Weeknote of 2018-08-21, Making and Breaking Patterns

On repeat: Joe Goddard - Electric Lines

I was dramatically sick Tuesday and Wednesday of last week; I’m guessing food poisoning. The combination of not eating, not exercising, barely drinking, and barely standing made me lose over 10 pounds in about a day. The following day, the dehydration caused me to cramp up so badly I nearly went to the urgent care. There are some patterns you just shouldn’t break.

Collect more than one person in a place and they will start patterning themselves off each other. You can see it in Instagram on repeat, on repeat. All these influencers seem to be “influencing” in the same direction.

Intermittently breaking pattern and secluding yourself from an environment of repeated interaction statistically leads to more thoughtful and novel responses. It improves the group’s collective intelligence, too.

In recent weeks, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time condensing a service-oriented application architecture down to a queue-based implementation within a single project. I’m notoriously a proponent for pervasive patterns in the code I write. I will often go back a rewrite groups of functions to match the same signature or reorganize class hierarchies to fit a couple new members. The real benefits are realized and strengthened now as I go through years-old code, transposing high-level tasks in one language to another. Each revision chips away a few more bits from the edges to reveal the best pattern beneath.