Travel and inspiration

Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind. — Seneca

I’m feeling existential. I’ve been traveling through Germany with my family for a week and a half. We’ve visited over a dozen palaces, churches, memorials, and museums in Munich, Nuremberg, Bamberg, and Berlin.

What I’ve seen and experienced has shaken me to my core. While I was aware of the significant milestones in European, North African, and Middle Eastern history, it wasn’t until I experienced these places and artifacts in person that I realized that having any of these artifacts and historical sites is such a gift.

It’s incredible that we have evidence of our ancient past. Surviving evidence of any life on Earth from our past is a rounding error approaching zero of a Poisson distribution of unlikely artifacts that we still have today. While we have many fossil records and ancient artifacts, most of the evidence that ever has existed does not exist anymore. The rare exceptions are ancient civilizations and organic matter, which encoded their history in stone.

I have more thoughts on this, but I’ll save that for another day.

Notable links this week

• Interviewed Neal Ford, co-author of Fundamentals of Software Architecture, on Book Overflow

• Discussed Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers (part 1) on Book Overflow

• Watched Ali Abdaal’s review on Cal Newport’s new book Slow Productivity (we’ve added it to the Book Overflow Backlog)

• Enjoyed this read on Quartz: a deterministic time testing library for Go

• Somehow, I just stumbled upon shadcn/ui - what a cool project.