2024-04-19: Checking in, Coding Hacks, In the Zone
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did At Work
1. Hacked on Code
I’m never really sure of the value me hacking on code. I’m a pretty crappy coder, but I know when it could potentially save time, and it drives me crazy to see someone — or be someone — repetitively doing something a computer could do better and faster. It’s also reproducible, it leaves a record of what I did, and (for a limited set of people), it’s a good way to express, document, and share an action. But I love coding a little too much, and I have definitely used it as a procrastinatory diversion (cough lifehacks cough). Large language models have made the real world cost-benefit analysis of “hacking out a quick piece of code” much closer than my imaginary calculations. So, for instance, for the Lotus Dependencies🄽 proposal for FIL-RetroPGF-1🄽 round, I’m finding it much more comfortable (and relatively fast) to do much of the manual work in slapped-together aider🄽-supported Python. It’s all in this repo. (If you want to see how AI-supported coding works, the git log may be interesting to you.
2. Zoned Out
The other (mixed) benefit of coding is that I’m pretty much in the zone when I do it. That’s good for having the feeling of getting something done. Not sure it always leads to productivity, and sometimes it means that I find a whole day has gone by without me noticing, or tending to other parts of my life.
3. Checked In
I did the rounds of a few people, just seeing how they’re doing, checking in on stuff that I know was trouble for them. I think the world is divided into people who do this, and people who don’t! I used to be someone who didn’t, but it’s such a good exercise. Liz Henry🄽 is a marvel at it. I used to have a habit of mailing a thank you to someone every day, and it was a good practice. Maybe I should start that up again.
TIL
- Okay, it’s not much for you, but I ended up learning a lot about how go downloads modules. I’ve never coded in Go, but its the lingua franca of the Filecoin universe and I feel its siren call.
Link Du Jour
- Ooh, your other favourite daily newsletter, Money Stuff, now has a podcast. Here’s an RSS feed for it.