Productivity is a hot topic. It’s only logical we would want to maximise it, as the information growth and the pace of change is accelerating. There’s increasingly more things to do and learn, while it seems there’s less and less time to do it. I believe it’s most important to separate what’s important, and every now and then to have a day off. Instead of doing more, doing less. And the right things.

getting meaningful stuff done

Tracking, routines, focus, constraints. There’s more than enough approaches and methods on how to achieve maximal productivity. It has become somewhat of an industry. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I’d rather minimise repetitive and boring work, or avoid waste in general.

But there comes a point when squeezing all that time out of a day turns this habit detrimental.

The worst possible scenario is that one keeps going from one achievement to another...

Should I aim for specialisation, or be a generalist? Should I gather expertise on something specific, or go balls to the walls all-over-the-place? It’s something I’ve professionally contemplated for years already. Currently, I’m gravitating against the latter, as I see more positive sides to being a jack of all trades, than a master of one. Granted, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

a small identity

I try to avoid categorising or labelling myself. It leads to emotional investment on those ideas and inhibits considering new ones. Incorporating ideas into my identity makes them a part of me, and critique on them feels like a personal criticism on me. Those with strong opinions might argue this kind of approach as having no stance or backbone. But the point is to be able to give and receive critique and be reasonably malleable, resulting in self-improvement.

I view specialisation to be...

There’s this silly “action role-playing game”, which I’ve played countless of hours to date. It’s dumb-easy to get started with, but requires effort to master. Not that e-sports effort though. You don’t directly play against human players, but you can play in this ladder/leaderboard style, where your results are compared with others’. The best part of the game is, that I can play in pretty much any state of mind possible.

I can really concentrate, think, optimise and furiously abuse my mouse, and still have a challenge.
I can be near blackout drunk, mindlessly poking around my underpowered laptop keyboard and a mouse I picked up somewhere, and still have fun.

group effort

The best part of the game is the cooperative mode. Fire up Skype or something alike, start a conversation and launch the game. For the aforementioned reasons, the balance with gaming and conversation can sway. Which...

I just finished Neal Stephenson’s 900+ page book Cryptonomicon. I’ve since (and during the long read), been dwelling more on information security. Even though the book is fiction, it points out there’s been this hidden effort of espionage and information gathering, long before NSA’s recent accomplishments.

cryptonomicon

The book’s an epic story in two timelines, mixing historical events with fictitious ones. There’s fictitious interpretations of real people and unreal characters. It spans Europe, North America and East Asia, during the second World War and the end of the 90’s. There’s Alan “Türing” and Douglas MacArthur. Reagan and Yamamoto make an appearance, as do the world’s first digital computers.

The book’s main theme is cryptography, information security and wartime intelligence. There’s a bunch of characters, and some of them represent a regular dudes’s viewpoint from the...

Why is it that integrating into another system can be so tedious? Sometimes, the integration endpoints are backed by vast financial support and professional care. Too often, though, they’re a mess that’s just been pieced together in a hurry.

Larger companies like Google, Twitter, etc., have their shit together concerning this. A substandard API would be a sign of either low effort or immaturity. Also, it would cause a mess within customer service. Public APIs are generally OK, and getting better. The problem lies within those private ones where the integration is implemented ad-hoc. Many of these APIs (that I’ve seen) are more like a nightmare of arcane old techs, crackling communications channels and pompous colleagues on the other end.

estimating

Estimating the time required to implement an integration, even to a well documented system, can be difficult. There’s bound to be...

People are products of genes, upbringing, chance, etc. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be accountable for their actions, or that it’s all just destiny. But thinking that no one chose how they ended up as they did, makes it easier to understand or withstand them.

I’ve recently been thinking about what Sam Harris has to say about free will. His thoughts can be accumulated via podcasts, videos and of course the book titled “Free Will”. I was most intrigued by the fact that we exist in a state machine of sorts. And that even though we can consciously affect that state, it couldn’t have ended up in any other way.

This is one of those things that still keeps me thinking about it.

state

The universe, and therefore our minds, have a state at any given time. Sometime in the past, could you have decided and then done something differently? How much can be attributed to randomness? Quantum...

I’ve repeated the following quote before, and I’ll do it again:

“to understand is to perceive patterns” - Isaiah Berlin

I’m intrigued by this because of working as a programmer, after seeing Jason Silva’s many outputs, and after reading Raymond Kurzweil’s “How To Create A Mind” last year.

What Kurzweil’s does in the book is first he attempts to explain how the brain works and how the mind then emerges from it. Later, he proposes some techniques on how this could be digitally replicated and what philosophical and cultural conundrums that would create. I find both interesting, but to me, the part about what constitutes the mind is more thought-provoking.

connections

Kurzweil argues that the thinking mind emerges in the neocortex, with it’s approximately 300 million pattern recognisers. The pattern recognisers are then linked with each other, in a hierarchical grid of sorts.

Inputs...

Agile used to be the hottest buzzword for project planning and progression. Minimum viable product wasn’t an excuse for low quality shit. Some ideas are overused and misused, so much so that they’re losing their meaning. I’ll look into these two, as I’ve witnessed their usage most:

agile

Agile concepts were introduced in the 80’s, and around 15 years ago within the software industry. The “agile methodologies” then quite soon reached adoption within smaller companies. These companies would ridicule the enterprise world with notions of rigidness and waterfalls.

Scrum is an example of an agile framework with strict rules promoting agility. Following them too closely and dogmatically can be an contradictory to agile. Applying scrum orthodoxically is a challenge. At best, Scrum can promote easier approximation, planning and productivity. At worst, it’s a battle of schedules and...

I was watching “Going clear”, a documentary about the “church” of Scientology. It details the creation, growth and present state of the religion/cult. It’s a display of how people end up following ridiculous rules, religious or not.

The documentary consists of narrated history and a multitude of interviews from former top-level executives to public figures. Out of which, the likely most recognisable is Paul Haggis. These interviewees obviously no longer participate in those shenanigans. They are free to provide insightful commentary on how people end up in, stay and finally leave these groups.

Haggis summarised some of these thought patterns:

“We lock up a portion of our own minds. We avoid things that could cause us pain just if we looked. If we can just believe something then we don’t have to really think for ourselves, do we?” - Paul Haggis

dogmatism

Following rules and...

I subscribed to the gene testing service from 23andMe some time back, and have been inspecting the results during the last couple of weeks now. Overall, I find the results interesting. I’m slightly concerned about the privacy and security aspects of this kind of a service. Not so much from the technical standpoint of this particular site, but from the nature of the data itself. I am also unsure if the ROI for this (169 €) is what I was looking for. I did, however, buy myself some peace of mind.

I’m no biologist, but more of an engineer, and don’t pretend to be an expert about this stuff. I’ll do my best not to butcher the facts. The whole process takes a month or so, including the two-way shipping of a saliva collection kit and the analysis of the spit with some kind of a chip technology.

genetic information

The results list things like inherited conditions and genetic risk factors...