Bad Ideas

• Teaching people that certain tools are much more generally applicable than they really are


• Not asking when you think you are worth much more than you are getting


• Not saying "I don't know", when you don't know


• Accepting developer ignorance as reasonable and treating unnecessary tool ecosystems as sane


• Non-composable GUI components


• Keeping silent when witnessing wrongdoing


• Relying on text-based conversations


• Narrative solvers: Narrations implemented as a constraint language with stories as predicates and narratives as the path of solvers


• An inconvenience store


• Not conversing with someone who doesn't speak your language


• A hash function where all hashes are prime numbers


• Not realizing that boredom is a function of creativity


• Postdiction


• Software craftsmanship


• Wasting time trying investors before the market fit


• Reading what the authors said in a research paper rather than reading what they didn't say


• Reading news


• Not using contracts


• A no vowel language


• Using the computer more than a pen & paper


• Not adhering to 1 tech stack, 1 library, 1 version control, and 1 programming language


• Believing you are not normal


• More than four co-founders


• Thinking in time rather than causality


• Working on someone's crappy idea when you have your own crappy idea to work on


• Formalizing processes


• An automatic shaver that uses the sound of hair hitting the blades independent of depth setting


• Steaming videos


• Job titles


• Thinking that if something offers a low return, it must be safe


• Caffeinated tofu


• Spending time on your phone


• Placing feedback loops in wrong places


• Performing a sociology monologue at a security conference


• A Kickstarter distributing average donation back to every donor


• Staying with the company even after a founder leaves


• Choosing hype over your style


• Forgetting the zero arbitrage principle


• Autonomous self-driving vending machines


• Disagreeing with people on social media


• An AI tool to predict what you would have written if you didn't have writer's block


• Implementing a language too soon


• CEO folding the job of a CTO into his own


• Making every whitespace in your text to spawn a separate thread to access a random website


• A podcast that provides serious and well-thought-out answers to stupid questions


• Multi cursor text editor


• Overlooking a corollary to a theorem


• Forgetting to revoke credentials before firing


• A co-recursive algorithm that creates a textual description of frames of videos it watches to resynthesize the video from that description


• Complicated business models


• A Ph.D. thesis titled Acknowledgements that's a book-length acknowledgments section thanking people


• CTO and a VP of Engineering with overlapping functional roles


• Letting your ego lie to you that people around you cannot meaningfully alter your character


• Two foot pedals: one for bold and one for italic


• Forgetting a company's capability to work against its own interests


• Outsourcing a problem you don't understand


• Distorted text that resembles a QR code when seen from a distance


• Equating internship to no experience


• Assuming startups have a sane interviewing process


• Not appreciating the fact that salespeople and development people are different


• Training Alexa on the logs of your conversations with Siri


• Rushing to the market with a product you don't feel is ready


• Thinking the interviews you passed or failed amount to something


• Software features with no workflows designed around them


• Thinking that inspiration is worth more than consistency


• Replacing each word with another with the largest distance but smallest edit distance in the word-vector space


• Not living closer to work


• A moon emoji that renders the actual phase the moon is in


• Rearranging frames of a movie by average color and brightness and then playing it


• A RasPi seedbox connected to your pelvis that tries to connect to every open network


• A book containing no nouns


• Blaming users


• API as an afterthought of the business process


• IPFS powered network clipboard


• Paying attention to people's words than their actions