I imagine that summer vacations from school comprised formative periods for many people across the world. Six weeks (or more) without broken education systems breathing down our necks, allowing us to discover all those things that require long, uninterrupted blocks of time to understand and appreciate.
At some point during the last five years I started reading the works of Nassim Taleb. I regularly find myself coming back to one of the more well-known quotes taken from one of his books:
I spent much of the first half of the this month plugging away at what was my first sizeable piece of technical writing, my previous post on using Terraform to set up a new Hugo website on AWS. It took much longer to write than I originally anticipated, and the longer the post remained unfinished, the harder it became to continue working on it.
While a piece of writing taking longer than originally anticipated or intended is not really a problem in and of itself, I found that the unfinished state of the post acted as a blocker preventing me from writing regularly, which in the context of my overall goal to improve my writing skills, is indeed a problem.
Static generated blogs have seen a surge in popularity over the past few years, as a more cost effective and scalable alternative to traditional publishing platforms such as WordPress. A big reason contributing to why it took me so long to actually start writing online was uncertainty about the publishing medium I should use.
Ghost appealed to me for a while, but it felt like overkill for what I wanted to achieve. Most of the latter half of 2016 was spent diving into the ever-expanding React ecosystem, and it was during one of those dives that I was first exposed to the idea of static generated blogs by Gatsby, a static site generator which is built on the React component model. I am definitely a proponent of React. I have used it extensively in both personal projects and professional projects that have provided my income stream for most of the past six months. However, it didn’t take long for me to come to the conclusion that Gatsby too, was overkill for what I was looking to achieve.
Over the weekend it was decided that this year’s wedding anniversary would be celebrated somewhere in Italy.
It has been a long time since I last had any extended exposure to Romance languages. My French and Spanish are still fairly strong, though I rarely have the chance to speak either at any great length these days. I’ve flirted with the idea of learning Italian many times over the years, though I have always ended up deciding not to. This is largely because I felt any professional edge it might offer me would be outweighed by the effort required.
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable is a saying that I hear a lot when I’m around tech people, and particularly non-technical people working in tech. I get the feeling when hearing this saying repeated aloud, that my understanding of this it is quite different to the understanding of the people I hear repeating it.
In a team-based environment, it is important to voice discomfort at the earliest available opportunity. Whether that discomfort is a result of dynamics in the team, gaps in knowledge and understanding, unrealistic expectations, or any number of other things.
This year one of my goals is to improve my writing skills, and one of the ways I’m working towards that goal is to make sure I write something every day.
January was not terribly successful, but February has been a lot better. Initially I was having a lot of trouble getting started, though that has been mitigated by my efforts to consistently write something every day, even if what I start remains incomplete. Having something already on the screen when I sit down to write every day makes getting started a lot easier than it would be just starting at a blank page.
At some point over the last two weeks I came across a subreddit about ’non zero days’. As far as I can tell, the community on Reddit sprung up in response to a comment made by ryans01:
Rule numero uno - There are no more zero days. What’s a zero day? A zero day is when you don’t do a single fucking thing towards whatever dream or goal or want or whatever that you got going on. No more zeros. I’m not saying you gotta bust an essay out everyday, that’s not the point. The point I’m trying to make is that you have to make yourself, promise yourself, that the new SYSTEM you live in is a NON-ZERO system. Didnt’ do anything all fucking day and it’s 11:58 PM? Write one sentence. One pushup. Read one page of that chapter. One. Because one is non zero. You feel me? When you’re in the super vortex of being bummed your pattern of behaviour is keeping the vortex goin, that’s what you’re used to. Turning into productivity ultimate master of the universe doesn’t happen from the vortex. It happens from a massive string of CONSISTENT NON ZEROS. That’s rule number one. Do not forget.
Working in the technology sector as a consultant means that I sometimes find myself working with public figures in the tech community. I can’t think of many points in my life where I have found myself working with people whose talks I have watched on YouTube or whose writings I have read in various publications on a regular basis.
Naturally the process of following public figures primarily through the lens of the persona that they expose to the world results in expectations being formed which are rooted in the images that those people aim to project of themselves.
I remember content consumption being quite a simple process before I owned a smartphone. I had some preferred RSS feeds that I subscribed to with a reader of my choice, which I would go through on my laptop whenever I had time and save articles that I was interested in reading later.
In the years since I first started using smartphones I’ve gone through a few different mobile-first apps such as Flipboard and Pocket, trying to augment/improve my content consumption workflow, but as of last week it seems I’ve come back around largely to my pre-smartphone habits.
Since the start of the year I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to write more. I realise that many of my biggest hurdles at the moment can be traced a lack of regularity and discipline, but there has been one thing in particular which has caught my attention recently when I’ve been going over topics I’d like to write about: length.
I seem to convince myself that if I cannot (or don’t think I can) write about a certain topic up to a certain arbitrary length, it is not worth even trying to put together a post on that topic.