Work

My homepage lists my new career shift as “This is me, attempting to reinvent myself as a journeyman programmer. (aiming at craftsmanship)” I’ve never warmed to the term coder. For some reason, it never meshed with the way I thought about my new career and the work I wanted to do. And I couldn’t quite articulate just how I thought they were different. Today as I began reading The Secret Life of Programs though, I found author Jonathan E. Steinhart’s already done the hard work giving me a lovely explicit definition that I cannot better, even if I tried endlessly. Here’s his take … ...

I have been deleting too many books by mistake, now a days. Past Jason might have been pretty sure about what he wanted, but I sure as heck am not. So I had to do a bit of spelunking to figure out how to get the delete book option to confirm first. All I needed to do was Preferences -> Behaviour -> Reset all disabled confirmation dialogs Et voilà, Calibre now asks me if I am sure about deleting my books :) ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on July 23rd, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) New month, new work letter. Before I begin though, please hit reply to these letters and let me know what you think, whether you like them or not and if there is anything you’d want me to write / hunt & research about! Like I wrote in the introduction to April’s letter, both the letter and the website have zero tracking. So I have no way of knowing, whether you like stuff or not, whether it resonates or not, whether I am preaching to throngs or shouting into the void, unless you tell me! Let’s dig into it. As usual, click the headers, to wander off to the orginal articles :) ...

The old Paperwhite, is on the left. The Oasis is on the right. I ran out of space on the 8gb Paperwhite and so grudgingly went and paid extra for a 32gb Kindle Oasis. This was before a friend pointed out that even the Paperwhite now has a 32gb variant. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on June 18th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) I have two, count ’em, two articles from Stephen Wolfram today. And a fantastic historical restrospective on one of the early handhelds, the Psion! What Is Consciousness? Some New Perspectives from Our Physics Project Stephen Wolfram, has the amazing ability to go on long Talebesque side journeys, different flaneuresque trips through various domains and then bring it all back and tie it up in a bow, with the point he wants to make. If you love long, slow, deliberate posts, look no further :) ...

I did. I really did have a good work day! I had one of those, whatchacallit, flow states. What I learnt in Django land I learnt nothing! Well I learnt nothing new. I spent the whole day and what little I time I had yesterday, trying to crack the assignment for module three of the course. I struggled and struggled and then, struggled a bit more. The more I write Django, the more intuitive it feels, like I can never make out, what’s provided by Python and what has been built for me by Django. It all feels like one seamless whole. The blow up Django cycle continued today, to an extreme, it felt like. But it felt good and iterative, like I had a sandbox to play in, as I wished. There’d be a decimal error and I’d fix it and then there’d be some sort of bounds error because I’d built too little capacity to hold stuff in my models and I’d go fix it and then I’d figure that this method returns a tuple, so I need to catch it in two variables and throw one away, just so I could have at the data I was interested in, and I learnt how to rebuild my models and migrations and reset my database and I spent two exasperating hours on a consistent Django blowup that just should not have been possible. And then I realised, I was assigning the same data to two models (same variable.) Long story short, I learned a lot. Working over the past two days reminded me of this Julia Evans page, that I serendipitously came across a while ago. ![Julia Evans comic explaining the importance of tracking progress][jeiln] Focus Follow Up aka Flow what? This probably, was the first time, I had a state of flow while programming (I used to have them all the time at work as well lots of times, when I am writing). This probably means I am comfortable with the level I am at, and I should stretch a bit more. Did eleven, 30 minute sessions with no aborts. I lost track of time, quite a bit. Am done with three out of the four modules of this course, I’m on. After yesterday, today’s progress really feels good. While I’ll take my wins where I can find them, I should be cognizant of the fact that it was the uncomfortable practice of the week that brought me here. And so, I want to get more comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. Here’s to finishing strong! ...