I didn’t always enjoy reading docs or manuals for software that I was using. Despite the constant chant to RTFM in forums, I used to get by through tutorials and skimming just enough docs to do the things that I wanted. I nonethless appreciated that docs were an authoritative source which could always diambiguate things. Though as time went on my appreciation for good documentation grew and eventually solidified into making me one of those people who tries to read the docs completely if possible or at least skims it completely. (To be clear I don’t do it all the time and for all software that would simply be infeasible). I don’t exactly know when this transition happened but it must be relatively recent and to my great misfortune this seems to have coincided with a deluge of bad software documentation 1Thoughout this article I use docs, manuals, wiki’s interchangable and I understand that they are different but the general malaise that I’m talking about doesn’t differentiate between them .

One of my favorite pet peeves is the incentive misalignment of doctors. In a very simplified format, the problem is doctors make more money the sicker you are and thus they have a perverse incentive that competes against them making you get better.

This incentive misalignment problem is also present in fields like consulting where the consultants get paid more if there are more problems in the company that they can solve, but the doctor problem is the example that I use most of the time to introduce the idea since it’s very starkly visible in that case and most people would have experienced it at some point. 1Obligatory “not all doctors and consultants”

Decentralization and distributed system are relatively old terms in computing that are getting more widely used outside of these circles. Most of this adoption can be attributed to one phenomenon, crypto.

Decentralization is as the name suggests refers to systems without a center. This is in contrast to a centralized system where the center is the source of truth, control, dispute resolution, etc. all of which still need to be solved in a decentralized system but are done so without a center. Distributed on the other hand refers to systems that are spread out over multiple things (nodes, processors, etc.). For this post, I’ll be focusing on decentralized systems, but often decentralized systems rely on distributed state, 1For a more detailed distinction between decentralization and distributed, see here, or here or more classically the Wikipedia definitions of decentralized system and distributed computing so I’ll be referring to systems that arise due to both of these qualities interworking.

At an abstract level, people generally use tools and technologies primarily for three reasons, to make money, to save money, or to save time. All technologies have to provide at least one (ideally all three) of these benefits to their users for the overhead of using them. This is true for all tools and technologies from the primitive tools used to create fire to modern computers used to solve all kinds of problems.

“A buddy of mine” has been building a dating app, so I’ve been thinking a lot about services which connect people.

In an abstract sense a lot of the companies today are services which connect people in some context. For example

• Tinder / Dating Apps : Connecting people in the context of dating
• LinkedIn / Other Job Service Portals : Connecting people in the context of job finding
• Facebook / Twitter / Social Media : Connecting people in a generalized context [Often manifested as information sharing, community organizing etc.]

There are also services such as