A brewer

Yet.

An article surfaced on HackerNews yesterday arguing that Programming is the new High School Diploma, the main argument being two facts:

1. Computers are everywhere
2. Automation is pushing out middle-tier jobs

The basic idea is really simple – in the not very distant future programming will and should be as important as basic literacy is today. Not just basic computer literacy, but programming in the sense of combining and extending apps in novel ways to fit your problem area.

There are a lot of professions for which automation is almost impossible to imagine – an artist, a firefighter, a winemaker, brewer, baker; the list goes on and on. In fact this was the top voted rebuttal of the whole story. A lot of professions need so much human touch it is inconceivable they would ever need programming.

Someone else can do the coding

And if parts of their jobs do become automated, they still won’t need programming because there will be special people to program special tools for these professions and just show them how they’re used.

Image via Wikipedia

All well and good, but that’s missing the point entirely.

There is no need for an artist, or a baker, or anyone working in meatspace to be a good programmer. They have no need for pointer arithmetic, functional programming, P=NP or knowing javascript and python’s list comprehensions.

They just don’t.

Somebody else can do all that stuff – an actual expert. But how much does a programmer sitting at home, watching code and cat pictures all day, know about the problems of a baker or an artist? Or about fighting fires?

Problem areas

You can’t solve problems you don’t know exist!

Someone with problems who doesn’t know of a whole field of solutions can’t ask for help either.

And so we reach an impasse. On the one hand you have an industry full of people so hungry for problems they create better and better ways to share ever more boring stuff, and on the other hand you have … the other ~70% of the population drowning in real, hard, solvable problems.

While you can check foursquare to see where your friends are, there are firefighters who would (probably?) love nothing more than a real-time map of where all their buddies are in a building. And what are the best and brightest of the world doing? Nothing much, I heard there’s a meme making rounds about something or another.

High school is about broadness and giving pupils a little bit of everything. Some history to understand the problems with large-scale ethnicism, a little bit of biology to help you talk to the doctor, a dash of this and that. All in all, none of us become experts in every field we study in high school, but studying them gives us a better understanding of the world.

A chef

And yet high school deprives us of even the simplest knowledge of a field touching everything in our lives.

To innovate, to even begin to really use this amazing tool, we need to give the general populace the ability to begin the process of automation – that spark of Hey, this is kind of repetitive, I wonder if a computer could do it.

Chances are it could.

In fact, we know a computer can solve any problem we consider solvable … even subsets of those that aren’t solvable. But you first need someone who knows how to actually solve a problem.

That’s why most problems programmers solve are those other programmers have. It’s like an echo chamber out there, nothing but better and quicker ways to make development easier. These are then used to make development even easier and suddenly it’s become impossible to keep up with the world of computing.

Most other industries innovate much more slowly. Most of them can’t solve their own problems and they don’t even realize a solution exists because they don’t realize they have a problem. The greatest handbrake on innovation is a worker with too narrow a worldview to understand their job could be made better.

What you can do?

Because changing how high school works is hard, I have a suggestion for something you can do right now! Only needs three steps too

1. Find a nonprogrammer friend
2. Take them out for a beer
3. Teach them about programming

Give them the bug of automation. Do it with passion. Do it well. When they start looking at the world in terms of Hmm … I wonder how this could be made better, easier, more interesting. They will start coming back with real problems. Problems out of their solution scope, but something you can work on.

And hey, startup opportunity! You now have somebody with a real problem looking for a real solution! Hooray.

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I. Don’t. Know.

Three simple words. Almost impossible to say. As developers, as entrepreneurs, as men we never want to admit we don’t know. If you don’t know, you are weak and an army of angry huns will come to steal your women, your business and your honor.

When founders don’t know what the hell they’re doing, people leave, investors say “maybe” and users aren’t showing up. Especially if they openly admit they don’t know.

But just as some consider not knowing a sign of weakness, always knowing is definitely a sign of weakness. Selling your best guess as absolute fact works very well in the short term, in fact it works spectacularly well – there’s a reason there are whole books devoted to the practice of eliminating excuses from your speech. Phrases like  I think, in my opinion et cetera.

Island of knowledge

While it’s important to commit to what you say without hedging and ways to weasel out when you’re proven wrong. It’s even more important to admit when you don’t know. In fact all that hedging just defends you from admitting you are wrong and don’t know.

The best thinkers of our species, like Feynman, Einstein and others, are glorified for their ability to embrace what they don’t know. To look ignorance straight in the face and spit in its eye. Most of us cower from such an opportunity, we like nothing more than to stand firmly in the middle of what we know and never looking beyond the horizon lest there be monsters.

Someone once said Every man lives on an island of knowledge in a sea of ignorance. The bigger your island, the longer the shore of ignorance.

Most people can’t even comprehend how much they don’t know about a subject, because the more you know about something, the more you understand the intricacies involved. A common saying amongst developers is What the fuck man!? How can That Startup spend so much money on that simple problem, it’s just <x>, <y>, <z> and you’re done. I could do it in a week!

Chances are, you don’t know what the hell you are talking about. The hardest problems seem the simplest when given only a cursory glance. So put down the ego for a moment and prove it. Prove that the problem is simple.

You can’t learn what you already know.

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Image by m.gifford via Flickr

What’s so special about a day off, you might think, I have like two every week! Or if you’re more like me, you’re thinking Psh! Dude, I get a day off almost every month.

This was different – I had a day off from me.

None of my little rituals. No exercise in the morning. Not a single cup of tea. No jotting down random-ish actions into Daytum. No tweeting. No instagraming. No marking down every bite into myfitnesspal. No time trackers. No email. Nothing.

Even wrote the 750words at almost midnight.

For a whole day I completely threw away every little thing I do day after day that doesn’t bring a rush of oxytocin there and then. Yes, I will continue doing all those things today, no, none of it is particularly useful, yes, they all tickle the nerd inside me.

I took one more step. I didn’t worry about the pile of email I’d return to. The day’s lull in my data, or the delay in stuff I’m working on.

A day like there’s no tomorrow! Carpe Diem is fine and all, but dear god we all take it so seriously. When did we collectively forget to enjoy ourselves? That Carpe Diem wasn’t [just] about working day and night to get the upper hand on your competition …

It felt great and against all expectations, my life is not a barren wasteland today.

I didn’t devolve into a fumbling beast, all my good [and bad] habits are still there. I’m still posting my daily blog. Still tweeting like mad. And still dutifully recording all the useless data about my life. I will even do some work despite Jan 2nd being a public holiday.

If you didn’t do anything even remotely like this yesterday – shame on you! You’re an even bigger nutcase than I am!

Give it a try tomorrow, I dare you.

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Productivity is a big thing in my part of the universe. Everyone thinks they’ve cracked the secret for turning time into gold. Modern day alchemists, the lot of us.

This gives us a pervasive culture of 20-somethings busting their backs to squeeze every last ounce of productivity out of their day. Sleep, sex, health and culture be damned! If you condense your whole working life into five years of a startup you’ll be rich didn’t you know? Then everything will be alright!

I have this deeply seated hunch that it won’t be alright. You’ll never be a 20-something again. Ever seen a top athlete when they hit 35? They can barely walk, if they’re lucky they get to train a bunch of 20-somethings, but more often than not they just sort of wither away and nobody hears of them again.

You’re doing that to your brain.

But with mental tasks productivity doesn’t increase linearly with time worked. Every hour spent working hard is a tax on the next hour you want to spend working hard. And so on until you can spend hours, even days, working without achieving.

Remember the quote “You speak a lot, but you don’t say much”? Same goes for working a lot.

A couple weeks ago an article titled If you’re busy, you’re doing something wrong floated around the internets. It was about a study comparing the crème de la crème of violinists at an elite school in Germany with those that are just the crème.

Think of it like comparing Senna and Schumacher. Newton and Feyman. Even Turing and Torvalds.

Image via Wikipedia

The study found that despite putting in the same amount of measurable work (hours spent) those at the very top report being significantly less busy than those who are merely near the top. They also report having heaps of free time and generally having a rather easygoing lifestyle.

And yet, they significantly outperform those who are constantly busy and under pressure.

With this in mind I started looking for ways of fighting being busy. The first thing I noticed was that under crunch time Itend to do a little bit of everything every day. Two hours on this project, three hours of school and so on.

Makes me feel super productive! Moving forward on every project every day. How much better than that can you get?

But the reality is that context switching presented significant overhead and while I felt productive, I was actually just wearing myself out and producing ever worse amounts of crap.

So for the past few weeks I’ve only been working on a single project every day. Some days are reserved for school, some are reserved for freelancing and so on. This way I can go about my weeks in a pretty relaxed manner, even managing to have a decent social life, while still getting everything done!

It’s amazing. I heartily suggest you try it.

But this is all just talk. I don’t have anything other than anecdotal evidence to support my findings, so next week I am starting a four week one-man study trying to find the link between mental agility and being busy. I want cold hard numbers supporting this hypothesis.

If you want to help with the study to get a better sample, I’m all ears for volunteers

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In fact, a couple of hours passed since you started working. You didn’t notice. The code is beyond any level you think yourself capable of achieving and when you try to understand how it works … it doesn’t really  make sense. But it works, passes all the tests, is beautiful and elegant. Feeding yourself might be a good idea as well.

The Zone happened to me a lot more when I was younger. There’s something about being 12 years old and creating what you believe to be an operating system that destroys any and all distractions. They simply don’t exist. In those days a comet could have landed on my head and although dead, I wouldn’t have been distracted.

Now I have the internet, a bunch of stuff on my mind and nobody to remind me I should eat and sleep – getting in The Zone is harder. And when I was little I thought two weeks of coding was a sprint, now anything more than a single night feels like a marathon … because I get more done, I think.

For the past couple of months I’ve done a lot to figure out how I can get in The Zone better and I think music is a big part of it. Choosing just the perfect music for the perfect time is hard, but doable.

Another important bit is that when I find it very very difficult to focus, I must go somewhere where there are a lot of distractions. Counter-intuitive, I know, but it works. I either blast three songs at once, or go to a coffee shop.

Coffee shops are awesome. Something about everyone walking around, having conversations, music blasting out of the speakers and a nice cup of tea combined with a comfy chair really works wonders for my concentration. Maybe because my brain is so taxed that it simply has to focus just to function?

The interesting bit is that my taste of music when coding changes a lot more than normally. It’s also very different from the music I usually listen to in that same day.

Lately my favourite has been Mozart and, of all things, Tchaikovsky … how the Nutcracker makes for good coding music is incomprehensible, but there you go, it does. Beethoven is also a good choice, especially the more dramatic pumping symphonies.

At other times I prefer something witha  bit more bass. Skrillex has worked particularly well for a while, then there’s a Tetris remix playlist I made on Spotify that does wonders for my productivity. About a hundred versions of the same freaking song and it’s just awesome.

All things considered, the only thing that really matters for getting in the zone is that my environment not be silent and distraction free. My brain simply can’t handle that …

What kind of music do you listen to when working? Spotify gives me this unlimited jukebox, but I need to know what to look for.

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Driving a car over the internets

Twitter is kind of cool like that, you ask if there’s any way to sneak into a sold out event happening the next day, somebody says they don’t need their ticket and then does everything needed to get the organizer to change the ticket. Thanks @freeeky for being awesome like that!

I manage to get into the event and two things happened – I couldn’t for the life of me connect to the wi-fi, and I was seated in the back back row so was mostly looking at the cameraman’s head.

Nontheless, it was a kickass event! Really happy I managed to attend.

I mostly remember the brilliant talk by Jure Aleksejev – he was the only person there without something specific to show. He had only a message and the flawless rhetoric delivery of someone who is really really good at rhetoric. You can see about five minutes of his talk in my bootleg crappy video, but it should give you some idea of how cool he was to listen to.

The message was basically that Slovenia is a country doing stupid things. We think we’ll be able to fix our economy and become awesome by emulating the large western empires, except we forget we aren’t actually a large country and should therefore pay attention to creating wealth instead of simply shuffling it around.

Another brilliant talk was by Luka Manjolovič, if for naught else than he drove a car over the internets. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, a live demo right there on stage. Through the internets! That’s guts right there. Oh and it worked too.

All the other talks were pretty awesome as well.

Jure Brečko deserves a special shout out for being epic enough to give us a candid charming presentation full of natural charm. You can’t fake something like that. Plus he invented a cheap and effective way to do some important farm stuff I won’t even pretend to understand, a full five hours before deadline! Score!

I hate to be a sourpuss, but one presentation stuck out for being … simply bad. I don’t know if it was nerves, or she didn’t prepare well, but that was not TED-level presenting there. Not going to name names, just going to say that it made me giggle when she said with special pride that against what her childhood friend said, she did not end up a garbage collector, nope, she’s a graduate sociologist!

Yep.

On a more positive note. Burekwood was a brilliant cartoon. Kudos to all the 12 year olds for making it, charming story. The perfect way to finish off the TED talks. Can’t find the video of burekwood right now, but hopefully the official videos will be available in no time.

PS: I wish I had some good pics to show, but I don’t

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Image by The Seg via Flickr

A man died today. I never knew him personally and yet I feel like writing a post about his death before even getting out of bed this morning. When I went to bed last night, he wasn’t dead yet, this morning, he was.

Interesting how much can change in the world when you fall asleep for six hours. And people say sleep isn’t a waste of time …

Sure, it was readily apparent that Steve Jobs would eventually die,  not only is he just a man despite what many would like to believe, he also suffered from cancer and was visibly growing weaker over the past few years.

A lot of people will remember him for being a great entrepreneur, many will think that it’s really cool he could build two epic startups, create Pixar and then fix up his first startup into one of the most legendary technology companies currently in existence.

But none of that really matters, his biggest impact on the world is simply being very fucking inspirational. I will remember him most for the speech he held at Stanford in 2005.

There are other important quotes by him and I’m sure the internet will be full of them for the next few days so I’m not going to post any.

Just remember: stay foolish.

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Crayon+moleskin+mac

Quite a few of you suggested I use something called a “wax pencil“.

Yesterday I visited a nearby art supply store, Accent Arts. Don’t think I’ve ever seen an art store stocked so well!

They didn’t know what a wax pencil was.

After explaining that my purpose in life is the magical ability to write on a wet glazed tile and be able to easily erase everything after I’m done, they suggested I try two things.

A water soluble wax pastel and a water soluble oil pastel.

They had another suggestion, but it was made of wood so it didn’t look like a very natural fit.

I got home with a crayon and an oil pastel. Yes, the wax pencil slash wax pastel calls itself a crayon. One of those things I last saw in kindergarten and forgot even existed.

The oil pastel didn’t work out too well. It’s too hard and doesn’t write on smooth surfaces, then when you do manage to leave a mark it’s damn near impossible to erase.

True story.

But the crayon!

I. Am. In. Love!

Seriously, I’m never leaving home without a crayon somewhere on my person ever again. It’s pretty much the single most perfect tool for impromptu thinking. Soft enough to write on pretty much any smooth surface. Erasable with ease.

Yes, it even works under the shower despite a few problems with washing off soon after writing … but that just makes you focus more. It doesn’t wash off enough to vanish, but isn’t a perfect replacement for your memory either.

Just the perfect balance.

I also have a feeling this would work perfectly for, say, writing on tables at coffee shops, windows on a train … everywhere. Glass is seriously everywhere!

It actually works –>

Under the shower

Writing on a glass door, night

Glass door, day

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The general idea of the website is that you write 750 words every day. About anything. Unedited. Unhindered. Completely free. Just write about whatever comes to mind in whichever way it decides to come. When you’re done you simply tuck it away somewhere never to be seen again.

Analysis of today's 750words

Why would you do that? Why write sooooo much text so nobody will ever read it.

First thing you have to understand is this isn’t even all that much text. If you do it in handwriting that’s just about three pages and when typing, well hey, anyone who spends a lot of time on the internet is capable of pumping out text like a mad machine. Just count all your tweets, go on.

Counted?

You can get 27 average English words into a tweet. But yours probably aren’t all that very long so let’s say 750 words translates only to about 60 tweets.

Personally that’s about two or three days of tweeting. Your mileage may vary.

Right, so it isn’t a lot of work and if you’re at all capable of blabbing on and on about something, or even simply just to write out your train of thought, then writing 750 words shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes.

But question remains, why the hell would you do it?

Turns out it’s really really good exercise for the brain. You know how everybody advises you have a good morning routine that you follow every morning? And that this routine should include some form of exercise to wake you up, get the blood pumping and just generally prime you up for the day much better than caffeine ever could?

Now think about where between breakfast, shower and exercise does kickstarting your brain come in?

That’s right. Writing 750 words!

Since I’ve been doing it daily I’ve noticed a pretty major effect on my productivity. When I get to work I’m usually already at my productive peak or thereabouts, because I had time to think about anything that’s ailing me or causing me problems … that’s out of the way and already processed. When I feel like it’s going to be a stressful long day … the 750words helps me plan it out mentally beforehand and so on.

Hell, it’s even a good morning-after-party tool to help remember everything that transpired the previous night and make sure I didn’t do anything too stupid; since it’s generally easier to reconstruct a sequence of events if you try writing it down like a story.

Oh and 750words also does one pretty cool thing. It analyzes everything you’ve written and provides a very plastic view of things that are troubling you. It’s a bit rudimentary so it doesn’t always get it perfectly (it thought I was concerned about death when I wrote about how awesome Shutter Island was) … hell, this part of hte website is so awesome I’m thinking about making some sort of plugin and always displaying the charts in the footer of this blog.

Seriously, go, write 750 words right now.

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HackerNews was aflutter today with talk about how you should be a quiet professional, do whatever it takes and don’t even complain, take any and all ill that comes your way like a stoic shaolin monk, show no fear, show no emotion, robotically and efficiently perform any task on your path, go face-first through a granite wall without even blinking and just get it the fuck done.

tl;dr –> bitching gives you teamwork, understanding, focus and appreciation

The original article discussed on HN was apparently written by one Kyle Tress, but apparently the even more original real original story was on CNN … something about The Quiet Professionals navy seals brutally assassinating a political figure on foreign soil.

Being a quiet professional is a load of bollocks!

And so is the whole “stiff upper lip”.

In reality what you’ll notice is that bitching just works. The more you bitch about your problems, the more they get solved and the less of them you have.

Of course it can turn out to be a bit annoying to the people around you, but that doesn’t really matter. You’re trying to help yourself remember? Solve your own problems. You can worry about theirs later. It also helps if you bitch to more than one person and a general rule of thumb you should likely follow is to bitch about stuff to people that can actually help.

Let me  outline four great things that can come out of bitching and you be the judge:

1. Teamwork – sharing encourages people to help
2. Understanding – it’s hard to do anything until you understand it, you don’t understand until you can explain
3. Focus – talking about crap forces you to think about crap, you can only do/solve what you think about
4. Appreciation – mums are the most underappreciated people in the world, it’s because nobody knows what it is exactly that they do

There’s bound to be more, I just can’t think of them right now. Talk to anyone who has to manage developers and ask them whether they prefer the guys who buckle down at their desk and don’t say a word until a task is finished let it take an hour or a month … or the guy who keeps giving them progress reports, explains the pain points and so on?

Hell, take good looking girls. Are most of them going home from parties with blabbermouths or that quiet guy who seems kinda cool, but not really all that human?

If you’re a fan of House MD. Consider Chase and Foreman. The former gets all the girls, the latter is a robot everyone makes fun of for never showing any emotion.

If you’re not a vampire, being all dark and brooding doesn’t work for picking up chicks.

Now I’m not advocating being one of those people who just bitch and moan and never do anything about it, that’s just being an annoying 13 year old girl. But you should really consider using bitching and moaning as a tool to better understanding the core issue at hand and finding a solution.

Protip: you don’t even need a listener, just get it out there (twitter is great for this, nobody will care)

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This year, when something even bigger and more important is happening … Twitter doesn’t seem to be quite as happy about it.

Now, they may not be doing anything too horrible. Yes, you can still tweet the word WikiLeaks, yes there’s only a small chance you’re on everyone’s watchlist already because you googled wikileaks or whatever.

But it would seem that for whatever reason WikiLeaks is not a trending topic.

So I made a little experiment. I clicked on the lowest trending topic of Kevin Hart and I made a search for WikiLeaks. Then I left both tabs open for 4 minutes.

The final tally? Kevin Hart, 3 tweets. WikiLeaks, 55 tweets.

Now I’m not sure what exactly is going on here, but it seems to be Twitter’s little contribution to everybody in the US censoring the whole WikiLeaks thing. Perhaps not quite on the same level as Amazon denying DNS services and PayPal suspending their account … but it’s still something.

What really bothers me though is that everyone is trying so fucking damn hard to censor this thing, but when it’s about a different country and their shameful things. Meh, nobody cares.

Is WikiLeaks going to become America’s Tiananmen Square?

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It is also no secret that I am trying to work on that at least to a certain extent.

Ok so I’ve tried numerous things to get myself organised; everything from entering TODO’s into Evernote, to Mac widget thingies and the pretty awesome Things app and just plain writing stuff on a whiteboard and erasing it when it’s done.

So far all of the solutions proved to have their advantages and disadvantages.

Evernote syncs on all devices, but is pretty stiff and clearly meant for other things.

Widgets are too hidden and I forget about them.

Things was nice and very shiny and, dare I say it, quite a bit useful. But over time it became simply annoying. Only on one computer, always pestering me about “OMG you forgot to do this! OMG it’s already 100 days overdue! OHMYFUCKINGGODMAN!!!”

Yeah, fuck that shit.

Out of all the things the whiteboard seemed the most efficient way of doing things. There it is, always on the wall, every task I haven’t completed staring me in the face every time I turn around. Not judging, just gently reminding me that hey, I might as well do it if I ever want to see a clean whiteboard again.

But hey, that’s not very portable either. There’s one at the office and another one in my bedroom. Any task that isn’t strictly tied to a one room radius of the whiteboard will never get executed because I’ll forget about it on my way out the door …

And then along comes Workflowy with a small post on HackerNews saying “Hey, we’re from YC2k9 and we’ve launched. We help you organize your brain” (this was a week or two ago)

Then I watched their video. And I drooled!

Workflowy was exactly the app I’ve been looking for. It was love at first sight.

Basically what they give you is an infinite online whiteboard that you can take anywhere.

Awesome! Brilliant! Doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Everything you write on Workflowy is a nested bulletpoint list. This is where it gets mindblowingly awesomer than an old fashioned TODO list.

The old way was writing a list of items you have to do in a somewhat hierarchical order. God forbid you have to switch contexts ten times a day and end up with a big mess.

Workflowy is a bit more like git. You have branches running in parallel. The way I use it is to have the top level represent a list of contexts I work on and then on the second level I just jot down the workflow. It’s not exactly a TODO list, it’s more of a “OK here’s how I’m gonna tackle this problem”.

Because of how my brain works it’s really quite a bit less organized than a TODO list. But it still helps me not fuck things up by forgetting them.

Like, you could do something like this:

And you’re set!

Really, I urge everyone who doesn’t like their organisation tool to force them into boxes and limit the way they work to try out Workflowy.

Actually the only thing I dislike right now is that it doesn’t work on mobile devices, not even tablets. Just gives you a warning that hey, you’re a smartphone, fuck you and come back later when we do support you.

That’s a bit lame especially considering Mobile Safari is plenty strong enough to support everything you need. Maybe it’s got something to do with their monetization strategy; get us hooked on the web version then sell the iOS app for shitloads of money … (hopefully this loving post is enough to get them to give me free stuff )

Update: apparently a MVP of mobile support is due to come out in a few days.

Anyway, yeah, try them out. They’re cool.

Oh and as far as the UI goes. I love it because it’s Spartan and no-nonsense and lets me do everything via simple to remember keyboard shortcuts. Please don’t add any more features. kthxbai

Related articles

• Turn Your Entire Life Into A List With Workflowy (techcrunch.com)
• WorkFlowy – Make Lists. Not War. (workflowy.com)
• WorkFlowy is a lightweight outliner endorsed by Matt Cutts (downloadsquad.com)
• Workflowy: Your Life, but as a List (rev2.org)

… and I never quite get around to doing them.

Fuck. This. Shit.

This year, I make a list and I fucking clear it by the time I’m 30. There is no sense in living if you aren’t having way over the top fun with it.

Also making a list, publicly posting it and putting a deadline on it is a sure fire way to have a really really really really crappy 30th birthday when you inevitably realise that you’ve done way too few of these things and have just run out of soup.

1. Bungee jump
2. Canyoning
3. Solo sky dive from plane
4. BASE jump the fjords
5. Flying suit BASE jump the fjords
6. Jump off a few other things with a flying suit
7. Climb Triglav
8. Climb Everest
9. Drive at least one official european rally race
10. Drive and finish the desert oldsmobile rally (I keep forgetting the name)
11. Ride the trans-siberian railway
12. Learn to do a no handed endo
13. Perform a double tailwhip with a mountain bike
14. Come to a board meeting with a parachute through the window

Noticed a pattern?

Well I’ve got 8 (although I like to pretend it’s 9) years to do all of this. Will happily take suggestions for things I haven’t thought of.

EDIT:

Oh and 15: Learn to ride a unicycle

Myth: There is time

Reality: You have less time now than you have ever had. You have less time now than you had an hour ago. You are nearer to your death than you have ever been. Plan thoroughly, but don’t wait too long before taking action.

And then when you remember that Steve Jobs had a speech devoted almost completely to this notion of memento mori.

Hell, the Romans came up with the whole memento mori crap far far ago … I forget how the tradition went, but they used to punch winning generals in the face or something … or was it that a slave was following them through the whole festivity whispering “memento mori” in their ear. Something like that.

Then there’s that tradition in greek weedings (judging from Big Fat Greek Wedding) where the bride is thrown off her chair – just to remind her she’s mortal too.

And way back when some smart poetry geek came up with the idea of Carpe Diem (later transformed to Carpe Noctem and Carpe Pijem, the slovene version). Again basically the same concept!

Then there’s an interesting story I read on a forum once, it happened to a forumite’s cousin or somesuch:

She was a lass, around 23 years of age. Two lovely children, a loving husband, nice house and so on. One day they have a fight over something extremely mundane and boring. She gets pissed off and storms out of the house … only to be mowed down by a truck.

To death.

So yeah, I know as humans we like to think we’re something special, that each and everyone of us is a special little snowflake unique and wonderful in their own right.

Well you’re not. You too will die, today, tomorrow, in an hour, it doesn’t matter.

And nothing of value will be lost!

Nothing!

Nobody will care, absolutely nobody.

I think people often forget these things and spend their whole lives doing boring shit they don’t care about. Stop that!

For the end, a quote from Anthony de Mello:

Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up

But that just brings to mind this:

I dunno, just remember that whatever you do, all your life, you’re on the verge of imminent death. Never forget.

And thus the three day easter weekend is behind us.

Finally.

Was getting a bit long to be honest.

But what’s more important than this is what I spent most of my weekend doing –> Videogames and piles upon piles of omnom yummy foods. Mostly junk foods like bits of smoked pigs and copious amounts of chocolate … very little eggs though, that’s a bit silly considering easter is supposed to be all about eggs.

No matter, food was omnom.

Now, how can a guy justify wasting so many hours on something as simple as videogames? Well, I could say I was trying to have fun … but that’s a cop out, way too easy.

The most importantest thing is the mechanics of my adventures. The game I was playing was Richard Burns Rally, known far and wide as being one of the most, if not the most, difficult and realistic rally simulation games. The map I was playing was Mineshaft from Australia, in my humble opinion the hardest fucking map in the whole game.

See in most of the maps you drive in some forrest or something and the worst that can happen is you ram a tree or lose time by going a bit wide and over some grass or something.

But Mineshaft is different. Most of that damn thing is comprised of a road with a sheer drop cliff on one side and a cliff on the other. It’s a bit like trying to rally over the Yungas Road (most dangerous road in the world FYI).

So what the fuck are you rambling about Swizec. Just get on with the fucking point already sheesh!

Alright alright.

My point is that ALL I did. For SEVERAL fucking hours. Was. Play. Richard Burns Rally. On. The. Hardest. Map.

But why on god’s fucking earth would you do something like that?

Well, because I could.

But the important bit is why I wanted to. The game is insane to play on keyboards and needless to say I never once survived to the end of the map. Out of ~200 plays. I never once finished.

Wtf, masochist?

No. Through endless repetition and stupid iteration I learned. I learned a whole fucking lot! By the time I got fed up with playing I was habitually achieving mid times several seconds faster than the world record for that stage. Yes, the realistic world record.

*gasp* *shocker*

But I still didn’t finish, so the quest continues.

My point is that this little experience teaches us a lot about life, the universe and everything. Life is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster

And that is all. Remember that. Whenever you are failing in life, you’re not failing, you’re learning. That’s what it’s all about. The more you fail the better a person you become, those times you dont’ fail you haven’t learned a single thing. So stop that.

Yesterday I gave a guest talk sort of thing at the Jobfair on my faculty. The point was to perform the function of a live demo for my startup incubator and help them get more startups that way.

My personal point was to get some blokes to go “HEY! I wanna to help with that too!”, which of course did not happen because the audience was mostly electronics and hardware people. But nevertheless, it was a lovely chat.

Although, I noticed a very interesting trend. None of them felt very keen on becoming entrepreneurs while still at uni. They thought it was too hard, that next to classes and studying they don’t really have time to do anything else. Hell, I even got an almostpplause for being such an impressive lad that I can do both AND keep a girlfriend.

But seriously, it’s not hard at all. Just take this week’s Tuesday as an example:

On Tuesday I worked for nine hours, five of which were studying/taking a hard maths exam (I count school as work because it’s my “job”). I went to the playhouse and I watched an episode of House. I also helped my girlfriend prepare a presentation for school.

And I still went to bed by midnight.

See, it’s that fucking hard!

Not only have I never passed as many exams as I have now that I’m also an entrepreneur, I’ve also taken up a new sport (boxing), which takes six hours out of every week.

Sure it’s not all fun and games and many people find it difficult to jam 60 to 70 working hours into every week. But if you think being a student and an entrepreneur is hard, you’re trippin’ man. Seriously.

Just get off yer arse and do it. The television and alcohol can take care of themselves.

Just to help you embrace the herculean task this was: My goal was to make the algorithm’s runtime lower than 1.5 seconds for any realistic data sample. It was taking anywhere from 5 to 20 and even 30 seconds at the time.

So I set off. First some profiling and some tidbits here and there, then tweaking and poking and yanking and scraping code for hours upon hours upon hours.

Nothing, no increase in performance. Nothing even remote to sane behaviour at all. Even though the algorithm was working, my debugging/profiling data wasn’t making any sense.

And I said fuck this shit and went to chillax and rest my mind over Men Who Stare at Goats for two hours.

There were some good laughs and some pretty good chillaxing being done. My I-don’t-know-which-exactly-or-what’s-it-called part of the brain was probably busy processing the afore mentioned problem in the background. Or maybe it wasn’t, who knows.

All I know is that when I came back to the problem I noticed something funky.

HEY THAT FUNCTION ARGUMENT SHOULDN’T BE A FUCKING CONSTANT WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!

Characters 1 and t look a lot alike …

So anyway, long story short. The meta-heuristic that used to take 1500 epochs to do something now takes only ten to do the same thing, but slightly better.

That’s a pretty fucking good improovement right there!

Now the algorithm is constantly taking about a second to do its thing and I’m happy. Pushed it into production where profiling data will be collected of a more varied sample of data to see if all is well.

Chillaxing! It really does work.

A few weeks ago, or was it days, I forget, I stumbled upon a rather fascinating video about living to be a hundred years old and more. But not just sitting around and waiting to die kind of 100+, the kind where at 100 you’re still happily running around, building fences and doing stupid crap most westerners really wouldn’t expect you to do anymore.

Everything in there is fine and good, but the most important bottom line I picked up on was the importance of having an ikigai. It’s all wonderfully explained in the video so I won’t go into what ikigai is, I’d rather say a little bit about what it feels like to discover one’s ikigai. (it doesn’t matter whether you know what it’s called or not, I didn’t for months)

As late as just last Spring my life revolved around going to a school I hated, having a job that was alright but not quite that and occasionally getting together with my girlfriend. I was doing some nifty stuff in the evenings and late at night, but mostly it was just another burden no matter how much I loved it and felt like I believed in it.

Then something changed, I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but it changed. The symptom of this change was that I quit my job and devoted most of my attention to the side-project, which evolved far far far away from what it was back then.

And suddenly much was different. School suddenly seemed interesting and awesome, I started learning exciting new things every day for the first time since being a kid. Getting up in the morning was … well it’s still fucking hard, I’m just not a morning person … but staying up at night was painless as hell. Meh, I won’t pretend like I can describe this, just try it.

Now watch the video, I’m not here to blab, I’m here to make you watch this

This is the first post in the series of How <x> changed my style where I shall talk about tools and events that had a significant impact on my style of doing things. If you happen to like this idea, I would be very happy if you could help it spread like wildfire, because it’s a form of pay-it-forward where we say Thanks for cool stuff.

Some months ago, fuck has it been two? three? four?,

Lounging on the sofa, with my trusty MacBook in lap, shiny logo greeting anyone daring to enter my bubble of deep concentration and flowing code masterpieces.

It’s time like these that I truly love what I do, I know us developers are a fussy bunch and like to get all up in arms over the littlest thing that upsets us. That we love nothing better than to nag about some app or another taking 10 fucking milliseconds too long to open! The travesty!

But fact remains, I love being programmer, despite stupid tests not passing, despite frequent choices not to use testing that end up biting us in the arse, despite always changing design specs, despite all the bugs and all the weird shit and that little typo that brings the whole system to its knees and takes a week to fix …

… heaven really is where your code lies, because code is an expression of one’s self, because code is art and no matter what anyone ever says, I will continue to see myself more as a poet than an engineer.

For an utter age now I have been trying to read proper literature more often. There’s a pile of books on my desk, all shiny and new, but unfortunately barely even leafed through. Just waiting patiently and asking me to please give them a read, are they bad books, perhaps they’re too fat? No you’re not fat book honey, I’m just busy.

Two days ago I said, fuck it, this situation needs to be resolved, I used to read a lot, I love reading, so what’s the problem?

As it turns out the problem is that starting is hard, isn’t that always the problem? Beginnings are always hard, sometimes it’s hard even to start going to bed or, hell, start having sex (and I don’t mean when you’re a virgin, I mean on a daily basis). But there was this other problem, I still didn’t have a lot of time.

And so I came up with the concept of 20 minutes a day. Twenty minutes might seem like a lot of time at first, but think about it. 20 minutes is the kind of time you waste walking to school, going to the post office, hell, just waiting for risotto to cook takes around 20 minutes. It’s NOTHING!

Everyone’s got 20 minutes of free time in any given day.

Yeah so everyone’s got twenty minutes, obviously that’s so little time you can’t do anything with it. WRONG! You absolutely positively can do a lot of valuable stuff with that time. For instance you could read ten pages of Dickens, yes Dickens of all things, it reads slow, but in 20 minutes a lot can be done. Or you could devote 20 minutes of unadulterated attention to your children if you’ve got any, or your pets. Or you could spend the 20 minutes getting through your RSS feeds (it’s doable), or do some Pilates like you’ve been wanting to for years.

The thing is you just gotta get off your fucking lazy arse and DO IT! Go on, take 20 minutes out of your busy day and do something for yourself.