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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more.
The AirPods Pro 3 flight problem
Testing Apple’s latest noise-cancelling earbuds at 39,000 feet reveals a potential flaw most users won’t notice, until they fly.
Framework Laptop with Ubuntu Review
I built my own laptop over the holiday break and it’s a developer’s dream come true. I took a chance and ordered a Framework Laptop DIY Edition. I’m so glad I did. The Framework is an excellent platform to customize and build a very capable and stable Linux machine for development. Here’s what I love about it and…
Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief
If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to th…
STFU About What Women Want
In a recent post on TechCrunch , Penelope Trunk tells us (again) that most women don’t want to do startups. First, I’d like to extend that...
There Are No Bugs, Just TODOs
One of my life’s traumas is the bug trackers, the issue trackers, the project management tools. The toolset that completes the version control log to form the development equivalent of double-entry bookkeeping .
Hello World
My Website
Why are Adults so busy?
As a kid, I'd always wonder what it was about adults that made them so busy. What could they be possibly doing with all their time? After I (kinda) became one, it hit me. There's an alarmingly large list of things adults do that we never quite grasp until we're there.
Building a Startup in 45 Minutes per Day While Deployed in Iraq
You may one day find yourself in a position where you’re eager to work on a startup but limited by the amount of time you can put into it due to a day job, family or other obligations. In this post…
“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Keeping a plaintext “did” file
Time flies by when you’re learning how to code. Its super important to take a second every once in a while to simple write down what you did during the past mental sprint. Writing down what you learned solidifies the knowledge.
Grieving the loss of details
I’ve been thinking about where I stand in respect to the current state of the industry. This is more of a journal note than a post, apologies for that. I usually leave this stuff private, but I thought I’d post this as a trial in case someone relates to this experience and feels less alone. All opinions are my own.
Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers
This is a pretty niche topic; I don't imagine there are many of us out there. Actually, to be strict, I'd say this advice is tailored to people who've had hemorrhagic stroke in the parietal lobe…
Boring tech is mature, not old
Talking about my description of tech as “boring” to be a compliment, and how to think about it.
The Lost Art of Research as Leisure
Where have the amateur researchers gone, and how do we bring them back?
My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown
How My Mindfulness Practice Lead Me To Meltdown
But Where Do People Work in This Office?
Matt Blodgett on topics occasionally germane to software development.
12 Months of Mandarin
Estimates for achieving intermediate fluency in Mandarin Chinese range up to spending years and around 4000 total hours (2,200h classroom hours, 1,800 outside). I did it in 1500 hours total and less than a year.[1] 1. There is a lot of disagreement on language proficiency estimates. They