dharmapure

Incredible overview of Vim abbreviations, I kind of knew you could do things like this but seeing it in action was great. I've been wanting to try out Luasnip but I realize I can do a large amount of what it offers just with abbreviations!

Thank you for the post-mortem Colin and I hope you get some sleep!

I like Pelican. It's Python and has been around for forever so I don't have to roll my own. I realized after a while that I was rewriting Pelican for no particular benefit and the things I thought were limitations of the tool were just my inability to see how to interface with it.

There is no benefit whatsoever in me rolling my own tech unless it actually allows me to do something I can't do otherwise, and a lack of imagination has been my biggest limiting factor.

Once I saw this I also stopped trying to reimplement Django from scratch too. But, doing these custom and also abandoned own website rolling projects did teach me a lot about how Django and Pelican work!

Dear sarvasvkulpati,

I appreciate your question! It demonstrates a curiosity about the nature of computing itself. Some will surely say that this idea is unreasonable or not practical. But, if this is an idea that speaks to you, I encourage you to try your hand at making a prototype of your idea! This is the hacker way. And being in college you have time, peers who are equally enthusiastic, energy, and the help of professors. Regardless of the practicality, all interesting progress comes from people who ask questions like this, and see what comes of trying to make something interesting.

In college I had a peer who convinced us to all use Gentoo Linux because it was the most hardcore Linux. I bricked my computer three times trying to use it and ultimately switched away from using Gentoo but learned a ton about Linux that I use to this day on a less hardcore distro. I still use Vim even though it's more complicated than other editors. I also went through a period where I tried learning every programming language I could find to see which one was "the best". I ultimately found a few I liked the most. None of these were efficient at first, but eventually led to highly cool results.

Ask for help if you get stuck. I bet something interesting will come of it, even if you just learn what doesn't work.

Something something "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Your idea is really cool. Stay hungry and awesome. Cheers to you.

Procrastination is fun and complicated. "Just Do It" doesn't seem to help much for me. After reading more I've found a number of reasons for procrastination that may be helpful depending on the cause:

Is the task too vague? If so, making it more concrete helps. "Do taxes" is impossibly vague and scary and the brain rebels. "Make a list of all expenses this year" is better but still large. This is the most common actually helpful advice I've found. But also

Do you not actually care about the task? Having a grand overarching goal for your career/life can help you make sure the task is worth doing. Or for something like taxes, you can say "this helps me achieve my goal because if I don't pay my taxes I'll probably go to jail."

Do you not believe your project will succeed? This is a subtle one I only recently discovered. If I'm working on an app or a business idea and I get to the point where I don't believe it has a chance, I strongly lose motivation. Some say this is a survival mechanism - if a hunter gatherer had a plan to kill a wooley mammoth with a spear up close and that'd probably result in death, a strong sense of "procrastination" could be a lifesaver.

Is it resistance to something that threatens your identity? This is a fun one - maybe you've internalized that you don't finish projects (I've had some of this I think). Finishing a project would threaten your "identity" of a non finisher, and some part of the brain _hates_ things that threaten it's identity. I think this one you just have to figure out a way to push through, and give that part of the brain fodder to convince itself that it's identity is not of "doesn't finish projects". The same can be true of earning money, and other kinds of success.

I had an epiphany of sorts about this when working on a freelance project with a client who was particularly organized. They had a kanban board split up into Inbox (ideas and incoming features and bugs), Backlog (accepted tasks), In Progress (doing right now), Review (for others to look at), and Complete columns.

At the beginning of a sprint, the project manager sat down for about 10 minutes and looked at all the cards in the inbox and decided if any should be moved to the backlog. He then rearranged the cards from most to least important.

This prevented the need to think at all when working on the project - I just took the top card from the backlog and put it into in progress until it was done.

I realized, why don't I do this for my own projects too? Since my own projects aren't paid, I for some reason think they should just be able to be done without organization. I've implemented this same system in Trello for arbitrary projects and it seems to work well when I use it. Also nice that it makes it easy to collaborate if relevant but that isn't required.

It's a hard problem though - figuring out how to "Just Get Things DoneTM" is a skill that requires trial and error to figure out what you'll actually stick to, but in some ways is the most important thing to figure out.

I also highly recommend the book The One Thing - my coach recommended it to me and though it started a little fluffy the second and third sections were solid. In short, doing less helps a lot.

The Twelve Week Year is another book with some good ideas - instead of planning long into the future, plan only on a quarterly basis, and have that quarter align with your grand vision for the future.

Happy to chat more about this, as it's a problem I've wrasseled with a lot too as a self-employed freelancer. My email's in my profile.

Speaking of getting hit by a bus, a friend and I are considering a consulting service that could help mitigate bus factor risk - would love any feedback on this idea.

We've both noticed that for nontechnical owners of small businesses that have a heavy software component, that owner is completely at the mercy of their lead developer. If that person leaves or "gets hit by a bus" their company might just die, especially since they don't really know what a Github is or how to log into anything. My friend is such a nontechnical person and hired someone to build his SaaS app. He has felt this risk himself but we wonder if he's just particularly perceptive.

The service would be, for a retainer fee per month a developer sits in on your planning calls, looks over all code committed to your repo, and over time documents how everything works and stores that documentation in a system outside of the company (maybe an external wiki or something). Then if your lead developer leaves, we'd help you find a new one and then train them on the codebase using the documentation created.

I'm a freelancer. Literally every job I've gotten has come from "luck". The trick has been increasing my "luck surface area" by putting myself out there.

How I got each of my current clients:

Person in my college class gets a job and two years later contacts the computer science department at my college and asks if they "know any freelancers." I had made it known to my professors that I was going into freelancing and they connected us. Client for 3+ years.

Joined a coworking space and chatted with a guy. Mentioned I do freelance work. Built rapport. 3 weeks later I'm siting in the coworking space and he comes up to me and says "I am getting a full time job and can't keep this client. Do you want them?" Client for 3+ years.

I was a teacher's assistant at a college class about software engineering. Made friends with a student. 3 years later his friend was graduating and interested in freelance. The first student connected us. I offered to meet for coffee with the younger student, told him everything I know about freelancing. 3 months later he contacts me and says "I decided not to freelance, but this client wants a site, do you want them?" Primary client for the first half of 2018.

I discovered a podcast I enjoyed by a thought leader in the consulting space about how to find a niche. I sent him an email saying "Hey I liked your podcast. My niche is Django development." Later another person who does Django work contacts this thought leader, he shows this person my website. This person joins my mailing list. I see that person has joined and so sent him an email saying hello what up. We connect over the fact that we both do Django. 3 months later he says "my primary client needs more help with a Django site." This is how I got my current primary client.

This doesn't really work as a short term strategy but the quality of clients compared to say Upwork is night and day. Provide value, make connections, get lucky.

In the book Antifragile Nassim Taleb cautions against medical care unless it's truly necessary. He argues that since so many things can go wrong in a hospital (you could get sick from someone else, mistakes could be made, etc), only go if the benefits outweigh the risks.

And so if you have cancer, it's probably worth the risk. But if you have something that could just go away naturally, that's got a higher expected value of positive outcome.

He is in favor of subtractive medicine - many harms are caused by adding such things as smoking, sugar, preservatives, etc, and instead of adding medicine or surgery, remove the elements that the body isn't evolved to tolerate and see if it heals itself.

He gives the example of how he hurt his back weight lifting. The doctor proposed surgery. He just waited and his back healed itself, and in a way that is now more robust than if he had had surgery.

As with all things, it's not a black and white kind of decision, but this mindset has worked well for me as a heuristic for health.