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A year of pain, and some growth

2019-12-13

2019 has been a strange year. In April, I underwent a retrospectively unnecessary surgery that caused me to suffer a level of physical and emotional pain, lasting more than six months, than I had ever experienced before. I went from being unrelentingly focused and productive, to not being able to summon the will to write a single line of code. I don’t want to give this excruciating experience any credit for where I have ended up today, so I will treat the resulting occurrences as purely incidental:

Productivity, coding, and burnout

It also disarmed bug reports. I don’t panic anymore when someone expresses dissatisfaction with a feature or dis-feature. I don’t panic to build new features or iterate on new versions. I’m not in a constant frenzy. I also don’t work nights and weekends anymore. This is actually unusual for me, since nights and weekends were to me, previously, the only time I’d ever work on side-projects. In fact, in my first career position as a software developer earlier in the decade, having finally exhausted the course of my small-time indie projects that were to make me rich, I was shocked to find out that the company I was to work for had closed offices on Saturday and Sunday! I thought, what lousy dedication! I never not worked weekends, prior to that. If I wasn’t working, I felt like I was failing. This turned out to be a tough mentality to shed.

Hiring, culture, and remote-first

What’s more, hiring locally is a huge constraint on access to talented people. Imagine you were browsing a website where you see a world map and tell the query box: “Give me the most talented software developers you can find—from anywhere.” And boom—the map erupts with red bubbles indicating the overwhelming amount of people that satisfy your criteria. But then you tell the website: actually, instead of searching the whole damn world, let’s limit this to a tiny 3 mile radius of people. At this point the website should, rightfully, ask you: mate, are you sure? What are you expecting to find with this query? But it obliges with your strange command, and filters the hundreds of thousands of results around the world, to like 5, in your local island-like radius. So yeah, local-first is quite strange.

I have seen that “founders” (a word which SV/SF culture has tainted, quite honestly, but to which I cannot find a better alternative) who prefer local-first tend to be more interested in the idea of what a company should be, rather than optimizing for results and productivity. That is, they tend to romanticize the idea of building a team, and having everyone forcefully show up at some physical coordinate, whereupon they are all chained to a computer or white board for eight or nine hours. They romanticize the idea of having a ping-pong table or snacks, because they’ve seen that’s what a lot of rich companies do. They fancy themselves CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs—and that this typically involves being as ostentatious as possible. Whereas, if your primary focus is building great software, it doesn’t really matter how or where it’s done.

Habits, lifestyle, and tweeting

Books, games, and arbitrary lists

Those were some words. Good.

It was hard to write about any of this stuff as it was happening, because it was all sort of brewing. But a year end review is a nice writing prompt. As far as progress goes, there’s really no more short-term low-hanging fruit. Everything I’m embarking on now requires the patience of watching a tree grow. 2019 was a tiny branch that today I saw protruding, and thought, hey, there’s something.

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