Ratchets over Levers

Hmm isn’t this the old unix idea of “layers” where each layer is built so that its as close to non-leaky as possible, thus allowing you to never need to investigate the layers below the one you are working with.<p>I think I learned this in school in like year 2000.<p>And I’ve strived to do that in software ever since - whatever I build - build the abstraction that makes solving the problem easy and then solve the problem with it.<p>That way when the inevitable change request comes, you don’t need to dive down the layers, just utilize the current tools.<p>And people gush when that happens throwing terms like 10x developers, ninjas etc. Its just consistently investing time to build those layers and then utilize them.

The observation that so many people incidentally dependent on software to do their jobs, and that said software is often broken, unreliable, or actively hostile really stikes a cord in me. Humans have always had a tendency to develop a deep understanding of their tools, and even to refine them to better suit their needs. But when the tool is software they are left totally at the mercy of whatever opaque GUI the distributor has cooked up. They have no opportunity to familiarize themselves with the tools they depend on or to sand down unpleasant irritations. It&#x27;s anti-human, and results in a learned helplessness about technology. Certainly engineers have a role to play in improving their tools to prevent quality backsliding, but to really have transformative change for your everyday worker the systems they use need to be open to modification, and basic education needs to cover at least the starting point for how to go about refining their tools for comfortable day-to-day use. Engineering teams can&#x27;t anticipate the every need and preference of ever non-software-developer in the world, regardless of how much great Rust code they write.

I love the writing and the perspective.<p>Somehow, I haven&#x27;t seen the juxtaposition of ratchet vs lever before and that lens feels really powerful. I recently had a mechanical design problem where this view might even be literally helpful.<p>At the risk of losing all my meaningless internet points, I have to confess that Rust just doesn&#x27;t feel like a ratchet or a lever to me. It feels a lot more like a large, iron shackle.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m alone in that feeling.

&gt; <i>The real wins, then, are tools which do not require everyone to be at their best at every moment: ratchets, not levers. Levers let you move things, but if you are holding something up with a lever, you have to keep holding it — forever. A ratchet lets you drive forward motion without slipping back as soon as you let up on the pressure.</i><p>I love love love this idea. I feel like there is always a curse of immediacy &amp; visible progress that goes against figuring out how to create relief &amp; space &amp; de-tension; few see the tradeoffs &amp; most of the org just wants features now, tomorrow, &amp; always, &amp; often from a position of high of not knowing (ignorance) will argue for an express path that they think gives leverage.<p>This is such an interesting great framing for in-our-humble-opinions the real quest of software. The idea of the ratchet as allowing progress but also being forever a backstop implies a paradigm that espouses the frontiersmen, the radicals. But always offering fallbacks, redoubts, safeties, and viewpoints to come back to. There&#x27;s an interesting nexus point of software &amp; observability that I think has grown enormously, but still is viewed largely as ops, as site reliability. The submarine point, what&#x27;s below the surface, is that the running of software slowly becomes more legible, easier to clearly see. Making good damned choices in your architecture that don&#x27;t suck &amp; are long term good picks is like 1&#x2F;3rd the effort. 2&#x2F;3rds+ of what enhances us, what positions us to not fail is a better total software visibility, is how we see our runtimes run the time; that ability to augment ourselves with an understanding of the runtime is up to is what keeps us from falling backwards, is what keeps us atop of situations.<p>Our languages &amp; libraries have made great strides, but the real computer revolution that&#x27;s afoot is being able to see &amp; understand our systems, and only a minority part of that is the arbitrary cobbling of architecture we do and a far greater part of that is systematics, is growing into these tools to see spans &amp; traces, to see time run. This is a sense of computing humans are only just starting to evolve again, and it&#x27;s IMHO how we ratchet ourselves up onwards &amp; forwards.<p>(@luu killing it with the submissions recently)

The part at the beginning about how critical software is to our world reminds me of the time (or so I&#x27;ve heard, it was before my time) when there was a push to make software engineering a licensed field. A &quot;real&quot; engineering. I&#x27;m very happy that didn&#x27;t happen.

Not to sound too much like an evangelist, but Nix is the first ratchet I&#x27;ve found for software deployment &#x2F; OS management. Everything else has been a lever. Once you get something working, it works forever.

For anyone curious about the difference, tldr<p>&gt; Levers let you move things, but if you are holding something up with a lever, you have to keep holding it — forever. A ratchet lets you drive forward motion without slipping back as soon as you let up on the pressure.<p>The ratchet is the promise of literally every tool. The lever is the cold hard reality of every tool. Human beings are required to maintain, fund, update, and use the systems in question. Which means letting up on the pressure will quickly land you in the dustbin of history. Remember Google Wave? Yeah, nobody else does either.