29 Jan 2025 #productivity
For the first time after over 10 years of non-stop work, in 2024 I suddenly found myself with lots of free time.
Thanks to the layoff in the tech industry and to fully recover from burnout, I decided to take a mini-retirement.
All of a sudden, I had 8 extra hours free on my day.
No more meetings, 1-on-1s, estimation sessions, or any other meeting that could be an email. I went nuts with that free time. Reading books, writing on my blog, reposting on dev.to and Medium, recording video courses, reviving my LinkedIn account, doing some freelance coding here and there.
I went to bed more tired than a full day of work. It felt so good. I was the master and owner of my calendar for the first time in years. Monday mornings didn’t feel the same.
But I realized I was chasing my ambitions.
The time that was supposed to be for rest and reconnecting with myself was as busy as the days when I had a full-time job.
Reflecting on this, I realized I need a change. I decided to start a new habit: Scheduling my rest time the same way I schedule important appointments on my calendar.
One day a week for one hour, I have a guilt-free time slot. I’m free to spend that hour doing whatever I want. The only rule is: zero work. Most of the time, I take a walk or read or watch a TV show.
We often are trapped in the productivity wheel that we forget rest is as important as active work, if not more important.
Rest time is the trigger for aha moments and bursts of inspiration. Often after taking a walk during my guilt-free hour, I have to rush to my computer to write something that came up while walking.
Remember to schedule your rest time too. You deserve it. And your mind and body need it.
28 Jan 2025 #writing
Too much of anything is bad. Except for writing.
Here are 10 more ideas to write or blog more—I say “10 more” because I’ve already shared 2 ideas to write more:
#1. Write shorter posts. Instead of writing a 1,000 or 2,000-word post, write multiple 200 or 500-word posts and make them a series.
#2. If you write a listicle (“10 tips to …” or “10 lessons I learned from …”), expand some items in separate posts. I used this technique when I wrote about Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth and my alternative to to-do lists.
#3. Write tangents in a separate post. When you’re writing and notice you’re going on a tangent, don’t delete it. Use it as a starting point for another post.
#4. Turn your “cuts” into posts. When you’re editing or proofreading, don’t throw away the sentences or paragraphs that didn’t make it into the final piece. They’re ideas for separate posts.
#5. Update old posts in new posts. If the subject of a post has changed significantly since the first time, write an updated version and add an “update” disclaimer to the original one.
#6. Take notes publicly after finishing a book or listening to a podcast episode. I do this all the time. Just look at my books tag. You could summarize it, react to it, or collect your favorite quotes and tell stories around them.
#7. Answer private questions in public. Every time I get a message on my contact page or a private text message with an interesting question, I expand my response into a post. Of course, editing out anything that can’t be shared in public. That’s how I preserve my keystrokes.
#8. Answer Reddit, Hacker News, or Quora questions on your own post. When you find a question that you can answer, write your own “answer” post. I did this when I wrote about my life-changing purchases since 2020. That was a question I found on Hacker News.
#9. Turn old comments into posts. Review the comments you’ve left on social media and forums and expand your comments into posts. Especially use those comments that got good engagement.
#10. Steal topics from others. This is a variation of #8. When you’re reading something and you realize you could have written that post, stop reading and write your own. Steal the topic, but not the content. I did this when I wrote about the lessons I learned from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
There’s no bad consequence of writing more. Volume always wins.
27 Jan 2025 #writing
Blogging is dead. At least, that’s what almost everybody claims.
And it’s been dead for years. But in spite of that belief, we still find (random and famous) people writing on their blogs: Seth Godin, Herbert Lui, and me (shameless plug).
With blogs, we have control but lose distribution
In our blogs, we aren’t at the mercy of third-party platforms and their algorithms.
A blog is a place you own. You can redesign it and write anything you want. It’s like your small kingdom. And I like to think of my blog as my time capsule.
But blogs don’t have a distribution mechanism.
Apart from search engines and cross-posting, there’s no “feed” for blogs. Well, there’s RSS, but you still have to find a blog in the first place to add it to your RSS reader.
Distribution is where social media truly shines. Unlike blogs, social media shine at putting content in front of readers. This means we can see traction way faster on social media compared to a blog sitting behind search engines.
But we don’t control our social media accounts.
A social media platform can change its rules at any time. Just take a look at Medium, everybody is complaining about getting lower payouts after a change in the algorithm.
Getting banned on social media is possible if you don’t behave.
We need a combination of both: social media for short-form content and blogs (and newsletters) for long-form content
Since 2024, I started to use my blog as my main hub for my content.
Ultimately, all my content ends up here on my blog in some shape or form. A single blog post ends up in multiple shorter posts for social media. And a short social media post can evolve into larger posts or sections. That’s my content wheel.
And I’m not only writing SEO-optimized 1,000-word posts about programming anymore.
Apart from coding and software engineering, I’m writing about my other interests. We’re not single-interest creatures. I’m not. I’m a multipotentialite. In fact, I created a new tag as a catch-all for my “other” content.
My new rule is that if an idea is larger than a Tweet, it can be a post.
When I cross-post on other platforms, I invite readers to my newsletter. And on every email I send, I promote two posts I write here and the products I’m building.
But if I had to start all over again today, I wouldn’t start with a blog. I’d go with a social media account and a newsletter.
26 Jan 2025 #writing
“Money has already been made, we just have to get out and search for it.”
That’s a common phrase in my hometown. It means money rewards action. And like I learned from hearing and watching James Altucher, nobody wakes up and thinks about giving money to any of us. We have to search for it.
That applies to content ideas too. Replace “money” with “content” and you’ll get the same meaning.
When we wear our writer (or creative) glasses, there’s content everywhere:
- Books
- Questions
- Conversations
- Emails you reply to
- Projects you’re working on
- Comments you leave on social media
- Other people’s posts
- Situations at work
- TV shows
Everywhere.
For example, the other day I realized the same coworker had asked the same question about investing on a WhatsApp group. Then I wrote about it.
Another coworker asked me how to start writing on LinkedIn. Then I wrote about it.
Another day I was reading a book review. And I realized I had read the same book. I stopped reading and wrote my own review.
Another day I found a post I didn’t agree with. Then I wrote a reaction.
I felt guilty for binge-watching my favorite TV shows until I started to write about them. Now watching Netflix and TV shows is an excuse to write more content. Content is everywhere.
25 Jan 2025 #csharp #asp.net
Here’s an opinionated catch-up guide if you missed the last decade of the C#/.NET/Microsoft evolution.
#1. C# isn’t JAVA anymore. That joke doesn’t work anymore. The two languages have taken completely different paths. They don’t even look the same.
#2. There’s a new runtime: .NET. It’s multiplatform and open-sourced. We have the classic one, we call it: .NET Framework, which you probably already know. And the new one was called “.NET Core.” But now, it’s simply “.NET” Yes, naming is hard.
#3. Speaking of the language, the main language features are still there. C# is an imperative side-effect-heavy language. But with every release, it’s adopting more features from functional languages, like lambda expressions, pattern matching, and records. (See #7)
#4. There’s excellent support for asynchronous methods with two keywords: async and await.
#5. There’s a whole lot of new small language features. Apart from async/await (from C# 5.0) we haven’t had a release with a single major feature. Most of the new features are syntactic sugar for existing features.
#6. There’s a new feature you shouldn’t miss: nullable references. It should have been called: “non-nullable references” instead. Do you remember nullable primitive types? Like int?? We allow a type to contain null by appending a ? when declaring it. We can do the same for classes. So Movie? m can be null, but Movie m can’t. And the compiler warns us when we’re trying to use a reference that might be null. Awesome!
#7. I compiled a list of C# features we should know about. Those are the features I like and have used the most.
#8. A “Hello, world” is now literally one line of code. We don’t need to declare a class and a Main method for console applications. Just write your code directly in a file like in a scripting language.
#9. I stopped expanding that list with the most recent features. C# is getting bloated with more features that are making the language less consistent. I don’t like that.
#10. The same way we have a new runtime, we have a new web framework: ASP.NET Core. It was a full rewrite of the classic ASP.NET. There’s no Global.asax, web.config, or files listed on csproj files. If you knew and used the old ASP.NET, I wrote a guide with the difference between the two. With .NET, we have way better tooling like a command line interface to create projects.
#11. Well, there’s Xamarin, MAUI, Blazor… But unless you’re planning to do front-end work, you don’t need to worry about them. Microsoft is still trying to find, create, and establish a golden hammer for the front-end side.
Sure, I’m missing a lot of other things. But you’re safe catching up on those.