I’m spending next weekend away racing bikes. Don’t expect an email but have an excellent weekend.

Notebooks for Coders

I learned very early on in my career that I’m not very good at thinking when I’m at a computer. When I have my code editor open, I’m in a “function mode” where I write stuff that does something. When my brain hits that mode, there’s not much creative energies flowing around. – Juha-Matti Santala

Agreed. This week I had to think about offsite regular backups across multiple different infrastructure points from Digital Ocean running a Laravel app and a different droplet running WordPress, plus our Kubernetes stack running in Google’s infrastructure. I did some research, then went and sat on my deck for 30 minutes writing down different options and thinking through how we’d setup the infrastructure to run them all.

I use my notebook daily to think about tasks at work and it makes the systems I build far better than if I just started writing code.

Should and Want

Often, when we say “should,” we’re expressing an underlying value. Maybe it’s a value that you hold, or maybe it’s a value that you’ve been conditioned to believe you should hold. – Every Should Is a Burden

I especially like the recognition that we’ve been conditioned to believe that we should want/do some things. I grew up conditioned in the Christian faith by fairly conservative parents, which comes with a huge amount of burdens about who I should hang out with, and how I should behave. Decades of watching “church” people break all those ideas with their behaviour while their victims were thrown under the bus and in some circumstances told they were no longer welcome in the church has mostly broken me out of all the shoulds church put in me.

I think something closely related to this is the idea that we want something. I talk to people all the time that want to blog or write a book. But they don’t want either, they want to have written and be successful at it. The don’t dream of Friday mornings looking for some ideas to grab on to that are meaningful, they dream of the author tour or getting to sit quietly and write because they have the money to do it without interruptions.

If you really do want something, then you show that by sitting down and doing it. Yes some seasons of life make it hard, like when your kids are really young, but most of us have decades of time where the only reason we haven’t done those things we wanted to is that it was hard and we didn’t choose to do hard things.

Pathways

In The End of Average the author introduces The Pathways Principle which says that there are many valid pathways to an end goal and that the one that works for you depends on you. Your experience, resources, tenacity, and random chance all combine to build whatever pathway will get you to your end goal.

It also says that we incorrectly assume that the pathway to our goals is a well blazed trail that others have followed and if we simply do what someone else did we will get the same result. This is how we have so many influencer’s selling their one course to achieve what the influencer has.

Yes if you’ve been successful on YouTube you are more likely to have an idea of what it takes to be successful, but that doesn’t mean the path you’re selling is the one that will work for everyone.

This idea is why I try to frame any advice I give as “this worked for me” and encourage people to take what works for them and toss out what doesn’t. Just because I like Obsidian doesn’t mean you should use it. If you found Scott Scheper’s book useful and you take better notes with deeper thought behind them, I’m happy for you. Take his advice and use it, don’t take mine if you think I’m out to lunch.

Even worse than when we take the advice from a field expert in their field, is when we confuse expertise in one field with expertise in another field¹. Why does a rich person know how to run a government? I’m an avid cyclist and have 30+ years of experience so I can speak to many cycling related things, but don’t listen to me about gymnastics. I have no clue how to build a body suited to that sport.

If you’re seeking out success in a field, listen to an expert in that field. Take what works for you, toss out what doesn’t work and don’t feel bad about it.

1. The Death of Expertise is all about this ↩︎