trentnix

After I came back to tech, I guess I have a renewed perspective or something. The big shift for me is that I'm more internally motivated than most people seem to be. The business I work for will have its ups and downs, but I'm able to be self-actualized by doing good work for good work's sake.

And I'm blessed to be in a role that, I think, is a really good fit for my skills and experience. I still have entrepreneurial fantasies from time to time, but I very, very much enjoy the work that I'm doing and am very grateful for that peace of mind.

Young me would have assumed “new” meant “better”. Now I’m absolutely certain that is not the case.

https://devrant.com/rants/816880/i-ve-done-it-again

And how does one discern who the domain experts are?

A DoT environmental is widely considered an arcade grail and is rare. It’s extremely sought after and the logistics of the size of the cabinet resulted in lots of them being trashed over the year or chopped up.

Why are we sprinting… ALL. THE. TIME. Can’t we at least mix in some brisk walks every now and then a la high intensity interval training?

Following the fitness metaphor, the concept of periodization is an overwhelmingly common training strategy. Periodization turns fitness plans into smaller cycles that include active and passive periods of rest.

It’s recognized that these rest periods are where performance improves - the grind that came before was simply tearing the body down to induce the body to rebuild itself fitter and stronger than before. These rest periods are not a vacation, but rather a reduction in intensity and training load and often include cross-training and other activities that give the athlete a mental and physical break.

I’ve always been surprised some enterprising Agile consultant hasn’t jumped on the same concept to push the concept of recovery sprints, like like an Ironman triathlete will have a recovery week baked into their plan. I’ve heard of sprints that might be focused on technical debt or experimentation, but nothing about a reduction in velocity or anything like that. I think it would be an interesting experiment to try to help mitigate the endless grind.

Additionally, two-week sprints weren’t originally the norm. I left software for a while when four weeks was the most common sprint length and when I came back , everything seemed to have settled on two weeks as the magic number. I never got an explanation why.

I wrote a Bash script to copy our ~25 repositories to a new organization using the GitHub REST API. Turns out that the default when creating a new repository was to make it public. Within a few minutes I was getting emails by third party services who had downloaded and parsed our code, discovering a long abandoned AWS credential hard-coded in an older codebase. (I think GitHub now does this for you)

I was lucky that nothing important was actually compromised (we had done a decent job of keeping secrets out of our repos and the one exception was an account that was long gone), but it was an eye-opening experience. If these services had found and downloaded our code in minutes you can assume any repo made public, even for a few moments, has been downloaded and cataloged by a potential bad actor.

I wish that great fits of productivity was just a byproduct of waking up every day. I envy people that seem to be able to do that. But for me, that simply wasn’t the case.

It’s become cliche, but I’ve greatly benefited from the tactics espoused by Cal Newport in his book “Deep Work” and in his podcast. I now plan my days (regardless of whether it goes according to plan), have startup and shutdown rituals, keep a list of values and goals…all that.

I also just finished reading “Atomic Habits” which wasn’t particularly insightful but provided great reinforcement of what I already knew.

At no point has a magic switch flipped and it’s been a slog at times, but I’m getting better. Like weight loss, improvement didn’t happen overnight. It’s not steady or consistent. Some weeks and months I might even regress and require a refocus or reset. But, over time, my focus, productivity, motivation, and actualization have definitely improved.

Coupled with a few behavior changes around health and fitness (exercise, better diet, daily sunlight, going to bed early and getting up early, and a focus on getting quality sleep), I’m as productive professionally as I’ve ever been. And I think I still have a lot of improvement left to make.

I lament that I didn’t realize all this back when I was in college. In every facet of my life I was capable of so much more than I did.

> There's just no reason to do the job when you can get the same compensation working remotely in tech.

Same compensation. That’s the unique qualifier that was chosen. That’s certainly not no indication.

In the 2010s I owned a high-end bicycle and sporting good store. It was 7 days of 10+ hours a day most weeks. And it was very nearly non-profit or barely-profit for most of its run. If you know anyone that owns a bike shop, you should give them a hug. They need it.

Nearly every Friday afternoon, just after lunch, a few of my customers who were physicians or surgeons would pull up in their Model X or Cayenne to get service for their 10k road bike they were taking to their vacation home for the weekend. On more than one occasion, one of them would exasperatedly tell me how much they envied me and how lucky I was to be doing what I "loved". As I confronted my busy, work-filled weekend cemented to the shop to deal with the fickle and spoiled public, I had to chuckle as they drove away in their luxury vehicles to their luxury vacation home with a nicer bike than my own.

In retrospect, I've concluded that the real problem they faced is they'd built a life dependent on a physician or surgeon's income. They were told they were building a castle, but instead they built a prison. The fact is, you just can't spend enough money to truly escape the stresses of your work, but you can certainly spend enough money to become shackled to it.

The most they would do is put us for a few months into a white-collar, minimum-security resort!

When I was a kid I thought it was humorous self-deprecation. Now that I’m older I see it is a recipe for contentment.

Amazing work.

What’s that, precisely?

I'm absolutely not interesting in arguing for any great solution but I do think people would serve their own interests better applying for jobs that fill needs and not that fill seats. I recognize it's easier said than done, but I really despise the livestock-based personnel management approach that infests most of big corporate.

We do. It’s called “product-market fit” in software. It’s called “elections” in democratic government. The government provides the services and competence its leaders, and consequently its electorate, demands.

San Francisco’s electorate demanded what it’s getting. As you can see just from these comments, “the facts” are twisted, distorted, and obfuscated to confirm a preferred narrative. But the faith in the narrative, whichever narrative you hold, never wavers.

That said, I just loved the idea of all of the different types of fighters going head-to-head. I loved Enter the Dragon and Bloodsport.

I had been a huge fan of Karateka on the Apple II and Ye Are Kung Fu in the arcade. Street Fighter was like Ye Are Kung Fu on steroids, but even the 6-button controls weren’t very good. When SFII brought the concept and controls together, it was love at first sight. I’ve been a big SF2 fan ever since and prefer it and its variants over all of the sequels.