👋 Hi, my name is Max Zsol.
I'm a computer engineer and writer of sci-fi,
some times with the help of AI.
I also blog about
writing,
mindfulness,
engineering leadership,
mechanical keyboards, and a long etcetera.
The power of minutes
Another way to think about micro-tasks to get things done, is to think about micro-moments.
Micro-tasks help reduce the amount of work to small chunks. They help divide an overwhelming goal into sizable bit-size tasks.
A way of taking action on these micro-tasks is to think about micro-time slots. Just as we broke down big jobs into small tasks, we can break down hour-long jobs into minute-long tasks.
Have a bias to action. Focus on minutes, instead of hours. To get started, think about the kind of work (which micro-tasks) could be done in the next few minutes.
We all have minutes to spare. More than we think. Put them to use.
Stockpiling
There are three types of things I get out of reading a book:
- Practices: like daily or weekly habits or other types of routines
- Mottos: phrases or words to live by
- Learnings: new ideas or knowledge to be acquired
One must find a mechanism to capture all this knowledge. Highlighting, taking notes, and writing summaries are some of the things I do.
Here is an example of each different kind of knowledge captured from reading Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
Practices
Designing your life encourages readers to “recalibrate their life compass” every year.
The best way to know what you really think and value about the big questions of life is to ask yourself and see what you have to say. We urge you to revisit your compass at least annually, and recalibrate it. This will help you revitalize the creation of meaning in your life.
This “recalibration” is a practice to be done on a cadence. Archiving the knowledge for a later time is not enough. To extract true value one must find a way to put it into practice.
I believe in goal setting and reviewing, and this recalibration is a good way to frame the act of reviewing goals.
Of all the things I read, I compile those habits or practices I should do on a cadence.
Mottos
I like to give mottos special attention. These condensed life lessons have the ability to resonate in a way more words don’t always do. And also, since they are shorter, they are easier to remember and repeat to oneself like a mantra.
Here are some of my favorites from Designing your life:
“It’s never too late to design a life you love”
“Flow is play for grown-ups”
“Building is thinking”
Learnings
Everything else I read that I consider interesting in any way I like to capture. I like to write down these core ideas so I can go back to them for inspiration.
The core ideas behind Designing your life are summarized at the end of the book:
We introduced the idea of life design in this book by telling you five simple things you need to do:
- be curious (curiosity),
- try stuff (bias to action),
- reframe problems (reframing),
- know it’s a process (awareness), and
- ask for help (radical collaboration).
In sum, when reading a book, capture information, process it, and do something with it. That’s how you turn knowledge into wisdom.
World-building creativity
We should approach human creativity as a multiplayer world-building activity.
The outcome that matters is what we put out as a group, not as individuals
It doesn’t matter how “bad” your art is. It doesn’t have to be “good”. It has to be yours. It’s your voice that this multiplayer game is missing without it.
It’s a game the magnitude of our species.
This game of making, mixing, remixing, digesting, turning, and creating, it’s all a game where all can play, where all are welcome, and the more that participate the more wonderful the output.
Think of creativity as a group exercise, not a solo endeavor
Add your voice to the mix. Let it be heard. Even if out of pitch. It’ll only make the chorus that much richer.
Being right
Do you want to be right or do you want to create something?
— Phil Stutz, Stutz
I like to say that being right is half the battle. And not even the most important battle at all.
Many people believe being right is all there is. That once you are right you are deserved recognition for it. The struggle comes when those who believe are right don’t get their way. Their ideas don’t move forward. Their suggestions are shut down. They don’t get support for their projects. They get pushed aside, or worst, ignored entirely.
Being right is half the battle, the other half is getting people on your side. Without support nothings moves forward. The hardest part is not having ideas, or even correct ideas. The hard part is making other see your point of view, having them understand why you think your ideas are better than those of others.
There are a lot of ways to get people on your side, and many of them have nothing to do with being right. In fact, some of the most successful people are wrong more often than they are right. But they are also very good at selling their ideas, at getting people to see their point of view.
The ability to persuade, to convince, to gain support, is a skill that’s worth honing. It’s a skill that’s just as important as being right.
Most people want to be right, but the few who win are the ones who also know how to get others to see their side.
Which way you ought to go
Most times in life, there is no arriving. What counts is the work we put in along the way without obsessing about the outcome.
The recently popular motto “failing is good” is there to remind us that the effort put towards a failed enterprise is valid in and of itself.
The journey is the destination.
“Destination” can be seen as a metaphor for success, or any other goal we may have. We should enjoy the journey because it is the only thing we can control. The destination is out of our hands.
This seems most relevant in the current climate of layoffs and looming economic recession. To me, the future never felt more uncertain. We don’t know what’s going to happen. All we can do is focus on the present and make the most of it.
So, next time you find yourself stressing about the future, or feeling disappointed about not yet having reached your goal, remember: the journey is the destination.
Enjoy the ride.
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where.
Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: …So long as I get somewhere.
Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Adequate progress
That’s what they used to say at my elementary school if you were doing as expected and learning along: “adequate progress.” That was my report card.
Adequate or “extraordinary” (that’s the other word they used), I care most about progress itself.
1% compounded daily for 365 days amounts to 3678.3% profit. Slow or fast, consistency beats the market any day.
Constant daily improvements are the key to sustainable success.
Reach out
Reach out to people around you. Don’t wait for them to take the first step. Be generous and vulnerable.
You will be doing them a service but also to yourself.
Relationships need care. Like a plant that needs regular watering, people need attention. The good news is relationships are more resilient. You can bring them back to life even if you haven’t watered them in a while.
If you haven’t talked to somebody for a while, reach out. They will be happy to hear from you. We live in a chronic state of solitude. Loneliness is the plague of the century.
Be generous. Be vulnerable. Reach out.
Never give up, never surrender
Take a thousand shots. One might hit the target.
Good advice, but it requires a lot of stamina. When the odds are not in your favor and everything feels uphill, you have to have a lot of confidence to keep trying.
But there is no other way, right? Such is the path of the hero.
My best trick is to focus on the process and not on the end goal. The journey is the destination, so enjoy the journey. One step at a time.
Never give up. Never surrender.
Why work
I’ve always said a job needs at least one of two elements (and ideally both):
- it needs to be fun
- and/or be challenging.
But that’s not what makes my job click. There is more to a role than the above.
Engaging in intellectually stimulating tasks is very rewarding. I like to spend time-solving puzzles. I like challenges I haven’t faced before and trying to engineer my way to solve them.
Socialization is a key part of work. The workplace is a very significant space for relationships. The office is one of the spaces where I get to be most social (even if it’s also very draining). I need that socialization. Feeling like part of a team, contributing, collaborating, etc, are essential parts of my well-being.
Work facilitates security. Something I have come to appreciate more and more as I stepped into adulthood as a gay man, and realized I am responsible for caring for myself as I grow older. I am not scared of death, but I have respect for it and approach it with stoicism. I can’t change it, I just need to prepare for it. Money provides a standard of living today and security for retirement tomorrow.
Helping others is my main driving force behind being a manager. I started down the management path in order to unblock the rest of the team I worked with. I wanted to make the work experience as smooth as possible for them. I started taking ownership of more things, having conversations that needed to be had, mentoring junior people, etc.
Eventually, the opportunity to take on the manager role presented itself. This opened the door to big-picture thinking. I enjoy helping solve problems from a high level in a more holistic way.
Above it all, I care about designing products that put the customer first. User experience is a key principle of my work since I started. Strong conceptual creative work is another.
Create memes to exert influence
Part of being successful working at a large organization is being effective at socializing your ideas. This could be anything from vision and strategy, project proposals, logistics, etc. To gain adoption, it helps to think of these ideas as memes.
I am talking about “memes” as described in Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene. Memes are ideas that spread.
“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Here are two suggestions to help your ideas catch on.
1. Visualize your idea
People react to visuals. A good image is attention-grabbing. Graphs, data visualization, diagrams, etc. are a form of condensed information that make concepts easier to understand and share.
Visuals can help when explaining certain complex thoughts. Hierarchies, data flows, group relationships, taxonomies, and architectural diagrams, are all examples of topics that are easier covered/explained with visuals.
Another advantage of using visuals is that images don’t rely on the language processing centers in our brains. Speaking over a slide of bullet points is the best way to confuse your audience. On the other hand, you can display a visual and talk over it at the same time without confusing our interlocutor. Visuals allow you to increase your communication bandwidth.
2. Label your idea
I already talked about [[2022-11-03 - The Power of Labeling|labeling]], the process by which we give an idea a concrete name to refer to it. Labeling helps people to pay more attention to new ideas, as well as help recollection at a later time. Labeling also helps give ideas authority, which in turn can help adoption.
Lastly, keep in mind that a successful meme has a tendency to evolve as it spreads through your organization. As the meme brain-jumps, it might change or lose its meaning.
This should be ok if you care about your idea being implemented more than about recognition.
In my experience, it’s a risk worth taking, even if it has caught me by surprise when my memes served slightly different purposes than what I had intended.
“When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
What can you obsess about
What can you obsess about? That is the question we should ask ourselves.
“Follow your passion,” they say.
I say let’s replace passion with obsession.
“Follow your obsession.”
When we are obsessed about something we get in the flow.
“[Flow]—the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Being in the flow is the most efficient and likely satisfactory way of being productive.
What activities can you engage in that make you lose track of time? What activities take your total focus and attention away from everyday concerns? What activities give you energy instead of taking it?
What can you obsess about?
Core concepts for a macOS native development newbie
Before I jump to learn native development I needed to get my basic concepts straight. Here is what I learned so far.
iOS
iOS gets much of attention for native development (vs macOS)
- Most recommendations for getting into macOS development suggest starting with iOS first
Swift
Swift and AppKit ****are used to make native UI for macOS
Catalyst
- Mac Catalyst allows to migrate iOS apps to run on a Mac device by interfacing between UIKit and AppKit
UI libraries
There are three UI libraries for native development
- UIKit (iOS)
- Framework used by iOS (Cocoa Touch) to provide its UI
- Imperative API
- AppKit (macOS)
- Framework for macOS (Cocoa)
- Imperative API
- SwiftUI (macOS and iOS)
- New declarative framework for any Apple platform.
SwiftUI seems to be the way forward but still not fully developed.
- Though it seems promising consensus seems to be it’s not ready for primetime
- Allows building user interfaces programmatically (vs storyboards)
Declarative programming
Declarative UI programming patterns seem to be all the rage.
- On the web with frameworks like React and Vue.js,
- In cross-platform development environments like React Native and Flutter
- In native development with SwiftUI
Web-based technologies
Web-based technologies are an alternative for native development are
- React Native, Flutter, PWA
- One significant limitation seems to be that the access to native APIs is possible but complicated (at least React Native, Flutter)
- Best use seems self-contained applications where performance is not key, with limited or no OS integration.
Right now, it feels a little bit like the three main MacOS app frameworks are floating in unanchored space: AppKit is not the future, Catalyst is not ready to replace it, and using SwiftUI remains a long way off for big, complicated apps
Where Mac Catalyst Falls Short
Ok, so SwiftUI is not ready, but it seems the learning curve is small and for simple application it might be enough. It might be a good place to start for me. Alternatively I could go with React Native since I’m dabbing into React these days.
I’m sure I got something wrong. Will try to remember to update.
References
Articles
Learning
Books
Passion for learning
A second career doesn’t have to be a professional one. We need vocations apart from employment.
We focus too much on learning or getting degrees for work. Work, as always, drives lot of our desire for self-improvement.
We should challenge this inertia. We must encourage ourselves to get into new fields as a way of personal growth. Maybe those explorations will have a professional applications, but we should make that a secondary goal.
We need to regain the passion for learning.
Biased decision making
Let’s say you want to ban remote work at your office because it’s hurting the productivity of your organization. How much of your decision has been influenced by bias?
Let’s see.
Could it be that you talked to Bob and Alice? You know they are stellar developers who like to work from the office. But both of them have complained that they feel hamstrung by absentee co-workers.
This is an example of Selection Bias, where your insights are skewed by a small population sample.
It could be worst. You could have asked Carol to look at company VPN logs to confirm that indeed the staff has not been checking in regularly.
That would be an example of Confirmation bias, favoring information that confirms our preconceptions.
I have yet to see a study that shows that VPN usage is directly tied to performance. You are using a metric you can easily come up with as a proxy for data that might be hard to get. How do you even measure productivity? Do you know?
Here are some common forms of cognitive bias that affect your decision making:
The list of cognitive biases is long!
It all comes down to selecting the wrong data to make decisions.
So let’s say you want to ban remote work at your office because it’s hurting the productivity of your organization. Given all of the above, how should you proceed?
Well for one, don’t make a decision before you can justify it. If you have made a decision but you can’t fully justify it, assume that it is likely to be biased.
Try to come up with a rationale to justify the opposite stance. See how far you can argue against your initial decision.
Widen your views and gather more data points before making decisions.
Political independence at work
You have to respect everybody’s right to their political views. You might not agree with those political views and some might be deplorable, but you have to respect people’s personal choices in the matter.
If you are a leader, I believe you have to demonstrate such respect. I believe you owe it to your team to show tolerance and acceptance.
I believe an office is a place where work comes first. There are other things of significant importance (tolerance, diversity, inclusion, etc), but they should be there in support of creating better work.
If there is a political discussion that directly affects work, it belongs in the workplace. However I have encountered none during my career. Some topics tangential to the political discourse, do belong in the workplace, but they should be addressed outside of party political (inclusive hiring, gender pay, sexual discrimination, etc.)
I believe leaders should be inclusive of all political views to create a safe environment of collaboration. As a figure of authority, you should be aware that expressing your political affiliation is going to antagonize people on your team.
Do talk about values and principles, but leave your party out of the conversation.
Smart Reads - JavaScript Edition
A curriculum for the JS inclined programmer.
Getting started
Beyond the basics
More Resources
Smart Reads
A curriculum for the philosophically frustrated programmer.
Management
Mindfulness / Stoicism
Fundamentals of Computation
Fundamentals of AI
AI Ethics
Coding
Computing History
Mind
Misc Non-Fiction
High-level Reading: Understanding the Gist
I have been looking at building my own curriculum of topics to learn. What this looks like is mostly a list of smart reads. I am compiling a list of Computer Science, AI and ML, and other non-fiction books.
As I was going over the initial list I realize that I could spend years trying to read all that material. That is likely how much time I need to read and absorb every single sentence. I got a little discouraged.
One of the books on the list is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and I could see myself spending a whole year getting through it. I am willing to spend a good amount of time reading GEB, but I am not so sure about the rest of the books in my syllabus.
Will I spend too long reading books that are not so important? could there be a way to get a sense of the books before I commit fully to reading them slowly and in-depth? Is there value in reading a book if we don’t absorb 100% of its content?
All of that got me thinking about striving for fast reading the books on my list. Instead of aiming to having read a book, I could aim for a high-level understanding of the contents. Even if some comprehension and detail are sacrificed, I would be extracting some value.
Instead of diving deep right off the gate, I could try to get a high-level pass. After this first pass, I might decide that I got all I wanted from the book, or that I want to re-read it this time much more deeply.
Ok, so I don’t yet have a plan about how to do this. But I do have a few ideas I might try:
- Skim the contents of a book searching for key ideas.
- Time-box how much time I want to dedicate to the first reading of a book.
- Summarize learnings or ideas extracted from the book
- Practice speed reading techniques:
- Pilot reading in new ways and measuring results.
Could I invest just a couple of hours in skimming a whole book and still get value out of it? Part of me thinks this is sacrilegious. But another part of me thinks I will never be able to read all the books I want to read. Specially if I only read them expecting 100% comprehension.
If I can read more quantity, I might discover things I would never have otherwise. This might open the door for me to explore areas of knowledge I would never have been exposed to.
The two requirements of a job
I have always said that every job should have two main characteristics:
- Be Fun: a job should be fun. We work for 8 hours a day. We should aim for those hours to be enjoyable as possible.
- Be Challenging: a job should help us grow. It should expose us to new challenges and teach us something new along the way.
Ideally, a job can satisfy both of the above. But if not both, it should at least cover one.
If a job it’s not fun it should be an opportunity to grow and potentially get a new role down the road. Or if it is not helping us learn something new, it should at least make our day-to-day enjoyable.
A job that doesn’t deliver on either is not a good place to be.
Getting laid off
I’ve never seen a layoff that didn’t feel like a punch in the stomach. Not in small or large organizations.
Today’s layoff at Twitter feels another level of problematic.
Without getting into the merits of this or any other layoffs, I am dismayed that the META team has been entirely letting go (all but one employee).
Musk dissolved a team known internally as META, which was well-respected for its exploratory work in ethical AI and algorithmic transparency. Rumman Chowdhury, the team’s director, was eliminated, along with the team’s engineers and other members.
—Elon Musk just axed key Twitter teams like human rights, accessibility, AI ethics and curation
This targeted layoff highlights the fragility of corporate AI ethics. And even more worrisome than the lack of support from the company is the lack of public understanding of the need for AI ethics in social networks.
We’ll have to see how the field and how the perspectives about it evolve in years to come.
But today it’s for all of those who were ever let go from their jobs to find their next adventure.
Getting laid off it’s never easy. But it’s not about you.
That’s the thing to remember.
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