Mythical Man Bullet, No Silver Month, and Other Little Things
Mythical Man Bullet, No Silver Month, and Other Little Things
This week I was able to read way more, especially technical books and concepts, and I also focused on having some quality time (which has been kind of rare lately).
The Quality Time
So, I spent some time helping a friend of mine get started with programming. Most people would consider her "tech-savvy," but still, having to teach someone who has never taken a class on data structures or logic how to actually build something was a challenge.
In the end, she was able to start doing some LeetCode questions on the same day. This seems to support the idea that I am a great teacher and probably the real point here that having a good understanding of math, combined with someone to translate a few concepts in between, can lead to very quick programming learning.
The Mythical Man-Month
I finally gave myself enough time to read this classic, and it was a rich read that was both very surprising and a little disappointing.
First, I believe a lot of my points had already been written by the book's author when he said "everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it" so I will not touch on a few of them here.
Aside from that, I find surprising that a lot of the things said in the book (even specific figures of speech) are very common to hear in my work experiences, despite the fact that most of them occurred in an entirely different language (and 40 years appart). Also, even though I had already seen most of these concepts, the author's depth and ease with these topics is truly shining to me.
This brought me down in a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole looking into closely related concepts and laws. While a lot of them seem "obvious", they were mostly new to me, contrasting with most of the experiences outlined in the book.
No Silver Bullet
This is my biggest takeaway of this week. The whole idea of not being able to 10x productivity with just a single change just sits wrong everything the majority of the market says nowadays, and even a little bit with me. WHICH IS EVEN MORE SUPRISING seing that i am someone that cannot undestand how people think its worth it to use AI tools. But maybe I just need a cleansing from this whole AI-driven environment that the market is becoming.
My Telemetry
Last but not least, I am starting to redesign how my entire os setup works (right now with a focus on telemetry). I'm mainly taking my old experiences and the things I built for my ricing into account to create a more resource and dev friendly project.
Being able to drop my PC's resource usage even further is becoming a big thing. For example, right now, I have music, a discord call, my browser, and the text editor I'm using for this, all open, and I am topping out at 12% CPU usage (with lows of 3% don't ask me how) and 40% RAM usage, using a i5-1145g7 processor and 16GB of RAM.
While I actually enjoy seeing the numbers go down, I think most of it is just to prove to myself that even though the last few months were spent fighting against React, React Native, and TS to build a "blazingly fast" app, I can probably do a better job, faster, and without as many mistakes if I just move away from that ecosystem.