# Joy & Curiosity #8 *Interesting & joyful things from the previous week* By Thorsten Ball • September 21, 2024 --- After travelling and meeting and talking the previous week, this week was full of just pure coding. Wrote a lot of code at work and [streamed about 5 hours of it](https://www.twitch.tv/thorstenball), which was a lot of fun. --- - In reply to [last week’s issue](https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/joy-and-curiosity-7), Muhammad [commented](https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/joy-and-curiosity-7/comment/69294245) with a link to [github.com/charlax/professional-programming](https://github.com/charlax/professional-programming) which contains a lot of links to great programming articles. It actually made me think that if someone were to ask me about how to start programming, I’d probably say: try to read most of what’s on here in the next 1-2 years (besides also actually learning to program.) - Watched Andy Allen’s talk [Serious Play](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBnIyD5I8mM) and thought: I like the ideas, I like the approach, I like the “happy accidents”, I like the whimsical stuff, but at the same time I don’t want animations or sounds in the software I use. Software should be as fast and as immediate as possible. - I haven’t linked to it yet, because I thought I’ll wait until they come out with a third episode, but I can’t wait any longer: if you haven’t, I highly recommend that you listen to the two episodes of the Acquired podcast on Microsoft: here’s [Volume I](https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft) and here is [Volume II](https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/microsoft-volume-ii). Acquired hasn’t just become one of my favorite podcasts of all time in the last year (I seriously don’t know how they do manage to pull of the casual-conversation-style *this well*), but these two episodes on Microsoft (a combined 9+ hours) are fantastic. I’m saying this as a complete non-Microsoft-guy (I spelled it as “micro$oft” when I was 14 and switched to Linux shortly thereafter), but Microsoft is an impressive company and its history is also the history of the personal computer which is also… my — our? —  history. At least to a certain extent. These 9 hours probably had more moments that made me go “ah I remember that!” than a potential 9 hour documentary on the last 30 years of the state of Germany. I remember when Windows 98 came out, when the new Aldi PC came out, when I finally got a Pentium 3, how calm Windows 2000 felt, the license code for that one widely-distributed cracked version of Windows XP, using Frontpage to build my first website, using Paint.exe in my dad’s office on a Saturday, Windings, Word, Clippy, … - This week a leaked version of a MrBeast company handbook, titled “[How to Suceed at MrBeast](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUSa7Y3J/view)”, made the rounds. I find that whole handbook incredibly fascinating. I’ve always had a thing for company handbooks, including the famous [Valve handbook](https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf) or Facebook’s [Little Red Book](https://facebookcollection.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/facebooks-little-red-book-office-of-ben-barry.pdf) or Reed Hasting’s not-really-a-handbook [presentation on Netflix culture](https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/culture-1798664/1798664), and this one hits all the right buttons for me. That doesn’t mean I agree with all of its contents, but rather that I admire when someone in a leadership position writes down how they see the world. I think it’s one of the most useful things that can be done for a company’s culture. - Some very interesting in this post on “[What's Wrong With Journalism](https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/whats-wrong-with-journalism)”. As someone who wanted to become a journalist twenty years ago, the difference between the world back then and now is stark. What stood out was the thought whether “we have returned to the word-of-mouth era.” - I loved [this post](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/blog-extravaganza-the-winners) for sharing that Donald Miller quote: “Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.” - After sharing a James Mickens talk last week, I now [came across](https://x.com/patrickdward/status/1836083885421048294?s=46) a piece of his writing which I totally forgot about but that’s still very, very funny: [This World of Ours](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf). - Read [this tweet today](https://x.com/stylewarning/status/1837288661714620571?s=46) and thought it’s a fantastic summary of (and maybe a replacement for) thousands of thoughts I have around different types of programmers and programming in different contexts. ---