It was fun to be featured on Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series this month. Manuel asks bloggers a series of regular questions about they writing and process. He’s interviewed lots of great writers. I saw that my friend Peter Rukavina had done it, so I was in.

It’s a clever setup he’s got going: ask people who like to write (often about themselves) to write about themselves. I was happy to oblige.

You can read my full interview here: P&B: Steven Garrity

Conway’s law states that:

[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

I propose a new law, in accordance with Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws:

Garrity’s Law of Spreadsheets:

We are bound to create spreadsheets that reflect the structure of our own brain.

The only way to truly grok a spreadsheet is to make your own.

See Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws

🎵 I’ve looked at [young people having bad hair cuts] from both sides now… 🎵

My grandmother Mary Nantes (“Nanny”) died in 2018 at the age of 98. Her last name is now my middle name (Nantes). Yesterday, CBC Radio on PEI aired some archived interviews with her about life in the 1930s and 1940s.

It’s nice to hear her voice again, and interesting to hear how she and her nine siblings would write letters to Santa Clause, and burn them in the wood stove (so they’d go up the chimney – makes perfect sense).

Those of us in Canada are getting a two-month ‘tax holiday’ on selected items. The complete list of items includes “Jigsaw puzzles, for all ages.”

I didn’t have Jigsaw-puzzle-tax-holiday on my bingo card for this year.

This feels more like a stunt than a policy, and I expect it will be generally perceived as a stunt. That said, I don’t discount the impact of the savings on those who need it most.

Also, my thoughts go out to everyone working on a point-of-sale system trying to get these updates addressed in time, and to those making the difficult edge-case decisions (do they use jigsaws to make 3-d puzzles?).

My mockup for a pumpkin-with-USB-C-port wasn’t as impactful as I had anticipated.

Nilay Patel’s scathing endorsement for Kamala Harris for president at the tech news site The Verge is the first editorial endorsement I’ve read that sounds like it is of my generation. He opens with:

“Donald Trump is a dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can even recognize the existentially threatening collective action problems facing our nation, let alone actually solve them.”

He also uses USB-C to help explain collective action requiring government intervention.

These early images from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope are enough to give me cosmic vertigo.

Proposal: A new national holiday where we all take some time to clean up our list of Interac e-Transfer recipients.

You probably aren’t going to do more business with that person from Facebook Marketplace who sold you a pair of kids snow-pants and claimed they lived “in town”, but took 25 minutes to get to their house.