix of pork, beef, and vegetables that was ready to eat after a half hour. But a Bolognese sauce cooks for hours and along the way transforms into something so much better than the sum of its parts.
Time. Distance.
Revisiting the past
I’ve recently had an opportunity to revisit projects I’ve worked on long enough ago that I hadn’t remembered them as clearly as I do when I’m waist deep in them.
I’ve just updated my book “A SwiftUI Kickstart.”
According to the file information, it’s been three years since I touched these files.
I really liked the writing and the approach I took.
Much of it needed to change and be rewritten. There are better ways to do the things I’d written about because of the additions and improvements to the programming language and the UI framework.
None of this stuff I’m writing about is brand new. The Swift and SwiftUI changes are six months old or older.
I’m still glad I sat with them for months before I revisited my book.
This update benefited from the time since I’d last read through the book and the time since the changes were made that required an update to the book.
There are times I’m in a rush.
Last year I wrote a book about Swift Testing as it was still being finished and polished. In the fall I did a couple of workshops on it and I gave a talk about it in November.
The talk was just published and I watched it. I hate watching myself on stage. I hate my mannerisms, my bald spot looks huge, my stomach looks huger - but there was enough distance between me and when I gave this talk that I could watch it as if it was someone else.
You know. It was pretty good. I’m pretty good at giving talks that cover a lot of ground and give people a feel for a complex topic. The guy could stand to lose a few pounds and to smile a bit more - but …
Processing life
So why is “Distance” my first word of 2025?
It goes back to election night in the US in November and the week that followed.
I had to turn off my television and stop listening to podcasts because every time a pundit asked, “do you know why the election turned out the way it did?” I would think, “no, and neither do you. It’s too early.”
We live in a world where all of that air time has to be filled and so no one says, “I’m sorry, I don’t know yet. Let’s wait for more data and talk about this in a week or two.”
We live in a world where we ask AI to make a guess and nod our heads at the answer, right or wrong, rather than take the time to dig in and really find out.
My articles on MacWorld were different because I was allowed to take time to understand the context of the announcements. I could reflect on past announcements and think about what had ultimately happened.
I wasn’t just reporting what they wanted me to report.
I won’t always get things right. There was that scene in Apple’s developer conference where a guy walked up to a group of people and didn’t take his AirPods out of his ears and the music he was listening to just stopped so he could participate in a conversation. I was mad at the rudeness and didn’t see the future where those AirPods could be used as hearing aids. When the hearing aid announcement came I could see the long game that Apple had played.
So Distance.
I don’t need to react right away. I don’t need to have a take.
I was recently going through a stack of mail that I’d set aside and many of them just weren’t relevant any more because some arbitrary “must answer by” date had passed.
This year I may say, “I don’t know” or “I need to think about this some more” a lot more.
Maybe take some time. Create some distance.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 250. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe