Category Archives: _Micropost 🍪

Unpublished content is like cash under your mattress

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I think a good reason to publish art sooner than later, and to default to creating in public, is so your art can start accruing interest as soon as possible. (“Art” used loosely; think content & projects also).

If you make art but only ever keep it private, there is a zero chance of it ever being discovered or enjoyed. In that sense, there is some wasted potential, like cash in the mattress.

But if the art is published (not necessarily promoted), there’s a non-zero chance of it being discovered and enjoyed by other people (potentially many others) with no work on your part. That’s what I mean by interest — some potential upside, at no cost to you.

I’ve been practicing this with this very blog. I write a lot and tell no one because that feels good at the moment. However, I already did spot some interest accrued: The “Nixers” newsletter #221 included a link to a recent post where I did zero promotion. Thank you!

P.S. Another advantage is that the work is readily available to be shared if you ever choose to at any point in the future — no need to dig it up and upload it.

Personal projects are like free weights

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I thought of this 7 years ago and I still think it rings true. In my experience, school projects were tightly scoped and had things like a basic build system and boilerplate runnable code (e.g. main) already provided. Maybe even some tests. It trains a specific muscle in a certain way.

With personal projects, you do all of this yourself and incidentally also train the equivalent “stabilizer” muscles. Things like: making the repo, writing the main and boilerplate code, setting up unit tests, setting up CI, setting up dependencies and their management.

And in my experience, it’s all these “stabilizer” activities that define what it means to be a senior engineer. Junior engineers work within an existing project; senior engineers own the entire thing, including these “little” (critical) parts.

The point here isn’t to necessarily criticize CS education; there are good, practical reasons for setting up such project structure to ensure all students have a good experience, given the time constraints. The point is that students should be wary of not doing any personal projects at all throughout a CS education. Maybe it would be possible so students don’t have to do this in their free time, and build it into some kind of flexible course. I suppose this is the point of final capstone projects, but I think senior year is far too late to be doing this for the first time.

A lot of my friends have been sucked up into UFOs lately

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A lot of my friends have been sucked up into UFOs lately
I’m happy for them
at least i try to be

I want to be sucked into a UFO too
I’m working hard at it
at least i try to be

we didn’t think it could happen
but then it did
took about ten years

then again
and again
it wasn’t a fluke

i’m happy for them
at least i try to be

it’s not always easy
but i try to be more proud than envious
more inspired than jealous
but i have a confession

i write this from a UFO
yes, i got sucked up too
in my own special ufo, in my own way

i once dreamed of it
but now it’s not enough
i want a bigger, newer one

maybe I should be more grateful
i’ll try to be

This poem was inspired by watching people in various areas of my life achieve incredible success. Y’all rock and I look up to you.

Memory is an abstraction

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I was learning about the different types of RAM recently (e.g. SRAM and DRAM) and it occurred to me that “computer memory” is just an abstraction. This is obvious once you think about it but I think as a programmer, it’s very easy to not realize this. The idea of memory as a linear array of bits is an abstraction created and implemented by an electrical device.

Most programmers when they think of memory are thinking of virtual memory, which is a completely different abstraction. While it’s also a linear array of bits, the abstraction is created by the operating system and lives at a higher level.

One level below, the abstraction the operating system itself uses — “physical memory” — is the one I’m talking about, created by a a set of electrical devices connected to the CPU with wires (the memory bus).

I’m projecting without any basis, but I presume the reason so few programmers think of memory as an abstraction is because the abstraction is so strong. Nearly all of the time, it “just works” — you write bits and read them out later.1 The abstraction can leak slightly during programming disciplines that require awareness of low level details like the memory hierarchy and cache coherence (i.e. lockfree) but this is a leak of the abstraction of the memory hierarchy. The core abstraction of physical memory stays in tact — for example, programmers never need to be aware of the internal refresh mechanism of DRAM.2

Of course, you can go infinitely far with this — it’s turtles all the way down.

Reflections on learning to write

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For the last three years, I’ve invested into learning to write. The main reason: strong writing skill is generally a shared quality among all the greatest thinkers, leaders and generally wise people of history.

How has it gone?

Really well. It’s paying off in many ways, and I only feel more inspired to keep doing it. I find that it gets more fun then more you do — the more ideas you have and the easier and faster it is to express them.

It’s paid off in my personal life with my offlinemark project. My writing (and general public creative efforts) has reached some unexpected places and put me in touch with some very interesting people. My most prized accomplishment is being cited in the Linux Kernel security mailing list.

It’s paid off in many ways at work. As a software engineer, I do a lot of writing at work, and I pride myself in having great written communication there. I write a lot of documentation, hold it up to a high standard, and people notice. I get points for this because most engineers don’t like writing docs, but I’ve trained myself to enjoy it.

Beyond these, modern life generally involves a good amount of written communication. I’ve found that putting in these reps has simply made this part of life a bit easier.

P.S. Something else I’ve observed is that I find myself having more ideas and being more aware of them. Whether they’re good or insightful is a different matter, but I’d like to believe that over time they’ll get there.

Learning on your own pales compared to spending time with experts

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This has become crystal clear to me at my current job. As much as I’ve had success teaching myself things about computers, nothing, nothing, beats spending time with experts and learning from them.

I had never truly experienced this before and was shocked at how much I was able to learn, in such little time — about C++, git, Linux, and more.

It can be a significant price to pay, but nothing beats literally becoming an employee at a company with experts in a field you care about and joining their team. This is ideal from a learning perspective because as a team member, the experts become invested in your growth and are incentivized to transfer knowledge to you. You just need to be ready to receive it.

Once you’ve tasted this, this truth is also bittersweet. You can only work at so many places. If you have many interests, you now have to live with the fact that for most areas, your learning will be stunted relative to what it could be.

My deep gratitude to the experts in my life: STK, DIR, CSK, MKL, RYB, MZA — thank you.

Dimensions of life happiness

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On average, what are the primary, minimal set of life dimensions that collectively contribute towards net happiness?

Or put another way, what are the common causes of dissatisfaction with one’s life, due to lack of something?

Here’s what I could come up with:

  • Monetary Wealth
  • Physical Space
  • Fame
  • Power / Leverage
  • Health / Fitness / Beauty
  • Romantic Relationships
  • Family Relationships
  • Friend Relationships
  • Adventure
  • Freedom
  • Personal Fulfillment
  • Skill

Not everyone is expected to want all of these. But, the list should generally represent the primary desires, on average, of people.

For each dimension, there is no fixed amount that qualifies as “enough to happy” — rather, each goes from zero to “however much you desire in your ideal life”. If you have zero dire for fame, and don’t have any fame, then you have fulfilled this dimension. Note that it is possible also to have too much of a dimension (i.e. too much fame).

WIP: I considered “career success” as something, but I left it out. I think it can be covered by others here.

Dimensions of job happiness

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I reflected on the qualities of a job that matter to me and here’s what I could come up with:

  • Technical intensity
  • Personal interest in the domain
  • “Sexiness” of the domain / Can laypeople understand it? (Or better yet, find it intriguing?)
  • Deploy at “scale” (leverage/power) (>= 1000 users)
  • Brand recognition & enthusiasm

These build on top of some base requirements of: working with nice & smart people that I enjoy being around, and being a good fit with the overall company future.

Software engineers must learn to write

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There is an immense amount of written communication involved in a programming job:

  • Commit messages
  • Bug reports & debugging discussions
  • Design documents
  • User documentation
  • Project documentation, READMEs, internal dev documentation
  • Project announcements
  • Comments & in-code documentation
  • Making complex situations simple for stakeholders
  • Handling support tickets
  • Mailing list discussions

Software engineers must learn to write well in the same way that they should also learn how to stay organized — they avoid doing so to their own detriment.

How I create so much content

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Between my two personal projects, I create a lot of content.

offlinemark:

  • Blog – Writing
  • Twitter – Shorter writing, writing meant to be seen more widely
  • Youtube – Educational content, screencasts
  • Podcast – Stories & lessons from my life, more personal

comfort (my music production project):

  • Music
  • Youtube – Educational content, screencasts on music production
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Podcast

I also have a travel blog that I don’t share publicly.

Some of these channels are more active than others, but I have three principles that help me do it all.

1 – Harvest, don’t generate

I try to harvest content from what I experience & learn in my life, rather than sit down, brainstorm, and generate content from nothing.

2 – Respect inspiration

I’m significantly more productive when I’m inspired, so I try to treat moments of inspiration with great respect and get to work when they come. Sometimes this means being awake at 5:18am writing (as I am now).

Rick Rubin talks about this exact concept in “The Creative Act”.

I try to avoid queueing things at all costs; if possible I just sit down and do it now.

3 – Have buckets for everything

Different kinds of ideas naturally have a medium in which they are best expressed. Insights or essays are best expressed in writing. Educational walkthroughs are best done via screencast. Stories are best told via audio.

I try to have “buckets” (media channels) ready to receive ideas in their best form the moment they strike. This helps you harvest as much of your creative potential as possible.

For a long time, I left content on the table by not having a podcast for offlinemark. I regularly had stories I thought of and wanted to share, but simply had no great place for them, so they weren’t shared. Now that I have the podcast, I notice that I fairly regularly have a thought that is suitable for that medium, and can capture it.

Bonus: 4 – Default to public, and iterate

Don’t get tied up polishing content before you publish it. Default to publishing whatever you have, and remember: You can always polish, expand, or re-release content later. Defaulting to in public maximizes the potential for it to be discovered.

Bonus (Dec 2023 ):

5 – Never let an idea slip

If you’re going to create a lot of content, step one is to not needlessly throw away good ideas when you have them. Ensure that you have some system or tools in place for quickly capturing ideas wherever you might have them. I heavily rely on “Hey Siri, remind me…” on my iPhone which lets me quickly record notes to process later. I use Omnifocus as my todo app which integrates with this. Omnifocus and most other todo apps have a “Quick Add” global keyboard shortcut which is useful if you’re already on your computer.

6 – Not all content needs to be long

Not all blog posts or content needs to be long and arduous to write. In fact, it’s better if it’s not.

7 – Minimize friction

My current blogging setup with WordPress feels very friction optimized — I just browse to my blog, click new post, write, and hit publish. No command lines. No writing in a separate app, then copying the post over. In-place construction if you will.

8 – One-shot it

Get in the habit of “one-shotting” content — forcing yourself to “finish” it in some way in the same session of work. It’s incredibly tempting to leave a piece in a half-finished state and say that you’ll come back later. But rarely does that ever happen and adding things to todo-lists/queues adds weight to your life that doesn’t feel good. Plus, forcing yourself to finish is a creative muscle in and of itself that can be exercised and improved at. I’ve noticed improvement with this for me for music making and writing.