I have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is like that advancing line of destruction, but operating on the brain. Alpha-synuclein (a protein) misfolds and, a little like prions, the misfolded proteins convince normally folded proteins to join the dark side. (This stuff is all so unspeakably cool if only it wasn’t happening to people.)

The proximate cause for this announcement is all the questions I’ve gotten from folks watching Still Burning & seeing my hand shake. By the time tremors appear, that line of misfolding has progressed far enough to destroy the 60-80% of the substantia nigra. The substantia nigra creates the dopamine that helps regulate movement (not the dopamine that used to form memories—I told you this shit was cool!)

Feelings

Not gonna lie—this has been an emotional shock for me. I’ve tried to figure out why it’s been so hard. I just turned 65 & I’ve been keenly aware of the advance of time for a while. I think the disturbing aspect of my new situation is that my best case scenario for aging just got a lot worse. My 90-year-old ex-father-in-law is still sharp & reasonably mobile. I comforted myself that I might grow old like that.

Now…not gonna happen. Over the next 5-15 years the tremors will worsen & spread (just my left forearm & thigh at the moment). Then my balance will go, followed by, well, it gets worse. Look it up if you want the details.

The expectation of increasing limitations has got me shifting my personal & business priorities. It’s the time value of time. If I can do something joyous this year it’s more valuable to me than doing the same thing next year & way more valuable than doing it in 5 years.

Business

Part of me wishes I could just say to hell with it & retire. I have a copy of Pauling’s General Chemistry I’ve been meaning to plow through, then Alberts’ Biochemistry of the Cell. I want to use the tools I’ve always used to stare this thing in the face.

I can’t afford to stop my business. I need to make as much progress towards financial security as I can as quickly as possible. However, I won’t earn at the expense of enjoying my best, most mobile years. Offer me $100m/year for 3 years of 60-hour days and I’ll just laugh. Go ahead, try it. In practice I’ll either get lucky or I’ll muddle through. But I sure as hell won’t do something I don’t want to do in exchange for distant futures.

(If you were thinking of booking me for coaching, consulting, or a talk for your team, might I suggest you contact my business manager sooner rather than later?)

Next?

I see no reason to waver from my mission of helping geeks feel safe in the world. I’m certainly going to keep coding interesting projects. Art & music are going to get more difficult but I have some ideas. Thinkies are taking on a life of their own. This newsletter will still be mostly on topic with occasional excursions because I have fewer fucks to give. Other than that, we’ll just see.

I’ll leave you with this poetic summary of the situation.

In

I talked about how I think about human connection as someone with both a history of trauma & a twisty brain. We can establish a bridge with another person. We can walk half way across. We can meet in the middle. That’s connection.

(I’m the one in the hat, in case you don’t recognize me.)

That connection can ripen & mature over time (topic for another day) but the basics remain—a bridge, and half way across.

Not all connections are good, are nourishing. Sometimes there’s just not a fit—my needs don’t fit what you can offer, your needs don’t fit what I can offer. Sometimes that lack of fit is down to timing, sometimes it’s structural, seemingly permanent.

As someone who both craves & fears connection, how can I spot connections that are likely not to end up mutually nourishing? Put bluntly, what do red flags look like in the bridge analogy? What can I do when I realize this connection is not a connection that’s healthy for me to continue in?

Too Far: Me

One form of red flag is when I go too far—I go all the way to the other person’s side of the bridge. This happens when I go to the middle but the other person isn’t joining me.

This manifests as, on their part:

• Cooler emotional tones

• Less vulnerability

• Less time investment

• Less responsiveness

When I’m feeling lonely, desperately in need of connection, I sometimes try to force the issue by further upping my tone, disclosure, time, responsiveness.

What’s wrong with going too far over? First, it drives some people away. Too much, too soon, leave me alone, creep. Second, there’s no end to how much I can give to try to force connection. Third, the folks who aren’t driven away tend to take advantage of, encourage, my over-giving. Not sustainable. Not a mutually nourishing connection.

Too Far: Them

The reverse happens as well. I connect with someone & they immediately become my best friend—I’ll give you this, and that, and this, and that. Let me tell you my whole life story. Buy you presents. Take you to meet my family.

NGL this feels good for a moment. I wanted connection. I got it. And I didn’t really have to work for it. What’s wrong?

Nothing is wrong with all those good things flowing between us, but in good time & in good proportion. Someone who is willing to instantly give give give doesn’t have a good sense of their own boundaries. If they don’t have a sense of their boundaries, they won’t have a sense of my boundaries either.

I’ve been lied to, stolen from, & manipulated by people who were instantly sharing too much. If they don’t have boundaries with themselves, they won’t have boundaries with me. And vice versa. Hard lesson but there you are.

Conclusion

I keep open the possibility of connection. I try to stay aware of where I am on the bridge. When I start edging over to their side, I cool myself off (& reflect on why I want to go too far). When someone edges over to my side, I cool myself off. If they insist on trying to be on my side of the bridge, I shut down the connection. Life is too short & the consequences too dear.

The little bird had left the nest prematurely. Thought it could fly but it couldn’t,…

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This is my attem…

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Originally published May 20, 2015. Since then my cognitive function has made a fairly complete comeback, well except accounting for normal aging. I was reminded of this essay by my experience with augmented coding. That “normal aging” stuff left me without the patience to get set up for coding. With the genie, though, I’m happy to dive into most any project. It’s like wearing an exoskeleton but for my brain. The point remains—don’t take cognition for granted.

If you’re augmented coding & you want my personal real-time reflections on the fast changing landscape, here’s 40% off the first year. Offer good for one week from the publication date.

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When I was about 10 years old I read Flowers for Algernon, the story of a mentally challenged man who is subjected to an IQ-increasing treatment. The catch is [spoiler alert] that the treatment only works temporarily. The story is written as a diary, with spelling and vocabulary tracking his changing mental abilities. As a child, I loved being smart, knowing things, understanding things. The story was exciting because I could see how much smarter I was going to be and I could see all the new ways I could think and the worlds that thinking would open up.

When I re-read Flowers for Algernon recently I was just sad. The second half of the story, where his mind is going away, is just brutal, especially when he can remember how smart he was but knows it's gone for good.

I'm going through something eerily similar.

The Symptoms

Over the past 5-7 years I've noticed a cluster of neurological symptoms—serious short-term memory loss, desire for social isolation, face blindness (seeing someone I know quite well but not having any sense of recognition), inability to deal with complexity, and social disinhibition (pissing people off unnecessarily and not being able to understand what I did wrong). These symptoms affect my coding and my relationships.

The Diagnosis

After years of waffling and knowing something was up and watching it get worse I finally went to the Mayo Clinic (in network, yeah!) to get a complete workup. After being poked, prodded, scanned, and bled I got good-ish news: it's none of the fatal stuff, no tumor, no fronto-temporal dementia. For reasons no one understands, 20% of the people who present with early front-temporal dementia symptoms never progress. I seem to be in that camp—no nasty mutations, no visible brain atrophy. I have to get checked annually, but this is my new normal.

I regret that I couldn't have brought my forty-year-old brain to Facebook. I could have done some shit here. On the other hand, I was a self-centered, manipulative bastard so I guess it's all tradeoffs.

The Road Ahead

The road ahead is uncertain. The cause and treatment of front-temporal phenocopy (i.e. "looks like but isn't") is unknown territory. As much as we've collectively learned about medicine, it's humbling (and a little frustrating) to be met with shrugs, especially when the condition threatens my livelihood and identity. One theory is that this is the long-run result of PTSD, which I qualify for. Addressing that is painful, lengthy, expensive, and uncertain. Southern Oregon is not exactly bristling with expert practitioners, either, so for the moment I'm just doing my best with what I have left. [ed: turns out the problem was just horrible relationship stress]

Why Share This?

Why write and publish something so personal and painful? Because one-in-I-don't-know-how-many of you are struggling with something. I hope you'll get help. I'm not "better", and I had a couple of really panicky months while results were trickling in, but I'm better off knowing. I can adapt my work. I can be patient with other people who are reacting to my additional weirdness. I really miss programming at a high level, but maybe I'll claw it back [ed: he does, thanks to the genie]. I've already done so once, but that's a story for another day.

Fortunately for me, young engineers are failing to invent new young-engineer mistakes. I can keep telling them whatever I did to overcome whatever they're doing back when I was doing it. Coaching FTW.

Update: The Long, Slow Slide

A follow-up comment from the original post:

I need to get this off my chest and I don't know a more private place to do it. When I got back from Mayo I was relieved. Okay, I was forcibly shifted from fourth gear into third, but, in spite of the screaming engine and diminished velocity, I could still make progress. This is my new normal.

Today, for the second time in a week, I woke up and thought it was a day later than it actually was. I've made this mistake once or twice in thirty years, so this seems like a big change. On top of that I've been trying to code up one of our ninja questions (binary tree->doubly linked list) and barely making progress in hours of work.

Now I need to confront the "long, slow slide" normal. I was panicked, which is why I'm writing. Now I'm just sad and scared.

But Then...

And then I slow down and think about the programming problem a little and the whole thing works perfectly the first time. Plus ça change...

Looking back, this essay describes a terrifying episode. I’ve always identified with my thinking—I have value because I’m smart. Turns out, as with all attachment, this is a mistake. Peace, y’all.

However, being of a too-literal cast of mind, I’m going to well-actually this comment because I think there’s a deeper point beneath it. But first, thanks !

Thanks to today’s sponsor Unblocked.

When I was a young programmer we were berated for not writing more documentation, but that documentation always turned out to be useless by the time we needed it. That experience was my impetus for writing about communicative code (Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns & Implementation Patterns).

Unblocked meets the same need in the same moment--I have to change this code but what is going on? Unblocked answers this question with less effort on the part of the original programmer & the answers are always up-to-date.

Illustration

The comment was in response to this illustration.

I wanted to help readers develop an intuition for why small, incremental releases were valuable. Even if each release doesn’t create much positive value (& that’s a big if), each release creates value by decreasing the potential loss if a big release goes badly.

Some people got it:

Others didn’t:

Which is a good reminder to let other people own their reactions & for me to only own how carefully I communicate.

But that wasn’t the point I wanted to make.

Workflow & Activation Energy

When I’m explaining an idea I tend to include visuals as part of my explanation. Sometimes the visualization comes first & the words support it. Sometimes I’m in the middle of a paragraph when a visual comes to me. What are my options when an illustration pops into my head?

1. Open up a drawing program. Switch my brain to “drawing program” mode. Try to optimize my actions to achieve the desired visual. Speculate on the code implementing those actions (I’ve written & used drawing programs for 40 years). Critique the UI for too-long click paths. Begin designing an alternate UI. Consider starting a new open source drawing program. Where the hell was I?

2. Knowing myself, consider the likelihood of #1 & give up on the illustration.

3. Grab an index card & a pen (always right there). Draw. Snap a picture with my phone (also always right there). Crop. Copy. Hope Apple’s cross-machine copy & paste is choosing today to work. Paste. Done & back to writing.

In short, I hand-draw because it makes me more likely to illustrate. & more likely to write.

Consequences

These illustrations have become part of my brand, part of my signature. If you see ink on dotted paper, you know I actually picked up a pen & drew for you. Some people get it & some people don’t (see above).

Some people are turned off by the lack of perfection in the illustrations (I’ve fielded this complaints many times). They see the rough nature of my illustrations as a sign of lack of commitment or polish or skill on my part. That’s okay. I spent 40 or 50 years coming up with these opinions. Ten minutes more or less isn’t going to change their value. If you decide that those 10 minutes are the difference between it being worth paying attention to what I say & not paying attention, you’re fully entitled to that opinion. On my side, I know I’ll write more & illustrate more if I work in this style.

The larger point I wanted to make is that you don’t just do your work, you design how you do your work. I call this Making Making. Pay attention. Experiment. You’re unique—find your unique style, but make sure it’s one that positively meshes with the people affected by that style.

My art has become an increasingly-important part of my life. I’ve never taken it seriously, though. I asked an art-knowledgeable friend to help me explain what I do in terms their community might understand. Here’s the result.

In an era of ironic detachment, Kent Beck's work stands as a testament to earnest exploration and technical virtuosity. Working primarily in acrylic on glass and mirrors, Beck reinterprets Art Deco's techno-optimism for our digital age, while maintaining a profound connection to traditional artistic processes.

Cityscapes

Beck's cityscapes, rendered through an innovative twist on églomisé, strip urban vistas to their essential element: light. These works capture moments of precarious impermanence – each point of illumination representing both presence and potential absence.

Abstracts

His abstracts begin with a singular gestural impulse, expanding into intricate systems of pattern and color. Maps of the artist’s inner world, these pieces operate under an internal logic: a self-imposed rule where identical colors never touch across different patterns, creating a visual harmony that emerges as naturally as a mathematical proof.

This interplay of pattern and color reaches its full potential when executed on mirrors. The patterns create multiple layers of visual information – the painted surface, the viewer's reflection, and the space behind the viewer. The viewer cannot escape becoming part of the image viewed, collaborating, consciously or not, with the artist. Art is transformed from a static picture into a dynamic dance—art as verb, not noun.

Process

Working in glass and mirror demands absolute commitment – there is no "undo", no ability to revise or erase. This irreversibility stands in stark contrast to Beck's background in software development, yet draws upon the same deep understanding of how complex systems evolve from simple beginnings. The results are works that delineate space, compressing the aesthetic whirlwind behind modern software constructs into two dimensions, while the mirror surface adds a third dimension of real-time human interaction.

Beck's work troubles the artificial division between digital and analog realms, highlighting the already-augmented nature of reality and perception. His cityscapes, reduced to points of light against darkness, become meditations on human presence in an increasingly technological world. His abstracts expose patterns of thought as misleadingly-precise lines, colors, and shapes. His work suggests that our attempts to separate human from machine, analog from digital, viewer from art, are themselves patterns we impose on a more complex reality.

Conclusion

In both his nightscapes and abstracts, Beck presents art that provides multiple levels of engagement, from immediate visual pleasure to deeper contemplation of how we perceive and organize our modern world. His work stands as a bridge between technological precision and artistic intuition, offering viewers not just a view into, but active participation in the patterns that underlie contemporary existence.

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Shamelessly stolen from Peter Block. In a small group discussion everyone expressed the fear that if they went independent they wouldn’t be able to provide for themselves. One participant was the sole breadwinner for their entire extended family. I realized that I’ve got it good—I’d only be letting myself down. Peter responded with the following image.

You walk into a hall. There are 2 desks at the other end. You can’t read the sign on one of them, but the other one says, “Safety”. It looks like a thousand people await the Safety desk, lines snaking & looping. You get in that line.

The line moves quickly, the sound of two thousand shuffling feet echoing from the rafters high above. Still, a thousand is a lot of people. Your feet are tired by the time you near the desk.

You see that when people reach the desk they have a short conversation, their shoulders slump, but then they take the token they are offered. That’s what you notice. That shoulder slump. Heads drop down. What’s going on?

You reach the desk. “Are you here for Safety?”

“Yes, please.”

“That will be a piece of your soul.”

What? A piece of my soul? No way. I only have the one soul & I can’t spare any pieces. No wonder all those shoulders slumped. But everyone took the token. Should I take it too?

You glance at the other desk. The sign on it, you now see, reads, “Freedom”. But there’s no line. Nobody at all.

But I spent two hours waiting in that line. But my soul. But safety.

Not worth it. Let’s see what the other deal is.

You turn & walk to the Freedom desk. “Are you here for Freedom?”

“Yes, please. What’s this going to cost? And don’t tell me a piece of my soul.”

“No, no, nothing like that.”

“Well, what then.”

“Anxiety.”

“Is that all? I’m already anxious. Lemme have that token.”

Away you walk, a little shaky but head up, shoulders back, that token unexpectedly heavy in your hand.

I’ve long since “lost my testimony”, but I remember the magic of story & picture & presenter.

I live drew my recent Goto CPH keynote. The questions afterward about the technique surprised me. Several folks said they wanted to experiment with drawing while giving presentations. Here’s what I’ve learned from the last 2-3 years of live drawing.

Case Study

Here are the 6 practice runs in the day between when I came up with the concept for the keynote & when I presented. The first was in my notebook while I was watching Dave Farley’s keynote. I thought, “Whew! I don’t have to deliver the message about whether or how to design incrementally, but I can explain the constraints that make incremental design necessary.” I started with bullets, but transformed them into a Venn diagram:

At this point I knew I had a new structure for my presentation. Next I added details to the picture & cleaned up some unfortunate formatting.

The next iteration was a few hours later. I realized that I wanted 3 parts to the picture.

The next iteration I started practicing with Goodnotes, my drawing tool. It’s the same picture, just a little trimmed & with color choices.

The next iteration was for practice drawing. Playing with spacing. Playing with the timing of zooming in and out (I like the technique of starting zoomed out a bit, drawing something that nearly fills the screen, then zooming out so it’s clear that the initial picture is only part of a bigger picture).

A half hour before the keynote I ran through the picture again so I could remember what went where. Sometimes I forget elements as I’m drawing.

And then the final picture as it appeared on stage:

You can see that I trimmed in real-time. Some of that was on purpose, not because I forgot. Really! Well, I forgot to point out what I meant by “empirical” in the center of the diagram, that part I flat out forgot.

Lesson 1: Practice

Folks came to me with a major misconception—“You just stand up there & draw.” Oh no, oh no. I practice what I draw. As you saw, 6 drafts before the talk & the picture is still evolving.

Lesson 2: Less

Live drawing requires thought, thought you can’t put to use connecting with the audience & yourself. Eliminate elements not wholly necessary. That’s what the practice is for. “If I tell this as a story, then I won’t have to draw that tricky bit.”

Lesson 3: Simple Tools

Goodnotes makes the right tradeoffs between simplicity & drawing quality. I’ve tried to live draw with Adobe tools & they simply take too much mental energy in an energy-constrained situation like live drawing.

Lesson 3: Rhythm

This is something I want to improve. Ideally the picture would start quite early in the presentation. I tend to tell too many introductory stories before I start drawing. The stories are fine in the presentation, but I need to figure out how to get that mystery outline of the picture in place early.

Once the picture is coming to life, draw a little, talk a little, draw a little, talk a little. The “breaks” I took from talking while I was drawing seemed awkward to me at first, but I think they enhance the overall presentation.

Lesson 4: Some Folks Won’t Like It

Here a couple of audience comments (of course I would focus on the few negative comments instead of the flood of praise, but I have a purpose here):

Many thoughts you were putting out there I completely agree with, but the way you’ve put it out seemed quite far fetched.

The presentation was poorly prepared (not at all).

But also:

Very nice and captivating that could function just with a single "whiteboard" approach as opposed to slides.

Be prepared for these responses. Not everyone is going to like the new format. Even conference organizers may balk at the thought of you not having prepared slides (Goto CPH were lovely to be clear).

Conclusion

The payoff I get from presenting is that under the pressure of the asymmetrical attention my creativity comes up with new explanations for old topics, explanations I wouldn’t come up with without that pressure. It happens when I create slides. It happens more when I live draw.

It’s my job as a presenter to be present-er. To be more present. To invite audience members into greater presence to themselves. Live drawing helps me be present-er. But it’s damn hard work.

What follows includes frank discussion of my personal finances as a nearing-retirement person under difficult constraints in 2024 America. If such discussion bothers you, scroll, as the kids say these days, on.

Tidy First? has done very well for a technical book. I’ve gotten great feedback from people who found value in its discussion of optionality & co…

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I started this newsletter to incentivize me to finish Tidy First?. It worked. The prospect of losing a paying subscriber because I couldn’t be bothered to write one more chapter this week was too much to bear. So I wrote. And I finished the book.

Along the way I got caught up in the turbulence & eddies of the newsletter revolution. The top newsletters were earning life-changing money for their authors. After a slow start I was earning life-modestly-enhancing money. How far could this accidental business take me? (Previous reviews of my progress towards a sustainable business are here & here.)

Goals

To review, my four financial goals are:

1. Predictable revenue exceeds fixed expenses. “Predictable” in this case means my Mechanical Orchard salary + newsletter subscriptions.

2. Newsletter revenue exceeds fixed expenses. I love working at Mechanical Orchard but it would still feel good for employment to be a choice, for my own business to be sustainable.

3. House & retirement. Newsletter income exceeds fixed expenses by enough that I can buy a house & be saving towards retirement.

4. (This is an asset goal, not an income goal) Savings exceeds predicted future needs. I never have to earn another dollar.

Progress

Here is my newsletter revenue to date:

Before December I had a revenue stream that was nice but didn’t address my financial goals. When I announced the price increase in January, revenue jumped. People (like you) who had been reading but weren’t paying now signed up to avoid paying more later.

That was a great month, I can tell you. Money & subscribers were rolling in all day. If every month was like that, I would be able to devote more time & energy to ideas & writing. Goal #1 was in sight. The growth wasn’t sustainable.

The smaller blip in March was my 30% off birthday sale. Took me closer to goal #1. However, even though my churn numbers are smaller than average, without something driving new paying subscriptions, revenue is going to drift downwards.

Okay, so that’s goal #1. How close am I to having a sustainable business?

At this scale I don’t look so close. I’m not almost there, I’m a third of the way there. For further perspective, here are goals 2 & 3:

Ouch

Relying strictly on newsletter revenue to reach my financial goals doesn’t look like a winning strategy. I’m going to need other sources of revenue. The first Tidy First? book is selling well, but “well” for a technical book doesn’t move this graph noticeably.

I don’t know what to do with my business that would reliably get me through my goals. I’m going to do what I know how to do: write. You’ll see chapters on book 2, Tidy Together?, coming soon. I expect to take about 6 months to write the sequel. The theme of the book is “software design is an exercise in human relationships” at the team level.

I will also hustle other parts of my business:

• Speaking. This used to provide significant revenue but collapsed during the tech downturn.

• Consulting. Expensive for me to provide (time & energy) but rewarding & potentially valuable for clients.

• Sponsorships & ads? Eww.

• Education. Seems like the material on software design should be valuable to companies who want the benefits it provides. However, I have no experience selling to companies. Leading me to the lesson of this essay.

FOMO

I naively assumed that people transacted when value exceeded price. I blindly pursued adding more value to this newsletter. It sort of worked—revenue grew, just not at a pace that approached sustainability.

The big jump in revenue came not from a big jump in value, but from the prospect of losing out on the chance for the value of a paying subscription. I’m trying to apply this lesson as I think about corporate sales—not, “What is the ROI to the company? How can I improve it?” but rather, “How can I communicate what the company is missing out on by not getting better at software design?”

“Don’t miss out” goes against all my instincts. Having dealt with truckloads of negativity in my life I have made a consistent habit of positivity. (Several Thinkies deal in positivity—you’re missing out on a weekly Thinkie if you aren’t paying for a subscription.)

When I tell non-geeks about my revelation the consistent response is “duh”. Okay, maybe most everyone understands this about human motivation, but I sure didn’t. Now I’m trying to rewire my brain so I have a chance of creating a sustainable business.