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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. ...

Luci Gutiérrez, from the linked article. Arthur C. Brooks, in his July 2019 Atlantic article Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think, confronts an uncomfortable truth: professional decline begins much earlier than most people expect. The core of Brooks’ argument is based on psychologist Raymond Cattell’s work from the 1940s, which distinguished between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence—analytical capacity, processing speed, and the ability to solve novel problems—peaks in one’s early thirties and then declines precipitously, which explains why many tech entrepreneurs achieve fame and fortune in their twenties but enter creative decline by age 30. ...

I have had the good fortune of meeting Scott several times at various conferences and the MVP Summits held at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle. Seeing him get emotional in this talk does not surprise me, nor is it unusual for him to criticize the very technology1 that his company promotes. He has always been an entertaining speaker and teacher. As it turns out, the TED format suits him perfectly. Or rather, the way that technology is utilized. ↩︎ ...

In the last year, a mindset shift and approach appeared as a very simple idea: just do one thing, that I want to do today. The one thing can be small or big, easy or labored, fleeting or long. I carve out time to go play drums for two hours, go for a bouldering session, do a shorter 20 minute run, read a page of a book, eat something I’m really excited about, and more. Even on the most difficult day, I can adjust and find the smallest thing that I am excited about and do it. ...