25 Dec 2024 #misc
We, as coders, take pride in preaching and following best practices.
Don’t write SQL, use an ORM. Don’t write conditionals, use design patterns. Don’t throw exceptions, use Results…Don’t do that, do this.
Those “don’t do that, do this” hide all the context in which they make sense. That’s the part we skip and don’t tell when we preach best practices.
Today, I had a call with a consulting company that needed help. They were migrating a small shop’s application from the early 2000s to a newer stack. It wasn’t written and maintained by professional software engineers. Zero best practices. Lots of copy-pasting.
Migrating that application and bringing its owners up to speed are two different challenges. They have to maintain the application once the migration is done. Using the latest and greatest best practices wasn’t an option.
Often, instead of going all in on best practices, the best path to follow is “let’s do the simplest thing that can work, without doing any more harm.”
We shouldn’t call them “best practices,” but rather “pieces of advice that worked for me under certain circumstances and might work for you too.” And we shouldn’t blindly follow them. Not all code is created equal and worth the same.
24 Dec 2024 #writing
Don’t write to seem smart or to sound like a famous writer.
That will only make you use technical jargon, complicated words, and long boring paragraphs that scare people away.
Instead, write for only one person.
Every time you sit to write, imagine you’re writing for a friend, coworker, or your past self. It will give you the right tone, context, and level of detail. You won’t use words or jargon you wouldn’t use in a real conversation. Instead, you will use your true voice.
I wrote most of my coding tutorials for a friend or two. They almost never asked me to write them. I never showed them the finished piece. I simply imagined myself explaining something to them to make my writing easier.
If writing for someone sounds hard, record yourself explaining something and transcribe it.
What’s the point of sounding smart if your writing get so complicated that people don’t read what you write?
“Write with the same voice you talk in. You’ve spent your whole life learning how to communicate with that voice. Why change it when you communicate with text?” — James Altucher
23 Dec 2024 #interview
Interviews are intimidating.
You don’t know what you’re going to be asked. You don’t know if the interviewer will like you. You have to remember what you wrote on your CV.
That makes interviews intimidating for sure. But the ones in a second language are worse.
Are my speaking skills good enough? What if I don’t understand my interviewer’s accent? What if I forget how to say something? Arrggg! I know that feeling.
When I decided to apply to my last full-time job as a software engineer, I really wanted to land the job. I was about to work remotely for American companies for the first time. I had to impress my interviewers not only with my coding skills, but with my language skills too.
Right before the interviews, to calm my nerves and practice my speaking skills, I phoned my language partner and friend. She was kind enough to answer my calls and help me out. We talked about anything.
Those calls helped me switch to thinking in a second language, like pushing a button in my brain.
Eventually, I stopped calling my friend before every interview. But I adapted the method.
Instead of interrupting my friend’s busy schedule, now I watch a short YouTube video of a movie or TV show or any content by native speakers right before an interview in a second language. It gets me into the flow of the language and makes my brain switch the second language on.
And that’s one of the tricks I used for interviews.
As a bonus, here are others:
- Keep a copy of your CV next to you.
- Learn conversation fillers to keep the conversation going.
- Practice answering out loud the most common interview questions. At least be prepared for: “tell me about yourself” and “could you describe one of your past projects?”
- Speak slowly. It will give you time to think.
- If you don’t understand a question, restate what you understood and ask if that’s what the interviewer meant.
Interviewing and hiring are broken. I know. But don’t go unprepared. Prime your brain by listening to or watching native content before showing up.
22 Dec 2024 #misc
Having too much money brings a different set of challenges.
That’s one of the takeaways from this conversation between two millionaires. It’s one episode of the “Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal.” This time Ali sat down with Andrew Wilkinson.
Here’s the link to the YouTube episode if you want to watch it.
Ali Abdaal started medical school, then became a YouTuber, and since then has run an online education business. But I didn’t know about Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew went from barista to billionaire, coming from a middle-class family.
“I’m as Stressed as You Are”
For me, hearing Andrew say he was stressed too was one of the most shocking parts of that conversation — right at the start.
We might believe that money makes life easier. But from that conversation: it just brings a new set of challenges. We have to choose our own money adventure and when to stop.
This reminds me of a past boss.
He was a well-known entrepreneur in my city (and maybe in my whole country). He came from a wealthy family and ran more than a couple of successful businesses. But when he tasted the bat soup in 2020, there was no money to add more time to his countdown timer.
I guess money can’t buy certain things. For everything else, there’s a credit card. I’m stealing that from a TV commercial.
“Be a Financial Prepper”
Be paranoid. Only the paranoids survive.
During the conversation, Andrew shared he’s a prepper. Not in the sense of keeping a basement full of weapons, canned food, and gas masks ready for a zombie apocalypse. But in the sense of having multiple income sources.
“Be unbreakable financially”
In 2024, I had to internalize that lesson thanks to yet another round of layoffs in the software industry. I lost my main income source, a.k.a salary. I had other income sources, but not enough to cover my monthly expenses.
Robert Kiyosaki is right: “Build your asset column” and “Make your assets pay for your luxuries.”
I had to truly live it to learn it. Knowledge is only potential power unless put into practice.
“The best way to feel rich is to have cashflow”
Be the Sushi Master or the Chipotle Founder
Apart from the money lessons, my most important takeaway from this podcast episode is to:
“Design your life around your flow state”
We could choose to be the best sushi master of the world — worth a Netflix documentary — or the Chipotle founder.
One has mastered his craft to the point of perfection. Maybe he’s happy having only one restaurant and serving one smallish crowd. The other took a different route and created a reproducible business with thousands of locations, taking himself out of the equation.
That’s success seen from different perspectives.
Both of them followed what they enjoyed doing. Each followed a different adventure.
It sounds like the story of a businessman who ran into a fisherman taking a nap in a hammock under a palm tree. After a long conversation and giving a business plan for free, the businessman realizes that the entrepreneurial journey he was sharing with the fisherman will end with a nap in a hammock under the same palm tree.
In any case, follow your flow state and delegate things you don’t enjoy.
Towards the end of the conversation, Ali started to ask for advice to expand his own business. It was interesting to hear the business and money insights from a billionaire who came from the middle class. It wasn’t advice for everyone, but I took this last part:
“Sell something boring to a rich person. Don’t sell a complex product to cheap people.”
21 Dec 2024 #misc
“Wait, I’m not working anymore.”
Being laid off feels weird. Moments of relief followed by a “What am I going to do now?”
Some days after being laid off last January, something weird happened. I didn’t realize I had ingrained this “habit.”
Midway through rushing to my laptop to reply to my Teams messages, I suddenly stopped my short commute from the living room to my working corner.
“Wait a second, I’m not working anymore…I don’t have to reply to messages or emails.” Pheeew!
I shared this realization with my family. We all laughed. But there was something behind it.
Stopping my short breaks to reply to messages had become second nature. I was trapped in a mindset. In the wrong mindset. “I could get into trouble if I don’t respond soon.”
That moment of relief lasted a few days. Anxiety knocked at my door: “Somebody here?” I realized I wasn’t receiving another paycheck. Arrrggg! “What am I going to do now?”
I had to go through my accounting software, an Excel spreadsheet, multiple times to make the anxiety go away. “Rational brain help me out here.” I had an emergency fund to cover my expenses for a few months.
Yes, a monthly salary is one of three most harmful addictions. I had already heard that quote. This time I had to live it.
That was a moment of relief followed by a “What am I going to do now?”