Make as many pots as possible
When you learn how to make a thing, there’s this false dichotomy between making a lot of things and making really good things. In practice, people learning how to make pottery who were advised to make as many posts pots as possible ended up with a better “best” pot than students who were advised to make the best pot they can imagine. The world is really complicated. There’s so many aspects of any skill that you can only learn through repeatedly doing and gaining intuition about the craft and the possibility space.
I love the idea that everyone has ten bad books in them. If you ever want to get to the good books, first you have to write all the bad ones out of you.
A tragedy of the English language
I think it’s a tragedy of the English language that the words “million”, “billion”, and “trillion” sound so similar. The actual difference between each number is hard for people to imagine, even programmers who are used to dealing with large quantities and orders of magnitude. My current favorite illustrative example is:
Let’s say you have an operation that takes 0.5 ms to complete and you need to run it on a large data set. Running it on a million things might take ten minutes, a nice coffee break. Running it on a billion things might take six days, a background process you really don’t want to interrupt or run twice. Running it on a trillion things might take 16 years. Don’t do that.
Write more like you talk
Most people’s writing would improve if they wrote more like they talked. You probably learned how to write in an academic setting and do most of your writing in a similarly formal setting. While you’ve probably had plenty of casual conversations in text, people often don’t consider that “real writing” and try not to let it affect their writing style. But you’ve got so much experience breaking things down and clearly conveying them in casual conversation that could benefit your writing with a small change of mindset.
Flip a coin if it doesn't matter
If you’re trying to decide between two things that sound equally good, like which place to have lunch, flip a coin. When the coin picks one for you, sometimes you’ll immediately feel happy or sad about what it picked. If you notice that happening, do the thing that makes you happy instead of the thing the coin picked. (If you don’t notice that, just do what the coin picks, since either outcome is probably fine, and you won’t have to think about the decision any more.)
burrito
The wrap burrito is first found in print in English in Erna Fergusson’s Mexican Cookbook, published in 1934 in New Mexico. However, the burrito described in this cookbook is more like what we’d call a tostada today.
In Mexico, the term seems to have arrived at its modern meaning in the late 1800s; an 1895 dictionary lists the modern usage as one of its meanings, with the other being a regional slang term for “taco”. In Mexican Spanish, burrito originates from a diminutive of burro (donkey). The food is probably so named because it resembles a rolled-up pack often found on the back of a donkey.
The Spanish word burro descends directly from the Latin burricus, meaning small horse, which itself is named after the color burrus, meaning reddish-brown. Latin burrus is a borrowing from Greek πυρρός (purros), meaning flame-colored, yellowish-red, or tawny. The Greek color is clearly named after its root πῦρ (pur), meaning fire, like we see in the borrowed English prefix pyro-.