Articles tagged as "thoughts"

After quite a bit of hesitation, I recently picked up A World Without Email by Cal Newport at the used bookstore. Internally, I was bouncing back and forth between curiosity and an expectation that it would be like every other productivity book (i.e. leaves an empty shallow pit in your stomach after reading it). What ultimately made me decide to purchase it was this thought: “Email, and the fast-paced work environment it exists in, is always detested. Executives know this, employees know this, investors know this. So why hasn’t anything changed?”. The book was written in 2021 and now three years later we have not had a revolution against communication systems at work, if anything they have gotten worse (looking at you, Teams). I started to notice complexity everywhere, in the terminology that we have to learn to describe any new system, to the layers of people that we often have to work through to get anything done.

According to this life expectancy checker, I’m expected to be kicking around for 85 years. That means that I am just about 30% of the way through my life. I won’t be adding a countdown timer anywhere to keep track, but it has got me thinking about how long we live relative to other things. For example, I have been around longer than YouTube, but not as long as Python. I have lived through 5 different US presidents, and (assuming the two, four-year term limit remains for the duration of my life) will live through 7 to 14 more. I didn’t grow up with social media, and completed university just as generative AI was rolling out. I have never known a world without the internet. Perhaps more interesting than when all of these events started (which we can know with certainty in hindsight), is when will any of these things end?

I was settling down to read AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor and thought “should I be taking notes on this?”. It is a topic that is likely to be relevant to my career, and also something that I may want to bring up in conversation professionally. It would be helpful to be able to point to a chapter in the book and say “here, they are saying it, not me”. By “they”, I mean the experts… right? Can the author(s) of the books I read be considered experts? Sometimes — but there are certainly times when I want to reference someone’s opinion rather than some research that was performed. Something was said eloquently and I now want to parrot that beautiful phrasing onwards. To do so, I need the source, because while I remember the idea, I don’t remember the prose. The more I think about it, the more taking obsessive notes about articles and books seems paradoxically like a doomed egotistical mission to sound more intelligent, while also not trusting ourselves enough to be accurate conduits of information.

Time seems to be moving faster and faster each year. Months seem like weeks and weeks seem like days. Time, for the first time, starts to feel finite. The thirties are approaching, and with that, the pressure to be on the “right track”, whatever that means. Everyone around me seems to be asking themselves three questions: Why do I suddenly have back pain? When did things get so serious? Is this all there is?

There is an app for everything. Wondering when to use the washroom during a movie? There’s an app for that. Unhappy with the latitude and longitude system? Why not use three words instead? More choice in software is great at a global scale - it increases the chances that you will be able to find the one app that fits your specific use case - however, we shouldn’t confuse that with a need to use all that software for everything in our individual lives. More software doesn’t necessarily make for a better life. If anything, it carries an administrative burden; more things to keep track of that distract us from focusing on what really matters.

The very first project I built was a very simple html and css personal website. It build off a theme and was just a resume in online form. It felt silly next to some of the fancy websites around the web, but it was mine. In setting it up, I actually learned a lot, such as how to buy a domain, how to host a site somewhere, and how to track changes using git. We often learn so many small things by doing. Now many years later, I can setup a new domain in a few minutes, but there are still many things that are at the frontier, and there always will be. Checking for broken links through a CI pipeline may seem to some to be a waste of time (after all, who really cares) but it isn’t about the result, it is about the process. It is precisely because it is so low stakes that makes it such a great learning opportunity. The worst thing that can happen is that the CI pipeline doesn’t run and I go back to the drawing board. This post goes over some of the broader lessons learned throughout the process of learning by building.

One of the things I don’t “know” are how many ounces are in a litre. It is something that I don’t use on a regular basis, and is easily accessible via a quick web search. Perhaps a better question is “should this be something that I know off the top of my head?”. What do we mean by “knowing” in the first place? Is it enough to know where to find the knowledge? This post is about how I like to think of our human brains working in cached layers to deal with information overload.

About six months ago I put together nevermonetize.com, a single page jekyll application with a couple of paragraphs communicating a simple idea – not pursuing an application or website for monetary gains. At first, I truly thought I would be the only one to use it, but then I began to notice people linking to from around the web. This has created its own challenges, as that text I put together in just a few minutes one night now has to stay consistent. Perhaps there is some beauty in something so hasty becoming solidified – it prevents over-engineering the concept. Some things in life just aren’t about money.

Going backpacking is a surreal experience. There are few moments in modern life where we bundle up everything we think we may need in a single pack and then wander off into the unknown. Before departure, we have plenty of time to check (and double check) our packing list in the comfort of our homes. Once we are out in the wilderness however, all bets are off, you either have a working system or you have a problem.

We consume and generate, a lot of information per day. With more people using the internet and generating data around the world, there will be even more communication: more emails sent, more articles written, and more data to store and recall. During the period 2011 through 2021, the percentage of individuals worldwide using the internet almost doubled, from 31.2% to 59.6% [1]. People are joining the interconnected infrastructure of the modern web at a blistering pace, and yet there are still billions more that remain unconnected. When they too join the global network, we can expect even more ideas to join the chorus.