The more invested you are in a specific solution to a problem the harder it is for you to consider other options. I prove this to myself on a daily basis. This is why I’ve adopted a circuit breaker — I say “STOP!”, out loud. Picked this trick up from Deep Work, by Cal Newport, a couple of years back. Works like a charm!
Read more →I’ve met tons of developers who would not do error handling because of fear of it being too much. Here’s a short list of reasons: We’re going to write too much boilerplate because the properties are too deeply nested. The code will look ugly. Why write a ton of if statements? The server always returns that response, why bother? Why validate this input — it’s declared as type="number" in the DOM so it only takes numbers.
Read more →We’re so imbued in zero-to-hero stories we fail to see the years of struggle, the lucky breaks and the sheer amount of effort today’s successful entrepreneurs had to put in to get to where they are. If you’re an avid reader like myself, you’re not getting any help there, either. The whole self-help genre is cluttered with overnight successes and “You can do it, Johnny!” attitudes. They’re lying to you! You end up believing that you simply have to push hard to get somewhere.
Read more →It’s 2014 All my colleagues are writing their Bachelor’s Degree paper in LaTeX1. Or MSWord… 🤮 I’m doing it in Markdown, mostly because LaTeX looks too verbose for me. And I’m not that smart anyway. I was never the brightest bulb in the chandelier, to begin with. So, back to LaTeX: too verbose, too many keywords. Looks like the type of thing highly skilled academics use to flex their look-at-how-many-format-specifiers-I-can-pull-from-memory muscles.
Read more →🛑 Stop asking for a price You are not buying potatoes at the farmers market! Think about it as if you were buying a pair of custom designer shoes. You may ask, and get a starting price, but that’s it. The rest depends on the model, materials required, adjustments made to the shoes to fit you, the deadline, as well as the number of orders the designer already has & can take.
Read more →“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything!” “Act natural and you’ll never have to pretend to be someone else.” The first quote is from Mark Twain (supposedly). The second is my interpretation, applied to communication, both online and offline. I replied to a comment earlier and Twain’s quote came to mind. The discussion was around my blunt communication methods, and lack of staging and scripts. ⬇️ Below is a link to the video the comment was about.
Read more →I keep seeing a lot of posts from people complaining about how social media is destroying their life and attention. Some of them have started disabling notifications, others quit cold turkey and delete their accounts, while others more just uninstall their apps. In the past, I also did it. I disabled notifications or uninstalled apps. Actually, in the past year I never allowed any app to send notifications, just because “it said so”.
Read more →I’m thinking of blogging like in the old days. Back when people used to blog whenever something happened. This is what made it so unique, because it was like online journaling. And I love journaling! So today I’m going to write about something that helps me a lot in my day to day life. That’s visualization! Not the kind you find in self-help books. I don’t imagine myself to be a millionaire, then tell myself that I deserve all the riches of the world to come to me and then they come.
Read more →Don’t you just hate it when you’re totally outside the loop when you need to hire a JavaScript developer?! Here’s a short list of concepts and keywords and the simplest explanation I could muster for each. Know these things and you will be able to make far more informed decisions (and you won’t piss your candidates off, in the process). 1. It’s JavaScript, not Java Script TL;DR Java is to JavaScript what car is to carpet.
Read more →This is not the usual type of article you’d expect from me. It’s a more detailed description for a question I asked on Quora — Does reading in a foreign language affect learning?. The point is that I’m not sure if and how does reading in a foreign language affect learning. How does it affect what you recall from what you read? I’m asking the question because I’ve been monitoring my progress on various books and it always seemed that I’m better at remembering details from the ones written in Romanian rather than English or French.
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