Experiment 5

Goal: Go 21 straight days without complaining or uttering non-constructive criticism. (If I catch myself doing it, I must start again at day zero.)

This was inspired by Will Bowen’s book A Complaint Free World, in which he claims that if you stop pronouncing your negative thoughts, you stop having those kinds of thoughts, and that if everyone did this the world would change completely.

What happened: It took 55 days to get 21 complaint-free days in a row, but I did it. This experiment really does teach you not to complain, and I think everyone should do it once in their lives. But it didn’t create much of an inner change. My negative thoughts were unaffected, I just got more polite about whether to pass them on to others. Complaining can even be a worthwhile form of bonding, as I learned while I was working a painful manual labor job with new friends, and could never join in on the lighthearted griping. Still, it’s better to never complain than to complain freely.

Where I am with it today: Even though the exercise didn’t eliminate internal negativity like the book promised, the experiment left me much more conscious about expressing needless negativity, and I am pretty good at keeping it to myself most of the time. I’m also more patient with others when they’re complaining. This is one experiment I would recommend to almost anybody.

When I want a thrill, I walk to the corner store without my phone.

We used to use software; now software started to use us

The safest and most reliable way to deal with feature flags is to hardcode them

Occasionally, you will see the opportunity to completely remove the worrying part of the system, which for me is one of the most satisfying things you can do as a software engineer. Removing things that cause your team stress has compounding benefits to your team, to the systems you work on, and to your engineering org in general

We are adding a new generated code API to Go Protobuf.

If you set out to build a local-first application that users have complete control and ownership over, you need something to solve data sync.

Dropbox and other file-sync services, while very basic, offer enough to implement it in a simple but working way.

Sure, it won’t be as real-time as a custom solution, but it’s still better for casual syncs. Think Apple Photos: only your own photos, not real-time, but you know they will be everywhere by the end of the day. And that’s good enough!

Imagine if Obsidian Sync was just “put your files in the folder” and it would give you conflict-free sync? For free? Forever? Just bring your own cloud?

I’d say it sounds pretty good.

Staticcheck - The advanced Go linter. Contribute to dominikh/go-tools development by creating an account on GitHub.

A properly configured distributed team of programmers can and must deliver a higher quality of code than a co-located one.

For me, this imagined audience is more important than getting it right. Which is why I write my blog posts with the wiki spirit. All these sites are pretty similar, in essence. Blog, wiki, digital garden, Zettelkasten, there’s not enough difference to draw lines. It’s all a question of intent, of culture, of belonging. The blog spirit is to write pages over time, and they disappear into the archive. The digital garden spirit is to write unfinished articles and papers, to be refined or not. The Zettelkasten spirit is to follow the trail of thoughts you thought and add new branches, small notes with new thoughts leading to more thoughts on new notes. And the wiki spirit is to write and edit online, to hit the Save button and then it’s live. There is no editor, there is no draft. Wiki is like brutalism in content management. I can see the page sources and the end result is obvious and full of that old web power. It’s not an app. The software has no idea of process. The wiki spirit is to open that window, write the text and hit save. And then I read it again, and edit it. And tomorrow, I read it again, and edit it. And next week, perhaps, I read it again, and edit it.

I no longer live in the Wiki Now. The pages are intended for future readers but they are not timeless. I add timestamps all over the place. The blog spirit is strong. The pages do disappear into the great compost of thoughts. The archive gobbles them up. I do go back but I don’t rewrite the pages completely. I’m more likely to simply add a timestamp and some thoughts like I did on this page.

Libre audio books. Recommended by Flancian.

When I’ve listened the most effectively to people, it’s because I was intensely curious—I was trying to build a detailed, precise understanding of what was going on in their head.

Просто напоминаю про прекраснейший блокировщик рекламы, который не только — внезапно — скрывает рекламу от любимого пользователя, но и старательно засерает статистику рекламным площадкам ("все кликают ВСЁ"), сводя на нет самый смысл персонифицированной слежки.

Выделите джуниору части проекта, где он будет главным, через него будут решаться все вопросы связанные с ними. При срочной необходимости, можно всё сделать самому, но в штатном режиме хозяин кода - он.

Про автомобили, топливо, химию, электричество, эксперименты, скандалы, историю, политику, сферы влияния, махинации, войны, катастрофы, экологию итд итп.

4 часа восторга!

Интерактивная статья о физике велосипеда.

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