"Crash Early, Crash Often" is the third volume in the ribbonfarm-roughs-series, the Kindle ebook collections Rao assembled from ribbonfarm-blog posts to create thematically organized, standalone reading experiences from the Ribbonfarm archive. Published around 2017, it gathers posts centered on midlife crises, aging, personal reinvention, and questions of meaning.
Title and Framing
The title phrase — "crash early, crash often" — riffs on the software development maxim "fail fast, fail often," applying it to the domain of personal life and identity. The framing suggests that productive personal development involves deliberately subjecting one's assumptions, plans, and self-models to early failure rather than deferring failure until it is catastrophic. A life strategy of crashing early and often means testing commitments before they calcify, embracing iterative self-revision rather than defending a fixed identity.
This framing connects to Rao's interest in personal development as an iterative, engineering-like process — the kind of thinking he applies in the-calculus-of-grit and related essays. The "crash" metaphor also connects to his affinity for failure as information: systems (including personal identities and life plans) are best stress-tested by allowing them to fail in controlled ways.
Content and Themes
As a curated collection, the volume likely gathers ribbonfarm-blog posts from across the peak-ribbonfarm and cozyweb-turn eras that engage with:
These themes connect to Rao's broader interest in how individuals navigate temporal experience — a thread visible also in tempo-book, pandemic-time-essay, and the-clockless-clock-series.
Role in the Ribbonfarm Roughs Series
Within ribbonfarm-roughs-series, "Crash Early, Crash Often" occupies the personal philosophy and life-design niche — distinct from the more organizational/sociological focus of the first volumes (which draw on gervais-principle territory) or the technology-appreciation material from other entries. The series as a whole represents Rao's systematic effort to make the ribbonfarm-blog archive accessible in monetized, curated form — recognizing that the blog's enormous archive was valuable but difficult to navigate without editorial guidance.