I paint flowers so they will not die. – Frida Kahlo
In my short time writing here I’ve already hit on this sign vs signified a few times. It’s an incredibly valuable paradigm to have at the ready, so it’s no surprise we find ourselves here yet again. (Spoiler: this won’t be the last time)
The flowery painting isn’t the flower—and yet it is. Properly done, the recreation of the things is the re-creation of the thing itself rather than the creation of a poor substitute. Small distinction, huge difference.
It allows the original thing’s continuation, fulfilling the spirit rather than the letter. A happy Horcrux with none of the evil, murdery stuff. 🐍
So ya, closing a ticket isn’t the same as solving the problem, sure. Documenting a decision doesn’t mean we never confuse why we chose this stack or the other.
But now the flower lives on, never fully dying. Again, only in form, and not the same form—it’d be ridiculous to think otherwise—but it lives on nonetheless.
The problem’s existence and resolution can be followed in the shadowy form of it we find in Linear.1 The decision coming from your discussion isn’t reproduced at 100% fidelity by the documentation, but it carries on in a form that is more than sufficient to operate on and thus justify the work required to do it.
The takeaway: pick up your paint brushes and don’t let your flowers die.2
Most of the time I’m agnostic to tooling, but after using Linear it’ll be hard for me to work somewhere with Clickup, Jira, or any of the other poor attempts at a product and engineering team’s workflow management.
Please excuse the flowery language contained in this post.