On The Basics
Learn to read.
Learn to read books, not online bat shit, not on the mobile phone, not on a screen. The worst book is better than the best blog because of the editorial process.
In a world where no one reads, reading books will give you expert knowledge in a subject in a matter of weeks.
Take advantage of incremental improvement. The compound gains of reading a little every day. Reclaim your capability to focus, you are not a caveman.
Learn to write.
“It isn’t enough to read, you also have to write, and […] you should write every day. It’s a good idea for anyone who wants to develop themselves intellectually. Even a half an hour a day, that’s 180 hours a year. That’s a lot of thinking, because writing is thinking.
If you can think, and speak, and write, you are absolutely deadly. Writing is thinking formalized. You gain the ability to think by first learning to write very, very carefully. Then, when you can write effectively, you can do anything you want, and no one will stop you.” — Jordan B. Peterson
“You don’t know what you think till you read what you have written.” — C.S. Lewis
Know the basics of your professional field.
Whatever your field is, just make sure you know its foundations.
For web development it might be something like the following:
- HTTP protocols and how caching works.
- Vanilla HTML/CSS/Javascript and a couple of scripting languages (pick your poison here).
- Technical debt. More on this in Development.
- Basic design principles (web development is primarily UI, so far): contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity.
- Diagrams. I think visually so this is paramount in my tool belt.
- Decision making and problem solving techniques.
- Systems thinking. Nothing exists in isolation, everything is part of something bigger. Understand how systems behave.
Start by making your bed.
“Start your day with a task completed. If you want to change your life and may be the world, start off by making your bed. The simple act of making your bed can give you the lift to start your day and provide you the satisfaction to end it right.” — Admiral William H. McRaven
Wear sunscreen.
“If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. […]” — Mary Schmich
This is a general piece of life advice that I relate to. I like to think it is universal, but perhaps it is a generational thing.
First things first.
Do the most important things first as the day will unravel with complications as it goes by.
Do not lie.
This is not the same as telling the truth, which may compel some to share unpleasant facts without cause or reason. Lying is the highway to hell, quite literally, as lies compound in life. The most valuable asset of a person is their word; be true to it. Never lie. Man up.
Lying also has costly effects around us, requiring far more resources to undo than to simply tell the truth.
“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” — Brandolini’s law
Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.
Ron Swanson (Parks and Recreation)
We can’t multitask. Our brains can’t multitask. We can only do one thing at a time. We can switch between tasks, but that is less efficient than focusing on one thing at a time. It has been proven that performing tasks sequentially takes less time than doing them in parallel (multitasking), on both micro and macro scales. This is how I work.
For some reason we (people and companies) insist on multitasking, delaying projects and wasting time and resources.
Chance favours the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” — Seneca
Humans do things as badly as possible but not worse.
This is what we call optimization. Be aware because we live at the limit. It is an strategy that works pretty well… until it doesn’t. When it doesn’t it is usually because we crossed the crap line. An expert is someone that has failed many times. That helps to estimate the crap line in projects.
Convenience is the root of all evil.
Convenience is the root of all ill effects. If something is convenient it certainly has a hidden and expensive cost to you. There is no such a thing as a free lunch, but when the lunch pretends to be free, it certainly will be costly.
The examples are many: convenient food is always bad food, convenient transport is always expensive transport. Convenient is certainly the highest price tag, and the sneakiest. In code as well: whenever we do something because it is convenient for us, it will certainly be bad for the project.
“Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).” — Jordan B. Peterson
Only renegades innovate.
Innovation is pushing the boundaries. Only nonconformist people, selfish individuals, egotistical and renegades behave like that. Only they have the drive to change things, perhaps just because they don’t like them. Whatever their motivation, they are the engines of change. Everyone else (the well-adjusted bunch) goes along with whatever is settled.
Beware the wheel of time.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” While it is debatable in the grand scheme of things, it is pretty accurate in a smaller set up of a company.
People have only one face.
Normally people have only one behaviour mode. Expect to be treated by someone the way that person treats others. Pay attention to how people treat others to know what to expect from them.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Beware of those with good intentions for others, as there are no limits to what someone can do to others for their own good.
Your skills are limited in number and across time.
Hard and soft skills are distributed unevenly over a lifespan. The older you get, the more your skills become soft. Young people have many hard skills but few soft ones. Later in life, people become more important than at the beginning. This is why our skills shift from hard to soft as we age.
The tardiness paradox.
In any time-sensitive event (a meeting, a date, picking someone up, delivering software), if you arrive on time, someone else will likely be late, and the entire thing will be delayed. If you are late, knowing someone else will likely be late, everyone else will arrive on time, and you will appear bad, careless, and unprofessional. Don’t rely on others’ actions to guide your own, especially when their agendas are independent of yours.
Generalized Metcalfe’s law.
I expanded the law to encompass all kinds of systems: “The complexity of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of relationships in the system.” This explains the oversized cost of running a company versus its size, viral infections in a population, software projects and code complexity, team efficiency with number of members, etc.
90% of everything is crud.
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Shirky principle
Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.
This is no longer recommended, at least for large public APIs. Be conservative in what you send, sure, but don’t accept garbage. Customers will depend on what you do, not what you say. If you accept things outside your spec, that becomes the spec, making it much harder to change implementations or update usage later without breaking users. Provide specific, helpful errors for what you don’t accept.
Outside of coding, this is a pretty good rule.
For many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
A small amount of people create most of the work, value, problems, crime, etc. Be that person. Or recognise them and get out of their way.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence. — Hanlon’s razor
A variation of this thought led me to realize that the incompetence of many large corporations doesn’t stem from the bad intentions of managers and leaders, but from the emergent flaws of systems where everyone has competing objectives. Organizations, with their people and rules, behave like beings capable of making their own decisions.
What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
Although this is perhaps one of the joys of life: to engage in pointless discussions.
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
The burden of evidence in a debate rests on the claim maker, and the opponent can dismiss the claim if this burden is not met. — Hitchen’s razor
All things being equal, the simplest explanation is most likely the right one.
Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. When two or more explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable. Explanations should never multiply causes without necessity. — Occam’s razor
Everyone specializes in his own area of weakness.
Rothbard’s Law
It is a basic compensation mechanism. What is your specialization?
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.
Blaise Pascal
“Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.” — Benford’s Law of Controversy
And this irrational behaviour is the source of so many discussions about technologies.
We choose with our emotions (type 1 brain) and justify afterwards with our logic (type 2 brain). This is likely what drives marketing and sales.
In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
“The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.” — Dilbert principle
Due to the reward structure of society, an increase in compensation for a technical person often results in their promotion to management. Being good at something technical doesn’t make you good at something social. This process fuels the destruction of technical knowledge in experienced individuals, as it incentivizes the shift to management. The process relies on a constant supply of newer engineers with fresh technical knowledge, but little experience. Managers transfer their hard skills for soft ones, so they can lead less-experienced employees. It works, but it limits the technical knowledge in the system.
Set you morals straight. What makes you always try your best?
Luke: Is the dark side stronger?
Yoda: No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.
The four pillars of happiness.
Faith, Family, Friends and Work. In that order.
You need faith to transcend, to make you small and the universe large and free you from the narcissistic world in which we live (my car, my money, my, my, my).
Family is your tribe, your most important relationships circle, your legacy. Keep in touch with your family. Do not let others to interfere with it (eg. 16% of Americans don’t talk with a family member due to political differences - that is falling pray to some one elses’ agenda).
Online friendship doesn’t work. Learn to recognize between “deal” friends and real ones. “Deal” friends are those that are useful to us. The real friends are useless to us.
The essence of joy from work is to work earning your success (create value with your life and in the life of others, being rewarded and acknowledged for merit, hard work and personal responsibility) and serving others. You need to be needed.
Arthur Brooks
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Learn and practice to eat well. Ultra-processed foods not only will slowly poison you but they will prevent you from ingesting the right stuff. This has an unmatched compounded impact on your life.
Mind your manners.
Good manners are social lubricant. Nothing more. Don’t fall for the “manners deniers” propaganda. Use your manners. They are meant to show appreciation for others, and that’s always a good thing. For example, greetings: When you exchange a greeting with someone, you recognize and accept them as a person, not just an obstacle in your way. And that changes everything (your understanding and attitude towards him). Try it.
Dress respectfully. Be clean.
Your appearance is a sign of respect for those around you, including your loved ones, even online. Being scruffy says little about you and speaks poorly of your respect for others. Dress well at home, for your partner. Who deserves it more?
Ditch the t-shirt and show some respect, for yourself, for your loved ones and for the rest of us.
Sleep.
Sleep is your superpower. For today, tomorrow and for the future. Basic human biology. Do not neglect your sleep.
Keep your CV updated.
Finding a job is a process that takes weeks or months. Writing the CV is costly and time consuming. The best strategy is to have it always ready for whenever it’s required. You never know when the axe will fall, so be ready.
Last updated: 20 February 2025