After a rather long hiatus and working from Spain, I’m back in London. I had a couple of conversations that, together with the state of the world, left me pondering and preoccupied, if what’s been happening these past years hasn’t been enough.

One conversation was about climate change. The other one, about nutrition. As different as the topics are—though interconnected—the two conversations followed a single thread: a thread of doubt, scepticism, and denial of evidence. There was a conflict inside of me, a certain cognitive dissonance, I respect the interlocutors, they’re intelligent, well-read, and reasonable, in other topics I could trust their insight.

These conversations revived some fears. I’m afraid I could become one of those old men who turned hateful and sour, out of touch, enclosed in a bubble while rejecting the present. I’m also afraid of being so fundamentally wrong that I can’t even recognise it nor myself, immutable, defending my identity over reality. Being wrong doesn’t scare me, what scares me is becoming a person that, faced with strong evidence, chooses to reject it and double down, specially if my choices can hurt others, or the world.

If it can happen to people I respect, it can happen to anyone, it could easily happen, and could be happening, to me, my friends, my family.

As surprising as it may sound, I’ve been writing a tiny language at work. It’s not the kind of thing I typically do, but the possibility appeared to investigate how to improve an internal tool UX, and having a code editor and a custom language was the ideal way to do it.

I’m not an expert on building programming languages or integrating web IDEs. On one hand, it’s been a bit scary, on the other hand, I've been enjoying the learning process a lot and the feeling of being “in the zone” this week has been great. Learning about parsers and compilers was on my learning list for a long while, which makes this research exciting, I can have my cake and eat it too.

The scary part is that I’m acutely aware that I'm not knowledgeable about the topic yet, which means that I’m bound to make plenty of mistakes, discover better ways to do things and change my mind—and the code—a dozen times. That’s also what makes it exciting, though. In a way, it’s like playing.

Here’s an example of the scary feeling of not knowing enough: I already got to the point of considering my current approach as flawed, and envisioning better alternatives that will still be flawed. At the same time, my approach is more than enough for the use case and time, it doesn’t require writing a complex programming language or a language server.

Happy new year!

This year has started with a flare up of a lower back injury from last year. The pain was intense enough to wake me up at night, radiating, burning and forcing me to seek a better posture that didn’t exist. I thought it was recovered, trained relatively light and without pain, but after the workout it appeared again. I need to get serious about the injury, with proper rehabilitation and thought; otherwise it’ll happen again, and I won’t be able to go back to normal training.

The injury made me think about the chronic pain in my neck. It’s been there since I was a kid, with its ups and downs. Some days I won’t notice it unless I pay attention, some days noticing anything but the pain is the real challenge, but it’s almost always there. As I write, I feel it in the centre of my skull, pulsating, biting my neck, blurring my thoughts, attempting to crawl between my eyes. I wonder what it would feel like to get out of bed in the morning and discover that it has gone away.

Overall, there are a few things that impact my pain positively: being active, working out—strength and mobility—and not being too stressed, anxious or sad. I imagine that’s why it hurt way more in my teenage years, and it’s usually manageable nowadays.

When I was a kid, I could sit down for hours on end playing video games. Nowadays, sitting for an hour makes me uncomfortable, my neck starts to hurt, or my back gets stiff. Working as a software developer doesn’t help, I’m deskbound.

In the past, I spent a lot of time researching the perfect ergonomic chair, how to sit properly and adjust my environment. My idea back in the day was that sitting for hours should be comfortable, after all, that’s what lots of people do. A second hand Herman Miller was my first ergonomic chair, after that, a Steelcase and I can confirm that they do help in enabling you to sit comfortably longer, but there’s a cost. You’ve probably seen the many headlines about sitting too much being harmful, some more dramatic than others, but the point stands: sitting for hours straight or a high volume of sitting is not healthy.

Ergonomics and Repetitive Stain Injuries

On top of that, while ergonomics matter to a degree, there’s no perfect posture one can hold forever pain free and in a healthy way. The best posture is the one that changes frequently. When sitting, it’s okay to slouch, to lean to one side of the body, to sit upright with 90 degrees angles…most postures are fine as long as we change them regularly, and the body often tells us when with discomfort. If I sit “ergonomically” for a long time, I’m going to feel uncomfortable, and will want to slouch or lean to a side, and when I stay in those postures, I’ll feel discomfort again and change. The idea is not to force it and flow.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been working mostly with Python codebases. On top of just the language, add to that things like pandas and Apache Spark for data processing, which I’ve never used before. Let me tell you, I feel uncomfortable, deeply out of my element. Thankfully, most of the work have been done via pairing or shadowing a teammate.

I was reflecting about this unpleasant feelings. They come with the territory of learning new things, and beyond them lie new knowledge and skills. I’d never learn anything if I’d avoided the uneasiness of not being in control, of not being familiar with things, of not knowing.

During my pairing sessions, I noticed that I had a hard time looking at the whole. My attention and even my vision were narrow, as if I had been wearing blinkers, and could only hold a couple of files—or just a few functions—in my mind’s eye, everything else slipping from it. ‘What was the file we just changed a few minutes ago, where’s this function being called for the tenth time, how is this done in Python again?’ My brain seems to be constantly scrabbling in a sea of ideas and thoughts, looking to connect far away strands or conjure up new pathways from a primordial void.

There are layers to becoming more comfortable over time. I’m reminded of the typical Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Until I get the more “mechanical” aspects down, it’s difficult to easily think about higher level concepts. It’s the same thing with learning a musical instrument, you can’t really improvise or play a song if you’re struggling with the chords or how to place your fingers correctly. At the same time, since I’ve been doing a bit of everything, it’s more of a cake slice rather than one layers at a time. Furthermore, on top of the more mechanical or coding layers, the layers of the architecture and business permeates everything I do.