Aaron Gunderson
Pro tip when applying for jobs. Export to PDF. It makes it much easier for people to read on the other side and you won’t send all your Microsoft Word edit history in with your submission, this is pretty key.
Farmers market this morning ended with “harvest soup” tonight. Apples, celeriac, sweet potatoes, squash, onions and a little bacon.
Fought my thinkpad too much the last few days. Can’t get Ubuntu to run stable on it right now. Freezes completely. A computer workers Halloween nightmare.
Great tribute to Guido. Python was one of my first serious languages and I always enjoyed it. Back to writing it after a break and it’s growing on me again. blog.dropbox.com/topics/co…
Good friends challenge you to be better. Find good friends and keep in touch. Life is better with solid relationships and it is a better long term plan than to just work hard.
Fun night eating too much with friends and playing board games! Played splendor and Coup a bunch. I want to find time to play Manhattan Project again soon.
Not every day needs to have a big event or involve burning through a to do list. Sometimes it’s okay to make a just a little progress and it’s okay to sometimes get nothing done too. We are in it for the long road it’s not all a sprint.
Consume Less, produce more.
Consume less, produce more. Modern culture is driven a lot by consumption. One push I’ve tried to do over the last year is to produce more and consume less. This includes writing, drawing and photographing instead of scrolling, cooking food over eating out, writing code and making projects over passive consumption and more. I’ve found it super valuable, I still consume too much news and twitter but I’ve been doing well to make a conscious effort and I enjoy the results. I encourage you to try the same.
I listened to the How I Built This podcast today about Milk Bar and the founder sounds really cool and the food sounded delicious. Looked up the reviews in Harvard and they’re “meh”. Is it worth money or a lot of hype?
Pair programming, configuring or writing takes a lot of energy for me but it can be super helpful. It’s especially powerful it for complex infrastructure, detailed reports and sharing knowledge of how to interact with or work in a system.
Writing down your steps as you make changes and tweak a procedure is super valuable. Turning steps into a text playbook or a script allows you to pull pieces together and convince yourself you are doing what you need.
On a small team with lots of active projects it’s really easy to get spread thin and have too much work in progress. When you have a chance take a day and burn down the to do list. This clears a lot of mental space and is valuable for moving projects forward long term.
Offseason Travel
This weekend we are headed to the Cape and it’s so much better than in season. I’m not a huge beach fan but when it’s out of tourist season it’s so much more relaxing.
Hiking, beach towns and more are drastically improved by less crowds if you are comfortable with slightly tweaked activities and prepping for more variable weather.
Exercising, stretching, eating well, putting in focused work can all be painful but in the end are good for you. It can be really hard to remember this. This is where good habits come in. It’s hard when you fall out of the habit. What else is painful but good for you?
When debugging a problem make sure you test your assumptions, especially when stuck. I just spent a while debugging something I “did” not working until I eventually realized I hadn’t done it at all.
Some tips for code reviews! www.agundy.com/2019/10/1…
Come work with me at Skylla Technologies www.linkedin.com/jobs/view…