Month: December 2019

Trying to Think Small

I have ambition.  I want to do good and useful things.  I want to do these things with some measure of scale.  That could be considered thinking and dreaming big.  Thinking big probably gets me in trouble more than it helps me.  Thinking small has worked for many people before me, and I could receive the same benefits it has given others.

Many big things grow from small things.  We are surrounded by big awesome things that started off far more modestly.  In many of those cases it is questionable whether the people that started those things had any idea about how big things would get.  Hardcore History might be the best podcast in the world.  It is currently a series of 3-5 hour epic episodes talking about history.  Some of these are multiparters, so you may get 20 hours of audio on one subject.  The first episode of Hardcore History was only 17 minutes and a single part.  I suspect the host Dan Carlin had no idea what his podcast would grow into.  If he had started with the current format in mind, would he have even began in the first place?  I think about the origins of Hardcore History a lot as I set forth with my own creative projects.

In moments of arrogance I forget that like Dan Carlin I can start small.  If something so creative and awesome can start super small, then my projects can have similar paths.  Starting small and thinking small in scope has benefits and I forget them.  I forget that when things are small you can experiment and tinker.  I spent 2 years working on my last software project, in the end I got to the point with it, that I couldn’t even make beneficial changes without huge efforts.  The code base had gotten huge and had too much “baggage.”  Given less scope, I might have been able to make a real business out of the project, instead it died a painful death.  Being able to experiment is not the only benefit to thinking small though.

Small is a lot faster.

Small is cheap. 

Small takes a lot fewer mental resources.

Thinking small may not actually be thinking as small as it appears.  I think the chief benefit of thinking small is that it lets you do more things.  I become paralyzed far too often by the scope of the things I want to accomplish.  This makes it hard to get things off the ground.  I have spent the last year writing a book, that no one has seen yet.  I might have spent a whole year working on a book that no one may be all that into.  I went big with this project, and it is by its nature going to take a while to get out in the open.  Not every project needs to be that way.  A smaller project might have allowed me to already be making money.  Going small with a project would have just allowed me to do more faster.  So sometimes we are forced to go big, sometimes we can go small.

I think that is the key, to go big and small.  If I go only one direction I get in trouble.  I am content to work in isolation on things for a long time.  I can do the big project mentality.  It does create a sense of dread though with new projects.  I assume all projects will become huge, consuming, and a stressor.  Feeling the weight of this impending size can make things hard to start.  Things do not have to be that way.  Sometimes small is good.

I feel the pull towards doing a lot more small things.  In fact as I plan the next year I am looking at doing man more small things.  I might pick up a big project or two but the big stuff is not going to take over the small stuff.  My hope is that doing some smaller projects will let grow some creativity and playfulness.  The big idea is that I just need to remember its cool to start small and maybe someday I’ll stumble my way into having a really big thing on my hands like Hardcore History.

Knowledge Suppression in the Elementary Library

When I was a little guy, I used to love being read to by my mother.  I thought books and stories were cool.  When I finally went to school I was exposed to the school library.  There was a room full of books and you could borrow them and read them all.  That is what I thought and wanted the library to be.  There were apparently a lot of rules about what books you could read.  I could only read books from a certain shelf in the library.

In my elementary school, students could only get books from the shelves that corresponded to their grade.  A first grader, simply wasn’t allowed to even look at most of the books in the library.  This was disappointing to Young Nehemiah.  The books I was allowed to read were not stimulating to me on any level.  I was being held back from reading things I was capable of reading.  This was a horrible thing to do to a child.  Luckily I am a stubborn sort, so it didn’t really effect me. 

I don’t think this whole library episode had lasting implications.  This could have really turned some kids off to reading and school.  It is criminal that school teachers and librarians act like this sometimes.  My ability to read a book didn’t matter to these teachers, my grade level is all that mattered.  I was a good reader, but I was held back by the teachers because I was in first grade.  Could I have read everything in that library? Maybe not, but I was not even allowed the opportunity to challenge myself.

I think it is horrible to tell a child not to challenge themselves.  It seems counter to all that education should stand for.  I think in all levels of education we should all the students to challenge themselves.  Even if we think they are biting off more than they can chew, sometimes they can chew it.  Biting off more than you can chew and chewing it, that teaches you a lot about life.  I have done it before, and that is the kind of risk that reaps some real personal rewards.  If I couldn’t read the books I tried to read, well I guess I would have fell flat on my face.

Falling flat on your face, that should be a part of the education process.  If you don’t run fast and hard into brick walls, you never know if you can run through them.  If we break ourselves against these metaphorical walls, then that is what a teacher or mentor is for.  They are there to pick us up and help us grow.  I don’t know many teachers facilitate this experience for students.  Yoda tells us that failure is a great teacher, schools could allow a bit more failure.

The risk associated with failing to be able to read a book that was above my level was small.  If it was too much, I would have had Mom read it to me.  It would not have been a big deal.  I might have been able to read it and stayed excited about reading.  Over time I think I lost most excitement for reading and school in general.  I was a smart kid, so I got through school just fine, but I didn’t like it.  School could be fun and stimulating.  Instead we tell kids no too often.

I was told not to read books that were above my level.  This level was some arbitrary age grouping of students.  What is a first grade even?  Is it a set of abilities?  No it is a set of birthdays.  I fear we do too many things like this that are just one more step in turning students off to school.  A student should be allowed to run as far and fast as they want to.  They will figure out on their own when to slow down and set a pace.  Telling a kid not to learn something because they are too young, well that is a pathetic thing to do.

Hello World… Again: Chapter 2 Choosing Stacks

I have been messing around with some hobby coding…these are my thoughts on the process.

12/16/19

Deciding to code is one thing, deciding what to code with is another larger thing.  There are so many tools available to me as a developer.  I have spent most of my development time in the past working with WordPress and Asp.net type things.  I probably cannot even link up to a Linux server with SSH if you offered me a million dollars to do so.  The question is what tools, languages and frameworks are even worth messing with?  This is where I get to be a business analyst for a few minutes. 

I want to work with technology that lets me do cool things, and might make me employable.  These are good criteria.  My bent has been towards using various Microsoft technologies because that is where most of my experience had been.  I am also open to doing some PHP and LAMP stack development.  I looked at all the recent job postings for developers in the area and these tech stacks seem to be used a fair amount in the area.  There is also a lot of talk about React and Angular, I don’t know how I feel about big JavaScript things at the moment though.  These things seem to change pretty fast, and I’m not sure about building my house on that particular sand.  So for now I will use JavaScript as it comes to me, but not get too deep. 

With these considerations I have decided to play with DotNet things and LAMP type stacks.  These stacks line up with my experience the most, so I can leverage that into building more cooler things fasterer.  I don’t see much job potential locally with full stack JavaScript, so that is a maybe later kind of thing.  I am not looking for a job coding at the moment, but employability is a good tiebreaker when it comes to picking tech to focus on.  I do like the fact that these are big stacks with lots of stuff around them in the ecosystem.  I see no need to jump into niche stuff just for the sake of doing it.  That decision will make itself when the time comes. 

The process of picking technologies was rather simple, I think I made good choices here.  Next up is building some cool and useful stuff, or napping, or listening to history podcasts.  All options are available to me.

Hello World… Again

It was a cold winter Saturday afternoon.  I had nothing on my schedule, I started poking around the computer and internet.  Before long I was downloading Visual Studio 2019.  I was feeling like messing with some coding and programming for fun.  Developer stuff has always been rather fun when I remove the time pressures and other pressures associated with it.  I wanted to play with some code, I wanted it to be fun, I am not sure if it will mean anything to my career at large.  Despite the fact coding might have zero career benefits at the moment, it seems as though it might be a great hobby to play with.

I spent about 5 years waist deep in being a web developer muddling about becoming a rather flawed developer.  I haven’t had much reason to code much in the last year, life has taken turns elsewhere.  I still have that skillset laying dormant and I would like to keep it.  Doing some hobby coding seems like it could keep that stuff alive in my mind.  It is not anywhere my top priority at the moment, so I am looking to approach it with a few rules, otherwise it becomes another out of control hobby.

Rule 1. I will be coding for fun, and not putting any hard effort into it, otherwise it will take away energy from other things that are far more important.

Rule 2. This is all a hobby and a learning experiment.  It is to be treated as such, you know until some outside force like a job incentivizes me to view it in another way.

Rule 3.  This is a night and weekend kind of thing.  It is not work and can’t be treated as such, otherwise I will be messing with code when I should be doing something that is actually beneficial to me.

These are the rules I made with myself as I started to play with code that night.  I think they are reasonable.  In the past developer skills have always been something I was chasing impatiently.  I think it would be fun to give it a try and just build quirky and fun things and see what happens. 

I don’t really have any goals with this.  To a degree I am doing this because I want a hobby that gets my brain away from fitness and writing based things.  It can be fun to work on things that don’t matter.

So far I have installed new development tools, and started messing with some Asp.net Core to see what that is all about.  I might not ever look at the code again, but the other night it was fun.  So I get to call myself a developer again for a few days. 

Boredom Is Not The Enemy

“I shall defeat all my enemies with my superpower of being insanely boring!”  That statement might be a bit of a stretch.  I don’t have many enemies to defeat.  I however do spend time cultivating this superpower of being boring.  I become more happy all the time to just do boring things.  What do I gain when I embrace being boring? 

Through boredom I can gain needed repetitions and consistency in all things.  Doing the same thing over and over is boring.  It is also the path to mastery.  I wonder if someone can’t handle a dose of boredom then can they ever become masterful at something?  In the past when I have lacked mastery, I have lacked the repetitions needed to gain that mastery.  I do feel like being willing to be bored allows you do some extra repetitions of whatever you’re doing.  This can be true for learning and mastery but also for execution.  Once you know what works and have a proven process, shouldn’t you keep repeating that endlessly?  How many businesses fail because the owner just quits doing the things that lead to success?  How often is this is due to boredom?  On some level I should never be bored doing the things that lead to success.  Boredom will still be there, but it is something I know I can endure.  Boredom is not the enemy.

Boredom is not the enemy, in fact boredom can be a great ally.  Through boredom I can gain space to think.  A lot of good thinking is done on long walks or long drives.  I think this is partially because they are boring.  These things can quiet your mind enough to allow you to have ideas come to you.  I don’t know the mechanisms behind this, but I know it works.  Have you had more good ideas come to you randomly or when you were trying to think?  For me that answer is definitely at random times.  The mind can only work on so many things at once,  being bored quiets the mind to allow it work in the background on any number of things you have given it. 

Since the mind can only work on so many things at one time, boredom can be a way to be more intentional about the things we have to think about.  By being boring in my everyday life, I don’t have to think about things.  I have autopiloted so many things in my life, which is boring.  I eat the same things for breakfast and lunch every day.  I wear the same clothes all the time.  I work from a library that is rather boring.  I don’t put energy into these things so that I can put that energy into things that actually matter.  This all works to put my mind into the best state possible for productivity.

Some of the best things I have accomplished in my life have been through being boring.  Graduating from college was boring, but I just kept showing up to class and doing the work.  There were many things that didn’t interest me, but I didn’t let these things being boring stop me.  I have written a book in the last year, well its kind of almost done.  There is still editing to do, but it has been super boring.  I barely like to edit my writing once, but I have made many editing passes on this book.  It can be extremely boring.  I don’t mind being bored though, because it is getting me to the point of having accomplished some cool things. 

Doing boring things might not be the chief reason for these and other successes.  I do think it’s a contributing factor.  Embracing repetitions and freeing my mind can’t be a bad thing.  I don’t know that I purposely seek out doing boring things.  I want novel and exciting things in my life too.  Boredom though is not an excuse to me anymore.  Boredom is not a reason for me to avoid doing something.  Boredom is not a reason to quit doing something.  I am finding myself having a better relationship with all that is boring.  It has grown my patience.  It has helped me finish doing hard things. 

How we think about boredom is a step in combatting boredom.  It is not a bad thing, it is just a thing.  In the end I must make the decisions I make.  I must not allow boredom to make decisions, because those are not good decisions.  Boredom is just a thing, and I can’t say that it is likely a very important thing.