Lifestyle mindfulness etc

The fight between an ambitious novice and an old master is a well-worn cliche in martial arts movies: the novice is a blur of motion, flipping and spinning. The master is mostly still. But somehow the novice’s attacks never seem to quite connect, and the master’s eventual attack is decisive.

taking YAGNI as the ultimate design principle: above single-responsibility, above choosing the best tool for the job, and above “good design

We’ve all seen codebases with hacks stacked on top of hacks, and they definitely don’t look like good design. But are hacks simple? I actually don’t think so. The problem with a hack or a kludge is precisely that it isn’t simple: that it adds complexity

the proper fix is almost always much simpler than the hack

Figuring out the simplest solution requires considering many different approaches. In other words, it requires doing engineering

Simple systems have fewer “moving pieces”: fewer things you have to think about when you’re working with them Simple systems are less internally-connected. They are composed from components with clear, straightforward interfaces

tiebreaker: simple systems are stable. If you’re comparing two states of a software system, and one will require more ongoing work if no requirements change, the other one is simpler

the cardinal sin of big tech SaaS engineering is an obsession with scale

you don’t know ahead of time where all the bottlenecks are going to be. At most you can try to make sure you’re ready for 2x or 5x the current traffic

It’s fun to decouple your service into two pieces so they can be scaled independently (I have seen this happen maybe ten times, and I have seen them actually be usefully scaled independently maybe once

firmitas (solidità e permanenza); utilitas (funzione, destinazione d’uso); venustas (perfezione di bellezza).

equilibrio e proporzioni sono elementi caratteristici della natura

Canone di Policleto, l’applicazione del modulo architettonico all’anatomia: partendo da un’unità (come un dito o la testa) si ricavano proporzionalmente le misure di tutto il corpo.

è un modello che concettualizza i meccanismi di conoscenza e auto-conoscenza delle persone; in altre parole, spiega in che modo l’Io si relaziona con sé stesso e con gli altri, attraverso diversi livelli cognitivi e relazionali

Data shouldn't live in a file on a laptop. It shouldn't be a single file on a network share. Data is a living beast. Data needs to live in a database - not an Excel file. Access should be granted for each according to their needs.

I didn't start running until I was in my late twenties, and even so I would end up in a pattern where I'd get motivated and go on a couple of runs, take a few days off, go on another run the following week, and next thing you know it's been a month since I last run. Rinse and repeat.

2024 was going to be the year that I finally did social media. Regular posting, a content calendar, a strategy, a plan for growth

I had a book coming out in April 2024

There are very few things that an author can practically do to make a book a success

excellence emerges from intimacy with imperfection, that mastery is built through befriending failure, that the path to creating one perfect thing runs directly through creating many imperfect things

When you imagine achieving something, the same neural reward circuits fire as when you actually achieve it. This creates what neuroscientists call "goal substitution"—your brain begins to treat planning as accomplishing.

TikTok shows you the perfect performance, never the thousand imperfect rehearsals. LinkedIn shows you the promotion announcement, never the years of unglamorous skill-building that made it possible

"Do-Learn" gave me permission to start before I was ready, fail early, fail often, to discover through making rather than thinking my way to readiness

This is the moment that separates the quantity group from the quality group: not at the beginning, but in the middle, when the work stops being fun and starts being work

Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely

the fewer headaches you create for your leadership chain, the bigger the rewards.

Being valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction

With no patience for learning that, I discovered I could do a pretty good job faking it by putting no fingers and thumbs in the ball and kind of twisting my elbow and chucking the ball down the lane.

There’s nothing you can do to improve as long as you keep bowling like that. You’ve maxed out. If you want to get better, you’re going to have to learn to bowl properly.

The model lists five phases of skill acquisition: Novice Advanced Beginner Competent Proficient Expert

skill acquirers move from “dogmatic following of rules and lack of big picture” to “intuitive transcending of rules and complete understanding of big picture.”

After a relatively short phase of being a complete initiate, however, one reaches a point where the skill acquisition becomes possible as a solo activity via practice, and the renewed and invigorated acquirer begins to improve quite rapidly as he or she picks “low hanging fruit.”

The Advanced Beginner stage is the last one in which the skill acquirer has no understanding of the big picture. As such, it’s the last phase in which the acquirer might confuse himself with an Expert

if I don’t understand it, it must be easy

I go from my optimistic self-assessment to a logical fallacy as my bowling career continues: “I know that I’m doing it right because, as an expert, I’m pretty much doing everything right by definition.”

ten years of experience or the same year of experience ten times,”

It’s during the full lifetime of a project that a developer gains experience writing code, source controlling it, modifying it, testing it, and living with previous design and architecture decisions during maintenance phases

They’ve officially become Expert Beginners, and they’re ready to entrench themselves into some niche in an organization and collect a huge paycheck because no one around them, including them, realizes that they can do a lot better.