Welcome to Scatter Brain

A new place for me to write some words on all the random things I have bouncing around in my brain.

a new place for me to explore

I've been working at Substack for over a year now. I remember when I left my last job and took a few weeks off before I started, I came up with grand plans for starting a Substack and to start writing again. I even sketched a little logo that I wanted to make in Illustrator that I was going to use:

It’s supposed to be a confused looking brain with things (keyboard, mouse, book, paper, pen) all scattered around

I wanted to call it Scatter Brained which was inspired by the name of one of my favorite songs. It’s called Napalm Brain / Scatter Brain by DJ Shadow (whose real name is also Josh Davis by the way). It’s off his stellar album Entroducing… I’ve shortened it to just Scatter Brain and decided to do the trendy 2022 thing and used DALL-E to create the logo. The name Scatter Brain also is a good description of myself: my own interests are all over the place and never seem to be the same for more than a few weeks at a time.

That didn’t happen and there’s no good reason for why I didn’t start it back then. Here we are now though and I’m going to give it another go.

I’ve always liked writing. Back in college I used to write blog posts on my personal website all the time. Many of them still receive quite a bit of traffic to this day. For awhile, I used to get an email every other week from someone telling me about how they came across my website and wanted to reach out. One of the emails was even from the son of Edsger Dijkstra who came across my blog post on how I spent a summer learning how to model my handwriting after Dijkstra.

It was a surreal thing to read and a reminder of the power of the internet and especially of writing. I really want to write more this year. The latest post on Substack Reads says it well: don’t start a new year, start a Substack. Sophia goes on to say:

What will you write about? Who cares. You can write about the moon, you can write about the desert, or just desserts. You can write about TV shows, coffee, makeup, your wife and her mean sister, poetry or gossip, about that secret, doomed affair. You can write about your expertise, your philosophy, or business, you can write about things only a few people will understand. You would think known writers with large audiences have it easy here, but the pressure to succeed is felt more among them. The stakes are low if you are not at all known. There is no audience to lose, only one to gain.

Another reason I am starting one is the reason many people have had in the last month or two. Twitter used to be my favorite place on the internet. Sure it could be horrible and often brought out the worst in people but if it was used right and curated daily, you had access to the very best of the internet.

I followed some of the best software engineers in the world and got access to their thoughts and ideas. I followed some of the best journalists in the world that would share interesting articles that they either wrote or read. I’ve followed researchers and scientists that would tweet about the latest of their field and thoughts about newly released research papers.

It was the pinnacle of the internet. It’s what the people in the 90’s envisioned when they called it the information superhighway (one of my favorite terms that I wish we still used).

Part of what made Twitter great was that it didn’t change much and it was constantly trying to figure out what it was despite being over a decade old. As Matt Levine has said:

My basic model of how Twitter works is that everyone who works at Twitter hates the product and its users, which creates a healthy tension. Twitter’s users push Twitter to be more Twitter-like, to appeal to the weirdest and most addicted tendencies of its most online power users. But Twitter’s employees and executives push it to be less Twitter-like, because they don’t use it, and it ends up being just about Twitter-like enough. If you put Twitter’s most addicted users in charge, it would be an unusable nightmare of harassment and weirdness. Twitter’s very most addicted user is now in charge.

I figured that Elon owning Twitter wasn’t going to go well but the speed of destruction has exceeded everyone’s expectations. No one predicated that it was going to go this badly as fast as it did.

So like many others, I’m going to take my Substack more seriously. I also now have an account on Hachyderm, a Mastodon instance for engineers, that you should follow. It has been really pleasant so far. There’s a novelty and naivety to people’s posts that reminds me of the earlier days of Twitter. Sure the UX around decentralization isn’t the best but I’m starting to think that that is actually a good thing because it keeps some of the casuals away.

One more reason for wanting to write more is just to get better at thinking and organizing my thoughts. The thing about writing is that it is often viewed as taking your thoughts and putting them onto paper. It’s more complicated than that though. Writing isn’t just writing what you know, it’s about discovering what you do know.

I am humorously bad at expressing myself while speaking. Being able to sit down and write what I think is easier; time is just removed from the equation. My wife once said that I speak as if I’m typing what I’m saying and editing it in real time:

You’ll be in the middle of a sentence and your brain will be like: “backspace, backspace, backspace”

It’s so funny and true. It’s another example of why I wanted to name this Scatter Brain.

Here’s to a new project and a new year! Thank you for subscribing and reading. I have about 5 different posts in progress and hope I can publish one of them very soon after I do a bit more research. The teaser for it is this: it involves the Unix epoch and IBM vs the Justice Department and how they are related. I also have a 2022 retrospective post in the works which should be easier to finish.

Thank you for joining me. LFG