The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of Plain Text

:_ferrisWhat:ERRATA - It's difficult to separate my desire for purity in doing as much in plain-text as possible, with the practicality that GitHub (and others) have features you're not going to want to miss, but can't yet get in plain text. This video represents a compromise. - I'm SO SURE I'm wrong about Odysseus/Ulysses that I'm going to put this here right now: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odysseus - I couldn't resist adding the effect at 3:00. That's Saike's glorious "Abyss Reverb" for reaper.fm/, the same as I used for my recent Ambient album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkdRLtubbII - 11:50 I did not say the phrase "style guide enforcement" very clearly, apologies. I've manually fixed the subtitle. - Linus did not create Git because existing version control systems wouldn't scale. He did it because the proprietary BitKeeper service he was using decided to revoke its free licence offerings.

“You must have the discipline to do less” Me on the couch: I’m a boss

Oh my god, I just hate it when companies think more meetings will make the team more productive.

“storage is cheap if you’re smart” looking forward to seeing that video

The comp sci department in my college uses git for everything. Every old test/assignment, syllabus change and bibliography is there for all to see. As a student i love the ease of access to materials and the ammount of old stuff to study from

I wonder if Linus had any idea he would have such an impact on the world.

Stand up meetings are good for two things in my experience so far: 1. check if anyone is blocked. 2. check for duplication of effort. i.e. make sure two people aren't doing two overlapping things.

It would be really cool to see lawmakers use git in this fashion. All law would be in plaintext in a repository for everyone to see. Government would create a pull request, parliament would comment on it and then vote on whether it will be merged. The justifications for that law proposal or change would be plainly visible in the commit messages and you could see a complete history of them. Any time you wanted to see why a certain law exists, you could just run git blame on it and read. You could possibly even have regular citizens commenting on the pull requests what they think of the new proposal.

Recently my team had to migrate to a diffrent "workspace" in databricks and we were unable to migrate models, workflows, and experiments. I want you to know that becasue of this video I will be pushing for saving things like these in as simple, transparent & popular format, within a git repo.

Would love to hear more about the stand up meeting you described. I find they often just turn into a status update meeting and everyone is just waiting their turn to talk before mentally checking out

We're living the result of "everyone uses a different format, what we need is a new format!" XD But yeah, plaintext markdown, restructured text, etc. Totally agree. Great take.

I'm impressed you didn't mention RFC repos as a real-world example of plaintext organizations

I work for a unicorn software company, and this vid describes our workflow to a tee. Instead of growing via series funding and then IPO like most successful startups, they focused on efficient workflow & management to remain profitable without relying on investors, and this is pretty much what they came up with. It works great, but it requires long-term vision, which can be hard to find in a world running on short-term profits. Edit: also, as a bugfixer, I cannot even imagine having to work without git and especially git blame.

Every time I watch one of your videos I get convinced of something, but this was the best one. Less is better. In the world of productivity tools, the minimal setup, the simplest workflow is always the best. Its hard to acknowledge that, we all love the new shiny thing. But it is the truth.

The quote at 3:06, "The difference between science and screwing around is writing it down," although most famously said by Adam Savage actually originated from Alexander "Alec" Jason a firearms specialist for the show. Adam talks about it here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WFFhicVeXI He starts explaining the quote's origin at 8:35. It's Adam Savage so naturally he goes on a tangent before finishing the story but it officially starts at 8:35. Also, there are differing versions of the quote but from all the sources I could find they all start with "the only difference...". The version of the quote said by Adam Savage on MythBusters is "Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down." However, in the video linked above Adam quotes Alexander Jason with saying "The only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down." Obviously the later is prone to inaccuracies, as he is recalling it from memory. Adam saying the prior version of the quote can be found here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSUMBBFjxrY edit: spelling & minor revisions

I know from the title this is gonna be my next cause I'll annoy all my friends with for a week.

I have found that most teams producing bad software are, in fact, the same in one important way: The team diminishes and dismisses what their users say their priorities for the product are and instead the team decides to focus on what the team members want to work on.

I use my old Raspberry Pi as a provate git repo host on my LAN. Among many other repos, it includes a repo in which I keep my dream journal, which is a plain text file that is formatted with the date followed by paragraphs, with each entry separated by new lines. I'm definitely a fan.

Sooooo I actually think the git based product management concept is pretty good, but it’s going to be really fun trying to convince Karen from HR to use it.

Moving to plain text, enforcing PRs, and making teams work through merge conflicts was a learning experience for everyone at a previous job of mine. However, it also exposed who the good teams were, and which teams were poor performers but were hiding behind issues in proprietary tool sets. Some middle management was very unhappy, as rhey couldn't coast and get their bonuses.