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Finally some good news for us old farts! Cognitive ability (probably) peaks between 50 and 60.

Last year, Ashley and a large team of scientists conducted an elaborate experiment on the effects of exercise on the mammalian body. In one test, Ashley put rats on tiny treadmills, worked them out for weeks, and cut into them to investigate how their organs and vessels responded to the workout compared to a control group of more sedentary rodents.1 The results were spectacular. Exercise transformed just about every tissue and molecular system that Ashley and his co-authors studied—not just the muscles and heart, but also the liver, adrenal glands, fat, and immune system ...

Sometimes we feel confusion going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It’s not some fancy abstract concept, but rather a fundamental human constraint. It’s not imagined, it’s there and we can feel it. Since we spend far more time reading and understanding code than writing it, we should constantly ask ourselves whether we are embedding excessive cognitive load into our code. ...

Brent Ozar’s article below resonates with my post-COVID experience as a conference speaker. From big national and international conferences to local meetups like the one I run, attendance has been dwindling following the hiatus. Of all the proposed reasons, I believe “people switched how they’re learning” is crucial; just think about YouTube, LLMs, and the plethora of free and paid online courses. Why Aren’t People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore? ...

This is the story of the world’s most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world’s biggest companies. But Python’s future wasn’t certain; at one point it almost disappeared. Python: The Documentary

The first-line treatment for ADHD is stimulants. Everything else in this post works best as a complement to, rather than as an alternative to, stimulant medication. In fact most of the strategies described here, I was only able to execute after starting stimulants. For me, chemistry is the critical node in the tech tree: the todo list, the pomodoro timers, etc., all of that was unlocked by the medication Notes on Managing ADHD ...

From roughly the late 80s until the mid-90s, every month I would visit the newsstand at my city’s train station, hoping to snag the single copy of BYTE Magazine that arrived in town (at least one other hunter was competing with me: I often won, but not always, which frustrated me tremendously). I understood little to nothing with my rudimentary school English, but I was too stubborn to give up. I credit BYTE Magazine as one of my significant English teachers. Flipping those pages was exciting, and, as unbelievable as it may seem today, back then the advertisements were just as captivating as the articles themselves. Granted, I was also reading Italian computing magazines, but most were copycats of the one authoritative source 1. ...

Let me tell you something that will happen after you become a manager: you’re going to mess up. A lot. You’ll give feedback that lands wrong and crushes someone’s confidence. You’ll make a decision that seems logical but turns out to be completely misguided. You’ll forget that important thing you promised to do for someone on your team. You’ll lose your temper in a meeting when you should have stayed calm. The real question isn’t whether you’ll make mistakes; it’s what you do after. ...

Like Herman below, I exercise daily. A one-hour brisk walk in the early morning on weekdays before sitting at the desk, and four weekly sessions of bodyweight strength training (known as calisthenics nowadays). If it’s going to be a scorching hot day, I’ll immediately follow the walk with the training, take a shower, have breakfast, and then start work. In the cooler season, I’ll stop working at noon and exercise before lunch instead. During the weekend, I often take long walks, go hiking, and rest. ...

I was hiking the Narrows trail along the Rockcastle river in Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest, slipped off the edge of the trail and broke me ankle. There was no cell phone service so I ended up butt-crawling a ways on the trail (crutches I hacked together made things worse with weak wood out there) until I finally raised a faint signal. Texted 911 (so thankful they have this service for the deaf), helped their volunteer rescue squad locate me by boat on the river below and their wonderful firemen hauled me down the mountain with good cheer. ...