723 karma · joined October 3, 2017
Long time user of Vim->Neovim, Arch Linux, and Dvorak.
I most enjoy using Django/TailwindCSS/HTMX to create contentful websites with minimal Javascript. Started using Django back in version 1.6.
Getting back into freelancing after recovering from burnout at a monastery. Now a practicing Buddhist.
Full service content website building available for beings who are positively polarizing and desire to see the world a better place.
I identify as autistic and nonbinary genderfluid. My nails are painted silver. :)
Feel free to email me about any of the above or anything else at dharma@recursivegarden.com
Toots at https://tech.lgbt/@dharmapurebuddha
I studied Buddhism under a mentor and realized that many of the principles applied regardless of your beliefs about cosmology. The idea that all problems humans face can be summarized as "greed, ignorance, and aversion" was a useful frame. These helped me triangulate the ultimate source of my burnout to unmet family expectations that I had for many years tried to live up to but could not. Confronting my family about these expectations and taking responsibility for my own life was absolutely key in my healing.
These days I don't exactly have a set practice but I still live with my mentors. They started a syncretic monastery that welcomes all traditions, and observing the similarities and differences between worldviews has been quite eye opening. The most valuable practice I take from all this is a honed awareness of the root causes of suffering, and I've found that once the root cause is identified, it becomes possible to release it.
I live at the monastery full time now.
For me personally, it turned out I have autism (which I didn't realize until age 33), and understanding this helped me understand perhaps why I was being deceived so often.
Generally, I appreciated this article by Malcolm Ocean about his idea of a "Non-Naive Trust Dance". https://malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-t... He suggests that the optimal strategy for trust building is a slow building over time that acknowledges the distrust inherent to both parties rather than naively accepting people at face value.
I have lost my wife, my child, my parents, my grandparents, my friends, my house burned down with all of my possessions. I lost my ability to code due to burnout and had to spend several years doing nothing.
During my burnout experience I was basically forced to confront the roaring void of existence. I spent time at a monastery and contemplated the futility of it all.
And yet at the end of all of this, I considered what else is there to do with life but to begin anew? And now that I have lost everything, I am no longer naive. I know what is possible to have, and what is possible to lose, and I can act with understanding from past experience. I feel far more capable of success now that I know what it is to fail in the hardest ways I can imagine.
If all you need is HTTP routing, then Flask is great, but every time I tried to use it for the kinds of things Django is great at (databasing, templating, forms), I had to effectively roll my own crappy version of Django. (Something something every sufficiently large C++ program has a poorly implemented version of LISP embedded into it.)
I saw this dramatically demonstrated by an enormous Flask installation that would have greatly benefited from a little imposed structure. I bounced hard from that gig after being shown the code because it was going to be a massive pain to understand the poorly designed abstractions. But it wasn't even the maintainer's fault - it was pretty good code but it had only been designed by one person, both the abstractions and the business logic. And the abstractions were leaky simply because abstractions are difficult to design.
The framework allows you to completely offload the architectural decisions underneath the framework to many person-years worth of design, bug squashing, and security fixes. How do I add headers to a request? Django has one opinionated way. Where do I put my database models? models.py and if you put them there you don't have to do any connection fiddling.
The ideal of a framework is that if you release attachment to how things you don't actually care about anyway are done, you get thousands of free high quality lines of code.
I learned a lot from Sandi Metz about the costs of "The Wrong Abstraction" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE
The book Neurotribes presents a very in-depth picture of the history of autism and the research and theories for the past century.
This is not saying that autism is not real, that it is not a thing to understand, or something that should not be researched. It is only saying that the idea that autism is On The Rise in a terrifying way, that it is something to be feared, is misguided.
As this article says, and as the book Neurotribes explores in depth, autism used to have much more strict criteria for diagnosis. Connor, the leading researcher of autism for much of the 20th century, was convinced autism should only cover the most severe cases, and he did not like the spectrum idea. As time went on and it was realized that many more persons may have some aspect of autism even if it isn't extremely severe led to the DSM making the criteria much looser. The authors of the DSM particularly noted that this may make it seem like the prevalence was increasing when in fact it was simply more widely diagnosed.
The reason for caution of using the term "autism epidemic" is that it spooked many parents into thinking there was a horrible plague afoot, and that it needed to be cured.
My current understanding of it in myself and wider society is that it has always been around, that those on the spectrum hold an important place in society, and that rather than finding a cure (if this is an epidemic) is more important than understanding autism and advocating for services to help those who have autistic children.
This absolutely does not seek to discredit the indeed heroic efforts many parents have gone to to support their children, in fact by being more precise about what is happening the hope is that autistics like myself can have even better outcomes.
What percentage of Reddit comments are bots? I'd be curious to know. SaaS and Lambda functions and and APIs are all like very complicated neurons that link together to form this world wide web of interactions.
I've wondered if an approach to the AI alignment problem is really to see that the entirety of all the computers in the world are a giant brain that is continually self-improving. Phoenix Wright bot is one neuron, like any other. And so to align the world AI, you have to align the culture that makes the AI. And so, basically, anything that one does to improve the culture in a sense improves AI.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1771642483/
It suggests that trees may have some kind of hive intelligence in their roots and through the fungal networks they can communicate and share resources. It isn't something that I've investigated in a ton of detail but the ideas seem scientifically informed.
I've had a hard time figuring out where to live since I don't have to be anywhere in particular for my job.
My coach Malcolm Ocean has been speaking highly of https://roamresearch.com, which looks like a promising way to keep track of research-style notes.
I have a subscription and generally pick up a new book I've heard of that interests me right away either with a credit or just buying it.
This allows me to read while walking and riding the bus and doing the dishes and generally turns uninteresting chores into something interesting while also allowing me to read. Something about having someone read to me is way less difficult than reading it myself.
I generally don't worry about explicitly remembering anything unless there's something particularly amazing. I read nonfiction mostly and my theory is that the goal is to generally educate myself so that my worldview is shifted to be more accurate, and instead of asking "what would that book advise me to do?" I can ask, "What would I do?" and what I would do has been influenced by the book.
Good books I just read more than once. It's much faster for me to listen to a book twice than to read it carefully once. And regardless, someone said something like it's better to read the best book 100 times than 100 books 1 time.
My record is 4 times that I read Antifragile by Taleb. A scarce few are 3 times, several twice. As I once heard, keep reading books until the ideas start to repeat themselves.
Maybe I don't remember everything as much as I would if I took copious notes, but I certainly get a lot of books read this way (sometimes one in a few days if it's good enough) and it's in a way that happens without effort. I've been mulling on the idea generally that best practices that I won't actually follow are inferior to slightly less than best practices that I will do.
I guess what I'm more saying is, the default seems to be stressed out about money, and in order to avoid that you need leverage of some kind. One option is to work a ton, another is to take a high remote rate in a low cost of living area. It allowed me to work 20 hours a week right out of college instead of waiting until I retired. I also freely acknowledge that this is harder to do with a family.
I'm from rural Indiana and grew up in with a comfortable but relatively low standard of living. Going out to eat was spending $3 at Wendy's. All dollar amounts any business talks about still feel mindblowingly large.
Then I got a computer science degree and got into remote freelance web development. At first it was hard, but with shared rent at like $120/month, it didn't really matter. I could keep trying until I succeeded in freelance without much risk because I had margin for error. Rent was covered in a few hours of work, and every subsequent hour built my buffer.
My rate went from $50/hr to $90/hr to recently $125/hr while still living in this low cost of living area, and my margin for error increased even further. I think I got used to this and didn't realize how much margin I had compared to many people. I realized I could live a comfortable life working only 10-20 hours of billable work a week, and combine that with regular recurring clients and there was very little need to hustle for new work. Life was pretty chill. When my first girlfriend told me that "you make more in a day than I make in a week" I didn't really know what to say. Of course we were talking about something like $900.
I never understood how people could say that $100,000 a year wasn't enough money until I moved to Chicago. I kept the same relative amount of income at around $60k working 10-20 hours a week, but my cost of living probably quadrupled. I loved it there but there was so much less margin for error. My finances started to drain and my stress increased, and I had to take more work that I struggled to complete to pay my now $1080/month rent and buy $30-$40 dinners when going out with friends. And there were people around me making much less somehow surviving. I lived like I had margin but I didn't, so I recently moved back to Indiana.
My real goal is to spend more time working on my business anyway, and hopefully if those take off it will give even more margin. But until then, freelancing a few hours a week and living cheaply gives me infinite runway and no financial stress. Sure this town has 6000 people in it and the most exciting thing to do is walk around the local park, but I once again have margin for error.
All that to say, the van dwelling people seem to be experiencing something similar, as you describe. If finances feel like quicksand, there are interesting options for ways to gain leverage, especially as a developer.
Some of the most free and wealthy (in terms of purchasing power) people I know do this. Compare the person who can't pay all the bills with $20k a month (a figure I recently heard from a real person!) with my friend also living in this town who is extremely frugal who spends $1000 a month and built up $40k in savings from a job. She is now writing novels and basically doesn't work unless a good freelance gig comes up.
Another friend moved to Lithuania and teaches part time at a college for a visa and worked remote tech support for a US company and made $60k a year and saved nearly all of it. Now he does whatever he wants.
Nomading is another way to get that same leverage. There are others if you are creative. I'm always excited to read about people doing interesting things like living in vans, because I've found there to be so many more options if you are willing to look outside the normal ways of doing things. Many are even pretty comfortable. You may not want to move to Indiana or Lithuania, but it is an option.
In case you didn't read the end note: "I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror." I'd say he succeeded pretty well in that aim!
I grew up in a semistrict religious context, and regardless of whether it was intended, I internalized that everything I did was a reflection of my righteousness and value as a human and even to a degree my worthiness to be accepted into heaven.
I've since stopped practicing that kind of religion, but I realized I have still been treating say my freelance work as a _moral_ question - if I do it right, I am good, if I mess up, or take too long, or there are bugs, my emotions still process that as if my eternal soul is at stake. Leading to, procrastination, stress, and withdrawing from communication because I'm afraid of punishment.
I had some really good conversations with clients lately, just being upfront about my fears of blowing timelines and admitting to withdrawing, and they were very understanding and to hear them acknowledge that this stuff is hard and that I was doing a good job was massively motivating.
Hopefully most people don't have this issue, but if you do, it was very relieving to even just realize this is what I was doing, and am working with a really good therapist and a business coach to process and work through it, and I'm already seeing a lot less stress as a result.
This hits very close to home, guess I might as well embrace it! I'd probably be just as anxious at a normal job anyway and am determined to figure out anxiety management.
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Django for that reason, as even with the Python 2-3 thing, Django has been very stable compared to a lot of web stacks I've seen. It's 15 years old, and I fully expect it to still be around in another 15 years.
React was being adopted by companies when it was still at version 0.12, and while it did end up staying around, it was not guaranteed. I would have been hesitant to use it at least until v1.0, and probably would rather have waited until v2.0.
Now React is the frontrunner and unlikely to go anywhere. They've also maintained backwards compatibility mostly from what I've seen, as Facebook has 180,000 or whatever odd components they don't want to rewrite.
I wouldn't use Elixir/Phoenix currently, unless it was extremely helpful to the project, just because it's a less mature technology. It sounds like a wonderful ecosystem, but if I'm making a business decision, risk is what I'm wanting to minimize.
This is the biggest reason I was sad that VueJS seems to be flirting with a large breaking change. I had thought Evan originally said they _wouldn't_ be pulling an Angular 1 to 2 rewrite the whole framework, and though this doesn't seem as bad, it still is a different way of doing things.
You know what hasn't changed in 10 years? JQUERY! Ha!
So as far as how I'd keep up to date, my answer is that I'd try to choose a preferred tech stack that is stable and try to get really good at it. Django has been the only full stack framework I've needed to learn in my 8 years of contracting, and that's worked well for me.
I recently read the book The E-Myth, which identified for me a serious problem I overlooked for a long time: A programmer is a technician who is an expert in a craft, along with writers, designers, etc. One day the technician is overcome by an "entrepreneurial seizure" and declares "I do all the work around here anyway, I could totally run a business better than my boss." And so the technician goes into business and runs themselves into the ground because they didn't realize there are actually three roles necessary for a business to work:
1. The Entrepreneur, who sets the vision 2. The Manager, who organizes 3. The Technician, who does the implementation
The E-Myth argues that the technician is actually the least important of the three, and even should eventually be replaced with employees if you actually want to run a business. As someone who wants to be a solopreneur and stay that way, my hope is that it's possible to still be the technician, as long as you can actually balance the other two roles.
As someone with ADHD-like tendencies, I've recently realized that my life has been in relative chaos for years working for myself. There were no standard operating procedures since I wanted "freedom" to work how I wanted, but that's meant effectiveness is directly tied to my mood at the time. I neglected the Manager's role.
I've also come to see that having a clear "why" for doing what I'm doing is vitally important at least for me. This is the role of the Entrepreneur. Otherwise I'll just sit thrashing about with various web frameworks and coding standards, forgetting that building a product people want is why I'm here.
Working to balance my technician time with manager time and entrepreneur time has been really helpful for motivation. Procrastination for me seems to come from being unclear about what I need to do next, and "build product" is not a good todo list item.
As far as forgetting, Sebastian Marshall wrote a piece called "Background Ops": https://medium.com/the-strategic-review/background-ops-1-str.... He makes the observation that otherwise intelligent people will just stop doing things that are good for them for no real reason. The E-Myth agrees with him here that as much as possible should be put on autopilot so you can use your limited willpower for creative purposes instead of deciding what to eat for breakfast today.
I've been mulling on the idea that freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want to all the time, but rather the ability to decide what rules you will impose on yourself. I can use my creative energy to say "I have determined that I do my best work in the morning, so I will wake up at 6am" and then I'll make my lizard brain wake up at 6am whether it wants to or not in the moment. The lizard brain often will just go with whatever is in front of it if it can just get started!
Hopefully this is useful, I'd love to know more about the specifics of what you've tried and what's worked and hasn't. Great question! I'd also be happy to chat more over email.