The world is imperfect, so let's improve it

Fixing the world, one bug at a time…

I used to have that ☝️ as a status for over a decade on one of my messaging apps. I thought it was clever. It also summarises my raison d'etre quite well, I feel.

I don't remember who taught me the following principle first, but it's a life saver for me. I've heard it many times in different forms. Gramski worded it much better than I could:

Pessimism of intellect, optimism of the will

That means to me, roughly, that whatever the (shitty) situation is, there's always a next physical action you can take on the path to improve it.

One of the things I liked most in my software development career, has been to fix bugs. The reason for this is that bugfixes are the most real of all features. They are changes that improve an existing and used piece of software, based on a report of a real production user that described how the software was imperfect to them. There's nothing as satisfying as _properly_ fixing a bug and presenting the fix to the end user.

Then there are real world bugs. Tie a small child's shoe laces (ask permission first!), fix a broken appliance, etc and you may understand that satisfaction as well.

A great way to describe real world problems is also as bugs, because that provides a framework to generate tasks that are actionable.

Let's list some bugs then

Dear God
Yes my child

I would like to file a bug report

from https://xkcd.com/258/

Here's a list of hairy problems, that I would like to solve, with your help, in no particular order:

These are huge problems, so I'll work on separate pages for them in the future, splitting them up into doable and actionable improvements from a first person pov to keep it useful to little old me. The confounding meta-problem is that all these big problems are also interrelated, making it almost impossible to wrap my head around them. Aside from splitting off goals and tasks, I also see value in generalizing problems to find generally helpful behavior I can emulate.