Looking back on the last four years, what worked, what didn't.

For the past few months, I’ve been working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. I didn’t want to spend a year writing the book only to find out that nobody wants to buy it, so I ran a one-month pre-order sale on Kickstarter. I structured the project so that if I didn’t hit $5k in pre-orders, the project would be canceled, and I’d walk away with nothing.

I always think that I’ll be happy when everything is running smoothly. When X visitors are flowing in, conversions are steady, the app works flawlessly, and revenue is predictable. But that’s not life. And nor is business. Life is messy. And there’s no such thing as perfect. At least, not the version of "perfect" I have in my head. Messy is the perfection. Every chaotic piece, every moving part, somehow coming together to make it work. Look at our bodies: an intricate mess of cells, signals, and systems, all in constant motion, working toward a common goal. What's more, nothing runs in a chronological order. That's only our perception. Things are constantly out of sync. Dancing in the background. Building our simple reality. I want to embrace this more. The unpredictability, the imperfection. The beautiful and disorderly relentless mess of it all. I don't want inbox zero. I don't want to have my life in order.  I want to let go more. Not hold the beautiful bird on my hand every so tightly that I squeeze the bejesus out of it. Do more. Do less. Whatever. Live as it comes. PS: I wish I lived more like my writing above.

Six years ago, David Thompson wrote a popular blog post called “My favourite Git commit” celebrating a whimsically detailed commit message his co-worker wrote. I enjoyed the post at the time and have sent it to several teammates as a model for good commit messages. I recently revisited Thompson’s article as I was creating my own guide to writing useful commit messages. When pressed to explain what made Thompson’s post such an effective example, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t. It was fun to read as an outside observer, but I couldn’t justify it as a model of good software engineering.

Ike Saul is the founder of Tangle, an independent political newsletter that aims to tell you the news from both sides of the political spectrum.