My motto: Be bold, be curious.
Don’t be afraid to voice your concerns or to ask questions. Fortune favors the bold.
And be curious. Not enough people ask enough questions. Too many people stick to the defaults when it comes to opinions or even their computer settings. Because it’s hard to think. “Rarely do we find people who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
A little more about me
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Resourceful: I’ll ask and google to learn something I am interested in. Helped me a lot in school when the teachers/professors (usually) can’t teach. Good teachers are rare and only with the internet was I able to know what good teaching looks like.
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Critical thinker: I’m opinionated. I think of why things happen. I don’t sit idly.
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History nerd: I like knowing how others used to live. How did our world came to be? How did computers and programming languages evolve? Things did not come from nowhere.
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Ideas - I have 100+ side project ideas written down. So many ideas but too little time.
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Minimalism - quality over quantity. I buy as little as possible. What makes life good is not the material, but the immaterial.
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Organized - I like order; having things arranged in a logical manner. Simple example is that I make my bed every morning. According to sleepdoctor.com, only 38% of adults do so. And I like working with organized people, who doesn’t? They are cleanr and logical in their thinking.
My Desk Setup
My keyboard:
To innovate, you must think from the first principles. And that may make you different. Boldly embrace being different. Pragmatically ofc.
For my key layout, I iterated it around 15 times before settling on this one. The modifier keys took some experimenting to get in the right places.
You’ll notice that I don’t use Qwerty. I switched to another layout called Colemak-DH as soon as I got the keyboard in July 2021. I use Colemak-DH because my fingers move about 50% less due to frequently used keys moved to the center. Here’s my custom layout:
Here’s a comparison I tracked and made of my most common keys on Qwerty vs. Colemak-DH:
There’s several points of efficiency in this layout. But to keep in short it has 2 layers. The default first layer has the usual keys. The second layer is activated with a key to the right of my pinky that is held down like shift. Arrows keys are under my left thumb. Every key is within handspan. So my hands don’t get displaced like a normal keyboard. I am speed 💨💨💨.
Here is a graph over 5 months from July-Nov of my speed increase when I switched to Colemak-DH. Very interesting to see the progress:
If you are interested, I wrote an in-depth article of my keyboard here.
2 quotes to end it off:
This quote is about simplicity. I find it in the Linkedin bio of one senior developer:
If you asked me to characterize my feelings about years spent building software in one phrase, I would have to quote Eugene Meyer’s law “It is simple to make things complex, but complex to make things simple.
Minimalism and programming make a beautiful marriage.
And the following quote is about having the right values. That’s why I like the spirit of open source, the purpose is to share knowledge and help others. Few people help others in my experience:
What makes a winning team, “Many U.S. sports fans agree that the greatest victory in this country’s history was when a group of unknown college kids, led by >head coach Herb Brooks, stunned the Soviets 4-3 in the 1980 Winter Olympics and went on to win the gold medal in ice hockey. When asked how he assembled the >team, as well as his University of Minnesota hockey teams (Brooks had taken Minnesota from a perpetual doormat to winning three Division 1 National Championships >in 7 years), Brooks responded, “The key to my recruiting was that I looked for people first, athletes second. I wanted people with sound value systems because >you cannot buy values. You are only as good as your values. I learned early on that you do not put greatness into people…but somehow try to pull it out.
Hope this gave a good glimpse of me. Thanks for reading!