I started a new job as a software engineer last month.

It’s the first job I’ve ever had where all I need to do is write code. I don’t need to worry about finding customers, protecting the company from lawsuits, ensuring the product is the correct product to build, or making payroll.

All I need to do is write code.

This is the first time in my career where I can actually focus on the art of writing good code.

I came across this article from Simon Willison’s blog, and boy, there are a lot of great pieces of advice for folks in my position here.

As a junior engineer, there's simply no substitute for getting the first 100K lines of code under your belt. The "start over each day" method will help get you to those 100K lines faster.

You might think covering the same ground multiple times isn't as valuable as getting 100K diverse lines of code. I disagree. Solving the same problem repeatedly is actually really beneficial for retaining knowledge of patterns you figure out.

You only need 5K perfect lines to see all the major patterns once. The other 95K lines are repetition to rewire your neurons.

For a miracle to happen in your life all that is needed is your belief that the universe has acted on your behalf and for your welfare.

So, begin by keeping a journal where you note down all such instances in your life. This is stuff that you previously dismissed as a coincidence or perhaps did not notice at all.

For example, you remember an old friend you have lost touch with and determine to call him. And you receive an email from him later the same day. You forgot to make a reservation for the dinner with your husband’s boss and it turns out that he had an emergency, and the dinner has to be rescheduled. You go to your favorite restaurant and the dish you like is not available. The waiter suggests a substitute and you love it.

Constantly look, look, look for signs that the universe is dancing with you. You see a rainbow after a rain squall and your spirit lifts. You are trying to enter a busy highway and a driver slows down and flashes his light to let you know you can merge in. The latch on your screen door is not working and you make a mental note to get it fixed. The next day it is functioning perfectly again.

Record all of this in your journal. You will have a dozen or more examples each day.

For the last decade or so, I’ve operated under the assumption that the universe was indifferent.¹

I like this reframe a lot. Maybe the universe is indifferent, but that’s all the more reason to be grateful when things work out in your favor.

It is possible to be empowered to work how you want (Autonomy), to be leveraging your skills and expertise (Mastery), and to be proud of your role in a cause (Purpose / Why), and yet still dislike every day of your existence. More than contentment (ikigai), you need Joy.

Not only is this possible, it is common. There’s the classic example of the startup founder who wakes up six years into the journey, realizing she’s been surreptitiously brought to a boil, burned out, dreading each day, drinking too much “to turn my brain off so I can sleep” but actually because she’s deeply unhappy.

What I enjoyed about this article was the Venn diagram showing you need to find something at the intersection of joy, skill, and need. If you only intersect two of the three, you will fall into a specific trap.

For instance, if you have joy and need but not skill, you are falling for “indulgent failure”. Or if you want the recipe for classic burn out, take skill and need but leave out joy.

Many of us have looked back on historic events where people have bravely stood up against powerful adversaries and wondered, “what would I have done?” Now is your chance to find out. It did not just start with this election; it has been that time for a long time. If you’re just realizing it now, get your ass in gear. Make yourself proud.

Friends, I encourage you to publish more, indirectly meaning you should write more and then share it.

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

It’s a real gift to see my friends post stuff online. Go post more!

I got a message from my group chat with my boys. I looked at the Apple Intelligence-generated summary and it said:

(3) Flying too close to the sun, experiencing AI chaos.

I think this is my current favorite implementation of AI because it makes the messaging experience completely unpredictable.

Like, what could that summary actually be about?

What series of three messages could that unravel to?

Apple Intelligence (and most generative AI tools) work really well when the text is predictable. Business cases are perfect for these summarizations, because business talk is relatively predictable (what with its “action items” and “agendas” and whatnot).

A group chat filled with inside jokes is not gonna make sense to an AI unless it’s been trained to do so.

Which has led to one of the best messaging experiences I’ve experienced in decades: trying to guess from the AI-generated summary what the individual texts will actually say.

Some examples:

(3) Tired and wants candy before 8:45am, stuck on a song.

(3) Item unavailable due to legal holding period for used goods.

(9) Kirk on 8th, guest room set up, Sam may forgive Pat, Aldi groceries ordered.

• It's amazing how fast my mental health torpedoes when I get a terrible night of sleep.

• One parenting tip that's helped me cope with big emotions: reframe the situation from "you versus me" to "us versus the problem." It's not "why did you clog the toilet and let poop water overflow over the edge," it's "how can we make it so our toilet doesn't get clogged with an entire roll of toilet paper anymore?" Ask me how I came up with that specific scenario!

• Focus remains a challenge for me. I would love nothing more than to be able to set a schedule and stick to it, but when I go to sit down and honor the schedule, my body does everything in its power to stop me in my tracks. I can't tell why... maybe there's something more wrong with me, maybe I'm not disciplined enough. Maybe it's something else.

• Much of my 2024 experience involved adding a new entry to the list of questions that cycle in my inner monologue: "are these feelings just a part of the human experience, or is there a way to better way to process and cope with these feelings?"

• There's a quote by Yohji Yamamoto that goes, "Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy, copy. And at the end of the copy, you will find yourself." I wrote that down nearly two decades ago, and it's only in the last few months that I've started to understand what it means.

• My inability to manage tasks is what likely led to me getting sick going into my anniversary trip to New York. Everything is a choice, and sometimes, you gotta be okay with the consequences of the choices you make. I decided to spend an entire afternoon shopping and playing pull tabs at our old neighborhood bar with my wife instead of building graphics for a show I worked on. Then I had to stay up until 11pm building those graphics. Was it worth it? ...absolutely.

• If you ever want to see a masterclass in problem solving, go sit in the booth during a live television broadcast.

• Of all the terrifying places on earth, the one which still frightens me the most is sleeping in an unfamiliar bed.

• I'd like to further explore the intersection of fear and confidence.

• I spent a few days in New York, and it was fascinating to see the role that selfishness plays in that culture. In the midwest, cooperativeness is a necessity... if you were a dick to your neighbor in the summer, he might not wanna lend you firewood when you're freezing to death in the winter. In New York, everyone's selfishness stands in as a proxy for respect. People are curt not out of hostility, but as if to say "I won't take up any more of your time than I need to."

• I've known my wife for nearly 14 years now, and it took all this time to feel like I understand her. And now that I do, I love her even more, and I'm so lucky to have been married to her for a decade.

• I watched the entire "Mr. McMahon" docu-series on Netflix in a couple days (thanks Covid lol), and there was a moment in there where Shawn Michaels was talking about the kickback they were receiving from parents in the late 90s. His philosophy at the time was "if you don't like it, be a parent and ban your kids from watching it." Now that he has kids, he's realizing that you can't exactly do that. We can't shelter our kids from the realities of our society. There's so much good and so much bad that we are exposed to in our lives, and it's our job as parents not to shelter our kids from it, but help them learn how to navigate it.

• That being said: I loved the attitude era. I loved the campy stories of irreverent punks beating up their bosses, sticking up for themselves, meting out their own brand of vigilante justice. It is (and was) also super messed up. It can be both of those things.

• In the past, starting something new meant I should make huge, sweeping changes to my entire life. New job? That must also mean new exercise routine, new meal habits, and new hobbies. 36 year old Tim realizes that I can only bite off so much, and it would be more sustainable to focus on doing well at my new job, and then taking on new challenges once I am settled in.

• I like to think that if the famous writers throughout history had the same tech as us, they'd have their own RSS feeds and publish their own thoughts frequently on their blogs.

• There was a moment last week where I was grilling wings and watching my wife try to get our new moped running, my son argue about being outside (it was gorgeous out and I made him get off of Minecraft to enjoy it lol), and my daughter raise hell with the neighbor kids. I was listening to a new album, and reflecting on how much fun I had at work learning new stuff all week. That's when it dawned on me: "I've made it."

• I don't think my parents and teachers growing up were wrong to focus on teaching us skills we need to survive in this world. I just wish they'd also have taught us how to enjoy things, too.

• Dreamworks is more than capable of serving as stiff competition to the Disney empire. The Wild Robot was really good! I wish there were more studios cranking out enjoyable, emotionally-charged stories catered toward a family audience in animated form.

• RuPaul often says, "if you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else?" I find it difficult to love myself. All the techniques I've used to address my debilitating impostor syndrome involve some variant of tough love, and believe it or not: that never really helped me much. What's working for me currently is talking to myself the way I talk to my kids. Be positive. Focus on what you can change. Be humble and admit when you need help. And be there for others when they need you, too.

• I've struggled most of my life with feeling art. I look at a painting and can only see it at a purely technical level, as if knowing why an artist used a specific brand of acrylic paint explains the motivation behind the work. I've typically been more fascinated with how people do things rather than what message they're trying to convey. All this to say: I watched Jumanji again for the first time in years last week. I've seen that movie at least two dozen times, and I was legitimately spooked by it. Mid-20s Tim would watch that movie and think "I wonder how they pulled off that stampede shot inside the house?" Early-30s Tim would watch that movie and think, "were people in the 60s so into themselves that they didn't notice a child wandering into an active construction site and retrieving a treasure chest that was there in plain sight?" This time, I just felt myself as each of the characters. How it would feel to lose my parents in a car accident. How it would feel as a busy aunt who suddenly has to deal with two children. How it would feel to be a hunter whose only motivation is to murder the person who rolled the dice.

• I was raised to understand that love is showing someone how to avoid mistakes. As I reflect on that, I'd amend that belief to say that love is helping someone learn from their own mistakes and being there for them with firm support when they do screw up.

• Alexi Pappas once said, "Whenever you’re chasing a big dream, you’re supposed to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time, and crappy or not great a third of the time, and if you feel roughly in those ratios, it means you are in fact chasing a dream." I've been slowly working my way back into running shape, and I can confirm that I feel that way in those ratios.

• Running at 5:30a means I get to wander through my neighborhood and see everyone’s festive and spooky Halloween decorations instead of everyone’s political signs.

• One of the hardest aspects of being a software engineer is that the implementation details of your job change all the time. Did you know that in Ruby, if you pass variables into a method with the same name as the method is expecting (like a_method(property_1: property_1, foo: foo)), you can shorthand it to be like a_method(property_1:, foo:)? I learned that this week!

• If art is finding a way to express what is rattling around in your head to others, then maybe writing code is actually my artistic expression.

• When it comes to empathy, I've never struggled with the "getting into someone's mind" part. What I've struggle with is accepting that the other person's point of view is valid. And I'm still working on that.

System of a Down holds a very special place in my heart.

I was in seventh grade when Toxicity was released. I remember sitting in church on Good Friday a few months later and hearing the story of Jesus' execution on the cross. When my pastor, who was reading from the scriptures, got to the part where he shouts, "Father, why have you forsaken me?", my sister and I looked at each other and shared a knowing realization: "oh man, that's from the bible?"

I've been drawn to System mostly because of the instrumentals. Lyrics have not traditionally captured my attention when listening to music.

It took me a few years to discover that all the members of the band were Armenian-Americans. Until reading this book, I didn't give Armenia much thought. The last time I recall giving much consideration to the Middle East in general was in tenth grade world history class. I couldn't have picked out Armenia on a map if you had asked me.

Serj Tankian (the lead singer of System) recently released his memoir, and the title adeptly appends "of sorts" to that noun.

Yes, there are plenty of great stories in this book about Serj's experience with System of a Down, but I'd argue more than 25% of the book serves as a history lesson about Armenia for ignorant Westerners like me.

Even though I'm not much of a lyrics guy, it's hard to miss the humanitarian messages when they're shouted at you by Serj.

Like in "P.L.U.C.K.", from their debut self-titled album¹:

Revolution, the only solution,
The armed response of an entire nation,
Revolution, the only solution,
We've taken all your shit, now it's time for restitution.

Or "Cigaro" from Mezmerize²:

We're the regulators that de-regulate
We're the animators that de-animate
We're the propagators of all genocide
Burning through the world's resources
Then we turn and hide

Reading this book made so many of these songs come to life in a new way for me, especially reading of the horrible atrocities committed by the Turkish government. Serj really opens up about some deep, painful generational trauma that explains his drive for justice.

I also loved his reflection on what System means to him today. The closing chapter of the book talks about the 2023 Sad, Sick World show in Las Vegas. He went into the show feeling like System was nothing more than a cover band at this point, but came out of it feeling joy.³ I sure hope I can see them perform live one day.

If you're a System fan like me, I could not recommend this book any more highly. If it weren't for the fact that it's currently 6:15am, I would be blasting them in my house right now.

Collective action problem is the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to pursue their own interests. The essential work of every government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this dilemma, and the reason people hate the government is that not being able to do whatever you want all the time is a huge bummer. Speed limits help make our neighborhoods safer, but they also mean you aren’t supposed to put the hammer down and peel out at every stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.

Every Verge reader is intimately familiar with collective action problems because they’re everywhere in tech. We cover them all the time: making everything charge via USB-C was a collective action problem that took European regulation to finally resolve, just as getting EV makers to adopt the NACS charging standard took regulatory effort from the Biden administration. Content moderation on social networks is a collective action problem; so are the regular fights over encryption. The single greatest webcomic in tech history describes a collective action problem.

The problem is that getting people to set aside their own selfishness and work together is generally impossible even if the benefits are obvious, a political reality so universal it’s a famous Tumblr meme. 

In general, I don’t like to discuss politics on here. I figure if you’re reading my blog, you probably have a vague idea of what my political beliefs are.

But this endorsement of Kamala Harris isn’t just an endorsement of her and her politics. In fact, there is hardly any mention of her in here.

In fact, this endorsement is an endorsement for the concept of democracy.

The key part about Kamala is toward the end, which sums up why I’m gonna vote for her:

In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.

People love to say “the government is broken”, but often fail to ask any follow-up questions. You know, like "why is it broken" and "how can we fix it?"

When I see something broken, my first instinct is to figure out how it got broken in the first place. "Broken", by definition, implies there is a state of "functioning." If we want to "fix" it, we need to agree on what "functioning" means.¹

If we agree that our country is broken, then we need to agree on a vision for what a functioning country is.

When building software, there are plenty of excuses we could make as to why our system is broken. A junior engineer might blame the users. They're dumb, they're using it wrong, they don't understand the elegance of the solution we've built for them.

As you get more senior, you start to realize just how reductive and silly those arguments are. We can't control our users, and we will likely never understand them. But we can perform user testing and spend time with our customers. We learn how they actually use the software. We dig to uncover other problems they have so we can adjust our software to meet those needs.

I think what bothers me about our current political climate is that we are quick to jump to these reductive ideas which are proven to be ineffective. We have to work together and keep trying new things.

We're better than this. We all need each other, often more than we are willing to admit.

It’s a lesson I’m trying to impart on my kids. They constantly fight with each other, their feelings pouring out of them like a fire hydrant when they don’t get what they want.

I get it. It’s like The Rolling Stones said: “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try, you’ll find you’ll get what you need.”

We need America. We need to come together and curb our natural tendency toward hostility against anything that is different.

But even if you’re apolitical, I encourage you to read this excellent essay. It makes me proud to be an American at a time where it feels dangerous to be proud.

A need to “prove oneself” to internalized authority figures leads to things like climbing conventional status ladders, or staying in an unhappy marriage, or piling up as much money as possible to preserve the appearance of having “made it”.

What motivated Esther to do things like take a receptionist job at a film company, pick up her life and move to San Francisco, and risk her savings on her startup was something far more personal and idiosyncratic: a conception of the interests she wanted to explore, the people she wanted to meet, the products she wanted to create, the life she envisioned and wanted to build for herself—and, yes, the proof that she really could count on herself to do it.

This is super inspiring on so many levels.

It seems like life becomes a little more palatable once you figure out who you are and start leaning into that.