Today we look at writing tips, wallet politics, and figuring out where your bottlenecks are.
Some writing tips
Oliver Burkeman has a few writing tips for us this week. I like the first one the most, the right stuff will come. Waiting for something perfect is merely procrastination disguised as good work. Write down what you've got and revise.
You can't vote with your wallet
Cory Doctorow argues that you can't vote with your wallet because the wallets of the rich are so much larger than your wallet that the vote you made won't even be seen at all next to their massive vote.
At the very least, you can't only vote with your wallet. You need to get out there and participate in politics and movements. Nora Loreto discussed this in Take Back the Fight, that we need to get back to forming groups and working together to make politicians recognize our needs. Though Bregman also noted that we have a hard time forming these coalitions now because everyone must virtue signal as hard as the most extreme position held by anyone. You can't just fight poverty, you also must align and be as militant about trans rights or veganism.
The bottleneck isn't what you think it is
While this is programming specific, it's a great article on finding bottlenecks. I think about this at work. AI has helped me get some big features done, but the bottleneck is still my validation of the problem.
I have security issues cropping up that drive emergency work. I have security issues I know about but can't get back to with a full day or two so I can focus on them and deploy them across our entire stack in one big go. Any time I can look at them, it's 2 hours to the end of the day and I can't sit on it and test them.
The bottleneck is rarely writing code. It's my time to understand issues and then validate any code meets all the requirements we have.
