LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #101:

THE MANY LEVELS OF HYPE

“Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.” ~ Scott Adams

Hype is a thing, and today, we consider the different levels of hype. We get an idea of what we could do with recruiters reaching out, have a play with history, then a play with shapes, and in the end, we consider something called “overengineering”.

Five Levels of Hype

I guess we’re all familiar with the Gartner hype cycle, which for me strictly falls into the “all models are wrong, but some are useful”category. It gives a bit more context to Amara’s Law:

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

“The Five Levels of Hype” add another interesting layer to those ideas: How large is the “Spike of Hope and Promise” at the beginning, and how severe are its consequences?

I’d argue that we’re seeing a lot of Level 5 Hypearound Web3 and NFTs lately, but maybe that’s just me.

Never Ignore a Recruiter

Interesting advice on how to deal with recruiters, being them a cold-caller or a real talent hunter: Never ignore them. The author even recommends weeding out the insincere ones with a scripted answer, which I find a bit over the top (but I’m also not in the segment of people who get calls from recruiters every day), but one thing is true: Recruiters are your best window into the job market. What skills are in high demand? How does your current salary compare to actual market rates? Which type of companies would find you interesting?

Those are all relevant pieces of information regarding your professional growth; And you usually get them once every couple of years, depending on how often you switch jobs.

Wiki History Game

Earth’s history is one big line from left to right, and here’s a fun game where you can guess if an historical event is on the left or on the right of some other historical event. It’s interesting to notice that as history becomes less old, and (recorded) events become more dense, placing them gets more and more difficult.

Shapecatcher

Looking for a specific unicode character? Just doodle it intoshapecatcher. Wanting to know if there’s a unicode character for a sign you just made up? Just doodle it into shapecatcher. Feeling bored in front of your computer? Just doodle something into shapecatcher.

Overengineering

There’s a fine line between hacking a solution and building a Turing-complete system for delivering virtually anything from inside your application. Ask any Java-developer why so many of their classes are called “Factory”.

Applies to a lot of things in life. Also to Agile, where refactoring is key.

That’s it from this editon of Let’s be Fwends, let’s stay friends and pass the salt when we need it, ok?🧂