# What if you never sort your life out? | Oliver Burkeman
source: https://ift.tt/kbCPrDU tags: #literature #living-well uid: 202302202233 —
In recent years, for example, there’s been an explosion of books on habit change, most of which take a splendidly down-to-earth approach, focusing on the importance of taking tiny, incremental steps. Yet they rarely escape the trap of implying that once a habit’s been implemented, it’ll become totally automatic — and life’s suffering, at least in that domain, will have ended for good. Source: https://read.readwise.io/read/01gsm3wszqtwarfs6qejb1ebcz
I think virtually everyone, except perhaps the very Zen or very old, goes through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn’t quite the real thing, not just yet — that soon enough, we’ll get everything in working order, get organised, get our personal issues resolved, but that till then we’re living what the great Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz called the “provisional life.” Source: https://read.readwise.io/read/01gsm3str51pekeaz0grmam1q2
One antidote is to allow yourself to imagine what it might feel like to know you’d never fully get on top of your work, never become a really disciplined exerciser or healthy eater, never resolve the personal issue you feel defines your life’s troubles. What if I’ll always feel behind with my email? What if listening attentively to other people will always take the weird amount of effort it seems to take now? What if that annoying thing my partner does annoys me to the end of my days? Source: https://read.readwise.io/read/01gsm3xbf1f9fwpdxp4546j0kk
Things would probably be fine. I might have a nagging feeling that I’m not living my life to my full potential, but I don’t care as much about that as some people (including Mulan) might.
# Things they didn’t teach you about Software Engineering
source: https://ift.tt/sDv2ixP tags: #literature #software-engineering #insights uid: 202302202232 —
You rarely write something from scratch In university, they teach you how to write a 400-line program that solves a problem from A-Z. You have a blank canvas, and you need to show off your knowledge of some fancy algorithm to find a way to generate a maze. In the end, you have a nice solution to a straightforward problem.
It sounds like the real world, right? But it’s not. In the real world, you have a codebase of several hundred thousand lines, and you’re trying to figure out what your colleagues were smoking when they wrote this marvelous piece. You go back and forth between documentation and the person who understands the codebase more. At the end of the week, you write ten lines of code that fix some bug, and then the cycle repeats until you end up being the person people come to for an explanation of why you wrote it as you did.
Domain knowledge is more important than your coding skills I was surprised by how much easier it is to code something when you understand the underlying principles of how and, more importantly, why it needs to work.
When building a mobile banking app — you better understand how the transactions work, how money settlements work, how ledgers work, etc.
When building a Point-of-Sale system for a restaurant, you better figure out how the waitpeople operate, how the inventory is managed in gastronomy, and how the credit card authorization works. Basically, the ins-an-outs of the domain of where your software will run.
MK - This is extremely true, and an important #insights for me to have to get better at #software-engineering. I’ve noticed this with Airtable and main resilience as well. This is why Junyi has tried hard to develop domain expertise on ProxySQL - because it’s extremely important for us to be able to do our jobs well.
Writing documentation is not emphasized hard enough
This is something I can get better at going forward. 202302202224
Code is secondary. Business value is first. Nobody is going to come up to you and say, “Oh wow, great job on writing that one-liner, amazing!” what they will instead say is, “Users are happy with the feature that you wrote,” or “Your code took down the whole website” depending on how lucky you are.
Although it may sound surprising, the primary focus of a software engineer’s job is not writing code but rather creating value through the use of software that was written. Code is simply a tool to achieve this end goal. Code -> Software -> Value.
This is a fantastic #insights
I’ve spent considerable time figuring out efficient ways to deal with those incompetences without being an asshole. I think it’s a skill that should definitely be taught in universities.
One way I have found to be effective is to focus on being productive despite the other person. I try to find solutions/alternatives that may be more effective and don’t require involving the ineffective person. It’s also helpful to document everything. This can provide concrete evidence of their incompetence’s impact on the processes.
Ultimately, the best way to deal with incompetence is to be proactive and find ways to work around their limitations. This may involve:
- seeking out additional resources or support.
- finding ways to delegate tasks to more competent people. Can anyone else do what needs to be done?
- Implementing failsafe and fallback so stuff doesn’t break on your side.
- Set a 1:1 with the person to tell them they are hindering the process.
- Again — no need to be an asshole.
You work with uncertainty most of the time
Requirements gathering isn’t the easy part of programming. It’s not as fun as writing code. But it takes a considerable amount of your time as a programmer because it requires working with people, not machines — calling the agency that provides the third-party integration, and chatting with their developers to understand what’s feasible and what’s not. Sitting down with the stakeholders to tell them their ideas do not make sense and that we can do it this way and not that way.
Writing your first line of code on a task can take weeks. You figure out the requirements, then you figure out where it needs to go, then you figure out how it needs to be built, then you figure out where it might go wrong, and then you write your first lines.
Also need to get better at this. These are things that I can use for my self-review 202302202224
Assume everything has bugs
Aesthetics can’t be taught College courses teach us the basics of good code, but true aesthetics in software development can’t be taught in a classroom.
Aesthetics in software development refers to the overall look and feel of the code. It’s about how easy it is to read, understand, and maintain. Aesthetically pleasing code is clean, organized, and follows logical patterns. It’s the kind of code that makes you feel good when you look at it. Or makes you cringe when it’s terrible.
Estimations will be asked even when you don’t want to give them Managers like numbers, estimates, and asking for estimates with an idea written on a napkin. It’s just how the real world works — a business has some monetary goal, but before committing to it, it needs to understand how much it will cost.
Need to get better at estimates 202302202224
# De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness
source: https://ift.tt/BSTuEFY tags: #literature #living-well #favorites uid: 202302202113 —
Despite being moment-to-moment less fun than playing the game, going to the tournament was ultimately more fun. Playing the videogame is very fun, but it’s monolithic. It’s just play, there’s no environmental novelty full of multisensory stimuli to hook your memory into. It blurs from one moment to the next, and like bad American Chinese food, you find yourself paradoxically unsatiated when you’re done. There’s something more fun about complex fun, even if the individual moments might score lower on the hedonometer.
But fun is just one area where we can see this phenomenon. There is a clear experiential divide between rich multisensory life and what I’ll call “atomized” life. And atomized life is worth avoiding.
This is similar in spirit to “Being able to remember what you did is what gives meaning to life” 202210031413. I haven’t finished reading this article yet, but it sure seems like “atomized life” is the kind of life that’s very difficult to remember.
Life and fitness used to be deeply intertwined. You could not live without fitness. Now they are separate: fitness is a cute thing rich people do in their Lululemon after work or while jiggling their mouse to keep the Slack bubble green. You don’t do it to stay alive, you do it to get laid or not resent yourself or maybe if you’re particularly enlightened to “feel good.”
Fitness has been atomized: it is no longer part of a cohesive whole life. It’s a separate thing you have to try to “find time for.” When someone says they “don’t have time” to work out, they’re both stating their priorities (obviously, everyone has time)
Then we got Peloton. No socialization. No scenery. No exploration. No sunlight. Exercise, sure, and Emma is cute, but that’s it. The richness of biking is gone.
And, look, I love my Peloton, but it’s Type 1 exercise. Instead of exercise being a multifaceted activity that incorporates other essential life elements like seeing friends, getting fresh air, and looking away from a screen for a few moments, it reduces it to its simplest element and suggests that’s just as good. Maybe even better because you get a “harder workout.” The most important part of exercise, after all, is INTENSITY.
Where else do we see over-atomization? Food comes to mind. A meal should be about more than just food. Relaxation, spending time with your friends and family, fun, maybe joy. If you looked at an Italian neighborhood dinner and said “wow what a waste, don’t they know they could just drink a Huel and get back to work?” then, well, oof.
Lol. This is kind of me, when it comes to food.
But atomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element:
- Biking is about exercise, and scheduling with friends and planning a route and inflating your tires all get in the way of that.
- Eating is about sustenance, and inviting friends and getting groceries and cooking all get in the way of that.
- Relationships are about talking, and meeting up in person and leaving the house and scheduling are all inconveniences.
Atomization turns an integrated day of socializing, eating, exercising, and working into discrete hurried chunks of trying to move from one thing to another, wondering why we never seem to have time for everything.
If you throw Exercise and Socialization and Food and Fun and Hobbies into some complicated hexascale with Work and Life, you suddenly feel overwhelmed and start eyeing the benzos because seriously how can you possibly oh shit did the dogs get fed today ugh when did you last finish a book can you believe she hasn’t called you back is it 5 o’clock yet?
But at the root of this overwhelm is the language we use around many activities. “I’m going to go workout” feels more responsible than “I’m going to go for a walk with a friend.” We separate “I’m working” and “I’m playing.” We want to make everything extremely efficient, so we opt for going for a run alone instead of trying to link up with people along the way. We need to “be productive” so we don’t work from a coffee shop with friends.
I fall under this category. At the moment, I’m not convinced enough to definitively say that this is a bad thing, but I’m intrigued by the discussion here.
The challenge is that these “Type 1,” or Atomized, versions of activities are the most immediately appealing. Booting up my computer to play a video game is way easier and sounds more immediately fun than texting some friends to play pickleball. Crushing takeout chips and queso sounds tastier and easier than cooking steak and rice. But I know I’ll feel better afterward with the latter, and that’s what we have to try to optimize for. Integrated living is more satisfying than atomic living. 202302202034
I think I intuitively understand this fact but sometimes forget it. I’m going to take special note of this so I don’t forget.
Can you loosen the reigns on your Super Duper Productive Routine to hang at a coffee shop with friends for a few hours a week? And for the love of God, can you please stop drinking fucking Huel or Soylent at your desk and talk to someone instead?
The more creatively we can integrate the various parts of life that matter to us, the more satisfied we’ll be in our day to day. The more we atomize, the more lonely and overwhelmed we start to feel. De-atomization is the secret to happiness.
NOTE: This was a well-written article. There’s a certain genre of articles, including most of the ones in my #favorites , that just capture my attention. They’re written in an empathetic, humanistic way. They have a unique, compelling thesis. They genuinely feel like they’ve improved my life just by me reading them. They just capture my imagination. The ones that capture my attention like this (the latest one was “Why We Need More Boutique Search Engines” 202301292238) are the ones that truly reflect my values in life 202301292249.
Being Alone — Ankit Shah
source: https://www.ankit.fyi/being-alone tags: #literature #living-well #favorites uid: 202302202111 —
- Why be alone if you don’t have to be? Perhaps because that hollow feeling—the one you get when you’re scrolling on your phone for too long? That doesn’t change after 5 or 10 years of scrolling. It also doesn’t change when your follower count multiplies by 2 or 10 or 50.In other words: Never being alone isn’t never feeling alone. Being constantly connected or surrounded by people doesn’t make you any more at ease in your own skin.
- Tags: #favorites
- We may find hope, however, in consciousness. Even if we don’t know ourselves, we have the capacity to be aware of it. In a sense, we have two minds: one that determines how we operate in any given moment and a second that has the capacity to notice what the first one is doing. Getting to know yourself is effectively a conversation between these two minds. Seeing yourself outside of yourself.
- Reminders of Shared Humanity are critical to challenging your assumptions about the people around you. They exercise the muscle of possibility in your imagination. Any time you’re about to jump to a conclusion about someone you don’t know, the muscle reminds you: You don’t really know what’s going on. You have no idea what the person is going through, and there are probably a ton of assumptions you’ve baked into your interpretation of the situation that might be challenged if you sat with the person and heard their story. They are probably doing their best with the card they were dealt in this moment, and it’s likely that they are no “worse” or “better” than you are.The more you build this muscle, the more generously you reflect on and interact with others, the more easily accessible this observation of Shared Humanity is, the more deeply connected you feel to the people around you.
- In order to grow curious with yourself and listen to what you might find, you need space to step outside of yourself. Giving your consciousness breathing room—time, non-judgment, quietude—can yield its own kind of shared humanity: Self Awareness.
- Tags: #favorites
- The first few moments of you spending time with yourself are usually very heady. You start wondering why you’re by yourself, wasting time, being bored. You could grab for your phone, but you resist for a moment. You don’t have a specific goal, but maybe something will emerge. You could be doing something more social, more productive, more interesting! But over time, you start to let go of your sense of control, your rush to get somewhere “good.” You choose to be alone, and you’re creating space for what could happen.
- random observation enters from the periphery and somehow finds itself associating in your mind with a completely unrelated train of thought. You start noticing things about yourself that you didn’t know were there, or maybe you just forgot. Some of it is great. Some of it just…is. Some of it sucks and makes you sad. But it’s all you. Your previous urge to get this all over with evolves into a rabbit hole of self-discovery.
- You’ve discovered something. Maybe it’s profound. Maybe it’s a recycled version of a thought you already had. Gotta get back to the real world. This was really nice while it lasted. Who would’ve thought you could learn so much about yourself and your thoughts? All you had to do was sit with them.
- Note: Writing helps me discover these thoughts!
- It’s taking a shower before bed to think about my day and leave the water running just long enough to forget that I even had a day in the first place. It’s slowly smelling my morning coffee before I start sipping it. It’s washing the dishes without my headphones in. It’s turning on Airplane Mode and typing out my thoughts to myself as if I’m texting my own consciousness, having a true back and forth.
- Tags: #favorites
- The important thing about practice is that it’s regular. My habits are all small, but I can fit each of them into my life almost daily. Every day, I give my mind at least some space to be curious with myself. Some days, I find a sense of awe. Others, not so much. Being by myself still makes me very uncomfortable, but I’m way less scared of it—and in turn, significantly less inclined to reach for my devices when I’m left to my own devices. Progress!
- When you start feeling your feelings yourself, you don’t project them on other people nearly as much. The more secure you are in your own skin, the more you can create space for other people to be their whole selves—even if they’re not enjoying alone time nearly as much as you are.
Things To Know About Instapot Before Buying
First, it is almost impossible to mess up with this thing to a point of being dangerous, so if you’re concerned about the exploding pressure cookers of yore, you needn’t be (I said “almost”, don’t go overriding your pot’s safety features and then blame me when you poke an eye out). The lid audibly tells you when its sealed (when you turn it clockwise), and the pot won’t even build up much pressure if you haven’t properly closed the steam release handle by turning it, too, clockwise. The most likely point at which a problem could arise would be if you try to open the lid (by turning it counter-clockwise) before all of the pressure has been released and normalized (so don’t do that). The pot visually lets you know when it’s safe to open the pot, by the float valve (the little silver post that pops up when the pot is pressurized) dropping back down flush with the lid instead of being popped up. Think of the float valve as the reverse of a turkey pop-up button, in the case of the float valve it’s done when the button pops in, instead of out.
The sauté function has three temperature settings: ‘Normal’ heats to 320 degrees, ‘More’ heats to 338 degrees, and ‘Less’ heats to 221 degrees (all in Fahrenheit)
For pressure cooking, you will probably use ‘manual’ nearly all the time (nearly every Instant Pot cookbook I’ve read relies on the manual setting almost exclusively). So don’t feel badly for not using all of those other buttons very much, if at all (I’ve never used any of the preprogrammed buttons).
The preprogrammed settings each have their own timing, and variable pressure, which the pot manipulates by manipulating the temperature of the contents (the higher the temperature, the higher the pressure). That is primarily what makes them different from manual, which provides one consistent pressure (either high or low). However they generally bring the contents to high pressure, fluctuating the temperature a little so that the pressure fluctuates a little too, for a set period of time (the main exceptions to this are the rice button, and the multigrain button). Personally I just find it easier to use ‘manual’ and set the time that I want.
After you hit ‘manual’ to start cooking, you then set the amount of time you want it to cook at pressure, after which you will have a 10-second grace period (for example to add more time, etc.), after which the display will switch to displaying the word “on”. Then it will be a while before the display switches to the timer countdown. This is normal. The amount of time you enter is for how long it will cook after it reaches full pressure (either high or low pressure, depending on what you selected), and so the timer will switch on when it reaches full pressure.
The cooking time in any recipe is the time at full pressure, not in total. So you need to take into account the time it will take to reach full pressure (which depends on many variables, including what is in the contents of the pot, what temperature they started at, and your altitude), and how long it will take for the pressure to be released and normalized (i.e. for the float valve to pop in, which of course is really “dropping in”, but you get the point). And this brings us to the two different types of pressure release.
All Instant Pot recipes will include (or should include) either one of these terms: natural pressure release (also known as NPR), or quick pressure release (QPR or QR). What these mean is simply either “let the pressure dissipate on its own” (natural pressure release), or “force the pressure to escape immediately by turning the steam release handle counter-clockwise to the open position (quick release). The reason for using quick release (QR) is not because you are too impatient to wait for natural release, but because your food will be over cooked if you don’t get it the heck out of dodge once it’s done cooking at pressure. A really good example of a food needing quick release is poached eggs (which come out perfectly in the Instant Pot (see how to poach eggs in the Instant Pot below)). On the other hand, lots of (if not most) foods need the natural release - it’s part of their cooking process and processing time.
Natural pressure release generally takes between 15 and 20 minutes.
Quick pressure release takes about a minute, plus the hours spent in the ER if you forget to KEEP YOUR HANDS, FACE, AND ALL OTHER BODY PARTS AWAY FROM THE STEAM VALVE WHEN YOU DO IT!! Many people put a towel over the valve before they turn it, to help suppress the steam, which you may want to do (I don’t because then I just end up with a scalding hot towel - but I also rarely need to do QR, and those times that I do, I’m sufficiently respectful of the power and heat of that steam to keep my distance).
Finally, in my experience, unless you are doing a “dump everything in at once and turn it on” recipe, you will definitely want to have all of your ingredients ready to go before you start cooking. For example, for any recipe that includes sautéing in the pot first, then adding ingredients and then starting pressure cooking, you definitely want to have everything lined up before you start.
Oh, wait, this is actually the final note: the stainless steel inner pot can take a real beating, and cleans up just fine..BUT…after the first use or so (it was after my first use) you will see little “stains” (not sure what else to call them) and, if you are anything like me, you will think “Oh no! I have ruined the beauty of this pot! How can I fix it?” It turns out that this is very normal (at least the ‘staining’, not sure about my reaction being normal :-) ). In my case I had made beans, and my pot now still bears the “imprints” of beans, even though it is completely clean..it’s sort of like the chalk outlines from a little bean murder scene. ;-) I’m in an Instant Pot forum on Facebook where many IP cookbook authors are members (including JL Fields and Jill Nussinow) and they have all said that this is perfectly normal and just what happens (in fact they said it in response to my “Oh no, I’ve ruined my beautiful pot” post).
Accessories to get for the Instapot 202302201047 Recipes to use for Instapot cooking 202302201048
uid: 202302201040 tags: #cooking #instapot