New posts #

• Designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological.

Books I'm reading #

• Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright.

• Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Steven C. Hayes, Spencer Smith.

• The Shadow of What Was Lost (The Licanius Trilogy #1) by James Islington.

• Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions by Gayle Laakmann McDowell.

Courses #

Docker Mastery by Bret Fisher

Books I've read #

• Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke. I can agree with most reviews here. It's moralistic at times. Especially the further you go into the book. But, I wouldn't ignore the main idea of 1-month abstinence or the use of pain just because of it. I may be giving the author a little bit of benefit of the doubt as she is a practitioner and has seen the worst cases of addiction.

Elsewhere on the Web #

• Burnout guide from Commoncog by Guan Jie Fung, Cedric Chin. Its most important part is at the end:

Here's the bad news: we know very little about recovering from burnout. What we do know are two things:

1. Individual interventions don't work — and by individual interventions, we mean interventions while the person continues to be at the workplace that caused the burnout.
2. If you remove yourself from that working environment, you will recover.

• There are just 10 basic values

Self-direction
Stimulation
Hedonism
Achievement
Power
Security
Conformity
Tradition
Benevolence
Universalism

• Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster.

All my recommendations in Pocket

Watching #

I've spent a lot of time mindlessly watching YouTube recently. But, out of it, I've some fascinating ones worth your time:

Tech #

• How Senior Programmers ACTUALLY Write Code. The most unexpected idea was that PM shouldn't be part of the prioritization of technical work.
• Monorepos - How the Pros Scale Huge Software Projects // Turborepo vs Nx

Work #

• What If We Just...Stopped Working?.
• The Myth Of The "Self-Made" Billionaire
• Does Capitalism Really Drive Innovation?
• America Compared: Why Other Countries Treat Their People So Much Better

Health #

• Is Foam Rolling Bad For You?. Spoiler: it may be a waste of time.

Other #

• America's Stunted Political Spectrum
• The Man Who Killed Millions and Saved Billions. Great video from Veritasium. I finally got the importance of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the current economy.

Personal Thoughts #

It was a weird month in many ways, but I like the focus and flow I get from programming. I miss 1-1 meetings and mentoring I was doing for my team, but I think it was overall a good move.

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