Author: karthic891

Book Review: Digital Minimalism

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Preamble

While I read a lot of reviews before deciding on which book to read, I’ve always refrained from writing a review myself. This is because I used to be worried that I might not do justice to the book or that I might inadvertently highlight something seemingly unimportant which I should have overlooked and instead highlighted another positive attribute about the book. Recently I realised that it’s alright and no one’s going to be mad at me if I say something silly or stupid. Given that I hardly have few readers as of this writing, if one (or more) of them think that I’m being silly, I’ll sleep peacefully knowing that there’s someone out there who has willingly read my post fully before deciding to send me a scathing email as to how I ‘insulted’ their favourite book. All that being said, my reviews are going to be nice as there’s no point in talking about the books I didn’t enjoy. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s my first book review.

Review

If only we had more time after work, we’d spend it reading a book, or going out for a walk, or indulging in a hobby. Sounds relatable?

Cal Newport argues that minimizing the use of technology for low-quality leisures would ultimately result in us find time for high-quality leisure. Examples of low-quality leisures are browsing social media or texting a friend, while high-quality leisure would be going out for a walk, gardening, reading a book, or carpentry.

He takes us through the need behind digital decluttering and how it would help us grow as a human being, just like we were meant to. While the arguments he makes would not sit well with the heads of any social media company today, we as readers can relate to how much the so-called ‘digital decade’ has played its magic on us, unsuspecting victims, pulling us into a state of believing in likes and comments and not to mention an insatiable desire for validation from our friends, colleagues, the society, and sometimes the unknown ‘channel subscribers’ from halfway across the world.

The book comprises of two parts viz., Foundations and Practices. Under Foundations, the author addresses the current state of things in the digital world and how we arrived here. This is to help us understand that despite the brilliant advantages that technology offers us, there are parts of what was once conceived as a means of silly entertainment for a short while turned out to be so addictive that we are constantly distracted by their notifications, not to mention the strategies such companies employ to keep us coming back for more. This is virtually equivalent to a gambler in front of a slot machine putting in coins thinking he’ll win his losses back in the next pull. The second part addresses the how-to. The ideas discussed are so captivating that we can easily relate to them and can implement in our day-to-day lives. It gives us a lot of practical ‘way out’ from the pull of Social Media, Instant Messaging, and even emails. To piggyback on the gambler analogy, the author explains about how to cut the losses and step out of the casino.

One of the points I found interesting from reading the book is that as long as we have too many silly things on a given day that we have to attend to, for example, the need to instantly like/comment every time someone posts something or having to instantly reply to every text/email, we will never find time to indulge ourselves in activities that necessitate time and practice. As we get older, we like to have fewer items on our plate that we want to attend to. Having to indulge in less number of activities doesn’t mean we’re lazy, it’s quite the opposite. It means that we can only concentrate on a limited number of high-quality activities that deeply resonate with us. In the long run, it would make us happier that we associated ourselves with things that matter to us rather than flitting from one activity to another. That’s what the book sets out to achieve and it does a good job doing that.

4/5 Stars!

Note: The same review is available in Goodreads.

Just Start!

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“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”

— Zig Ziglar

This is part one of my two-part essay on pursuing any activity that one finds passionate.

Have you ever seen a world-class pianist play, or an Olympic swimmer swim, or someone speed-solve a Rubik’s Cube? You might have seen someone be so adept at something that it’s a pleasure to just watch it over and over. We all wonder as to how they make it look so graceful, almost to the point of being magical.

It looks as if it comes so easily to them, doesn’t it? As if they were born just to do that almost exclusively. We call them a natural. More often than not, we would be wrong! Yes, there are exceptions. Some are probably what people in the behavioural industry call ‘genetically gifted’. But exceptions are just that, exceptions. Most high-performers would not attest their achievement to being a ‘natural’. Guess what they attest it to? Practise. Hundreds of thousands of hours of practise until what was once a conscious incompetence becomes an unconscious competence.

The question is what should we do to get there. The answer is as obvious as the question:

  1. Start
  2. Practise

which certainly happens to fall under the two categories synonymous with the two-part essay that I’m writing. Coincidence? Maybe not. Anyway, they’re the two halves of a whole. If being proficient is the recipe, then they’re the main ingredients. For now, I’d like to talk about the first and leave the latter for part two. This is partly because each of them is intricate in nature and the reasons for their neglect vary between the two, not to mention the fact that I tend to drone on and on with an un-healthy disregard to the word count.

Sometimes, all you should do is just start. Don’t think too much about it. Don’t worry about the result, at least not when you begin. Don’t worry about performance. Just indulge in the activity that you like. It doesn’t matter how long it takes before you master it. It shouldn’t matter. Do it because you want to do it, nothing more. Some day you’ll look back and realize how far you’ve come and the primary reason why you would have been able to achieve that would be because you started.

I’ll give you a story of mine. Over the years I’ve watched a lot of videos of people solving Rubik’s Cube. I’ve always wondered how dexterous they are at solving it. I wanted to solve just like them but I’ve somehow convinced myself that it takes a prodigious skill to be able to solve, probably because I’ve seen only youngsters of the age demographic from 8-18 participate in such competitions and they solve it in less than 10 seconds. I never managed to google for help on how to solve one. In other words, I never started. A few years ago I happened to have a cube that belonged to a friend of mine. I casually googled for help to find out how to solve the cube while I was at work. I was just following the steps in the tutorial and in about 10 minutes I had a completely solved Rubik’s Cube in my hand. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. I was in awe of myself. I got addicted and started reading up more on Cubing and found out about speed-cubing which is solving the cube as fast as possible. Today I solve it in roughly about 54 seconds which is multiple times faster than the time I used to take to solve in the initial days.

If I look back, the single most thing that was important was not how much I practised, but that I started somewhere. I googled for a tutorial on how to solve and followed the instructions. Soon the habit kicked in and now cubing is part of my everyday hobby. I solve it a few times daily just to stay in touch. Recently, this has motivated two of my colleagues to learn to solve. They can now solve and are on their way to practising speed-cubing. They could do because they started.

It is said that 80% of success is showing up. Then what prevents from starting? May be laziness, lack of time, being too busy with other (un)important things around us, and so on. It’s easy to fix these. For example, try scheduling the activity that you love to pursue first thing in the morning. If needed, wake up earlier than usual and do it. If waking up earlier becomes the hurdle then wake up earlier for a couple of days and just walk around your home. All you’re trying to achieve is to get acclimatised to the new habit of waking up earlier than usual. Once you’ve mastered waking up at the desired time, then work on the activity that you want to pursue. It shouldn’t matter how you perform. At least not now. Stop assessing the quality of the outcome. You cannot be good at it in a few days, at least not the outcome you’d eventually expect when you master the skill.

On a side note, if you are at a loss of time because of Netflix, then stop watching TV Series. Movies are okay, they end at a maximum of 2.5 hours. Over. Period. On the contrary, TV Series are addictive and they run forever. When you’re done with one season, many more crop up. And once you’ve watched enough TV Series the ‘you-may-like’ suggestions are so enticing that it’s going to drag you down a rabbit hole.

We all have dull days, and for some, it lasts for weeks. I realized that taking up new activities during such times make us focus on doing it slowly and correctly and not worry about time. Also, the ‘satisfaction’ that comes out of achieving something helps in re-affirming our belief that with enough practise anything is possible. I wrote the word satisfaction in single quotes intentionally, as I don’t have a word to express that feeling at this point. I call it satisfaction because it is more of a long-term feeling as it transcends us into a different dimension every time we indulge in the activity.

So, just start!

*roll credits*

Programming and Productivity

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“If I had 4 hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first 2 hours sharpening the saw”

— Unknown

I’ve always wanted to write about programmers and what influences their productivity. There are many things that could enhance a programmer’s productivity. A calm workspace, meetings-free calendar, a good internet connection, etc. But that’s not what I’m interested in talking about, neither am I qualified enough to talk about that as it involves a lot of psychology behind why a calm workspace, for instance, makes a programmer more productive. Rather what I’m interested in talking about is the practices, tools, or tricks of the trade, that could make an average programmer a 10x programmer. What does it take for an average programmer to become better? Let’s cover the obvious ones first: many hours of practising programming, knowing a couple of programming languages at the least, knowing data structures and their internals, and the mainstream algorithms, you know, the sorting, searching, tree/graph traversals and such. Now, are there more, that makes an average programmer a better one?

Unsurprisingly, the answer is yes. While the areas mentioned above all deal with the mental exercise of knowing and learning, there are these entirely different M.Os, that make a programmer better.

Ever seen a carpenter at work? Each one of his tools is as per his choosing, including the length and sharpness, completely customized to his version of perfection, enabling him to do the highest quality work. His skills and his tools work in tandem with each other producing the best piece of furniture.

I wish there is a way to measure a programmer’s productivity objectively so as to be able to analyze what makes one better than the other, but alas, we’re at a loss as it’s near impossible to measure a programmer’s productivity objectively. But what I’ve seen over the last 8 odd years is that most of the good programmers have certain characteristics in common of which I want to touch upon three major areas today.

Touch Typing

One of the most underrated skill is touch typing, i.e., typing without looking at the keyboard. Steve Yegge has a nice blog about it, a brilliant read. Learn to touch type. Period. It’s not that difficult and it makes you 5 times, heck, 10 times better. It doesn’t just make you faster in terms of typing, because if you can type what comes to your mind quickly, you’re now forced to think quicker too. It has a feedback effect. You can quickly type what you think and now that you’ve typed out what was in your mind, you’ve to come up with the next thought for you to be able to type out quickly. It’s like your fingers and mind are in a constant tussle between each other. Over a period of time, you automatically start thinking faster as you’re used to that speed.

Every great programmer I know can touch type, every single one! I’m not talking about child prodigies who grew up to become programmers who can solve every single problem in ACM ICPC. Although, I’m almost sure that they’d put in the time to learn touch typing as every minute in an international programming event counts. They’re not going to be hunting-and-pecking at the keyboard when they’re solving a difficult Dynamic Programming problem. I’m talking about the programmers in the industry who have at least a few years of experience writing code for a living. You have to know to touch type even if your uber-cool IDE can provide the most correct suggestion when you press ctrl+space(or some weird key combination). Because guess what, once you know to touch type you will be able to type object.methodName(arg1, arg2) faster than your IDE frantically scrambling to its feet to suggest you multiple possibilities, ranking them in the order of most possible to the least possible for overloaded methods.

Quite honestly, it doesn’t take much time to learn. Let me tell you this, no matter what your age is today, it’s still not late. I learnt when I was 1.5 years into the software industry but some of my friends learnt after 5 years of coding. So it’s never late. Learn to touch type.

Recommendations:

I learnt touch typing in typingweb.com. It’s a good place to start. Once in a while, I practice in Typeracer. It’s a car race simulator where you’ll race with other anonymous folks and the faster you type the faster your car moves. Another quick way to practice in the middle of a workday is 10fastfingers.com. Try that after you’ve learnt the basics of touch typing and you’ll love it. I recommend 30 minutes a day for roughly 2-3 months. You’ll never regret the time spent.

A good extensible Text Editor

As silly as it may sound, a good extensible text editor makes a programmer’s life better. Every programmer should have a favourite text editor, and it cannot be Notepad. Not that Notepad is bad, it’s good at what it’s supposed to do, basic text editing. But your text editor needs to be extensible, in the sense that you should be able to build/configure shortcuts, program it to do things that you want it to do to and bind it to the shortcuts that you want.

While you may not be writing code in your text editor all the time, you’d certainly use it to edit most text, JSON, XML, Shell scripts, properties files, and myriad other file extensions that you can think of. So your editor of choice should be capable of understanding the extension so as to be able to highlight keywords or to some degree, the syntax of the language. And a bonus point if you can run your terminal inside it so that you don’t have to fumble your way between the terminal and your editor. But if you’re already good at alt-tabbing, then you don’t have to worry.

Just like touch typing, pick an editor of your choice and learn it. And by learning it, I mean you should actually use it to it’s (almost) fullest potential and see what features you can pick up and tune it to your comfort. Use that editor as much as possible for all tasks until you’re able to execute your common operations without even having to think much. It must be like muscle memory, for instance, do you think of the shortcut for auto-complete in your favourite IDE? No right? the same logic. Some editors like Emacs(yeah, I’m a little biased) provide keyboard macros i.e., you can record a bunch of keystrokes and run them again and again. Even if you already have found your editor of choice, go through its documentation to find out its capabilities and hey, you may find something new!

Recommendations:

Two great editors that have stood the test of time are Emacs and Vim. They’re such strong contenders that no other editor has even remotely come close to them, let alone take either of them on. Such is their legend that Wikipedia has a dedicated page for them. I recommend you pick one of them. Personally, I’m a fan of Emacs, but Vim is equally good. Both Emacs and Vim has a steep learning curve¹, but it’s worth learning it in the long run. In case you’re looking for modern text editors, Sublime Text and Atom seem to be good. When I started some 7 years ago, I had only heard about them, so I picked Emacs as some of my favourite programmers use it. But take a look and pick out the one you like. I guarantee you, you’ll never look back.

Understanding Computers

It’s a blanket term, I know. Allow me to explain. To be a better programmer, one has to understand computers better. Just like a musician knows his instrument in and out, just like a psychologist understands the inner workings of the human psyche, the programmer should understand the inner workings of a computer, both hardware and software. You have to understand the Processor, Memory, Disk, Network Interface, and what each of them does and how they work together. Similarly, for software, the knowledge of Virtual Memory, Paging, File System, Scheduling, Multi-threading, all are needed.

Let me give you an example to justify my point. Have you ever come across issues in another environment which hasn’t been your Test/Stage environment that your QE team signed off? These issues would almost always not be your application/code issues. Server crashes, network connectivity issues, certificate issues when you make a REST call over https, are almost always environmental² and understanding computers as a whole would certainly help debug and fix those issues. I know the above example is probably a little crude, but trust me, I’ve actually faced all the issues mentioned above in the real world.

Now, where can we find a few unified materials that cover the above areas you ask? No? Okay, let’s assume some do. Remember the courses/papers that you chose or rather shoved down our throats as part of our CS degree? Computer Organization By Carl Hamacher, et. al., Data Communications and Networking by Behrouz Forouzan, Operating System Concepts by Silberschatz, Galvin, Gagne? There’s a reason why those papers were and still are part of our curriculum because they’re some of the core areas that any CS graduate is expected to know.

It’s not like we remember everything we studied, but the point I’m trying to make is to go back and brush up the concepts once in every few years. I’m going to dust my consolidated mark sheet across all semesters to find out the core papers that I studied and brush up on it again. I recommend you do the same.

Recommendations:

Take a look at the papers that you studied during your CS degree and brush up on them. These days you can find older versions of some of the books online as an eBook for free. Dust your mark sheets, in case you don’t remember all the papers you studied, because that’s what I did. If you did not do a full-time CS degree, then look up B.S Computer Science curriculum³ and check out the courses that are mandatory.

There are more topics that I should have covered, but given the size that this blog has already reached, I’ll reserve them for another post, or probably never. But I think this is a good start. If my post motivated or helped you in any way, drop me an email, I’d love to hear from you.

Note: The thoughts and opinions expressed above are solely my own and does not reflect my employers, current or past.

Footnotes

  1. Emacs probably has a steeper learning curve compared to Vim.
  2. If it’s a coding issue, your Dev/Test team should have caught the bug in the lower environments.
  3. You can find MIT’s C.S curriculum details here.

 

The Voyage Begins

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I have always wanted to write a blog, always.

But I never did it till now, partly because I was lazy, but mostly because I was skeptical about publishing my thoughts as I was afraid of my ideas getting shot down. But here I am, after 8 years of procrastination, writing up my introductory blog. What changed now, you ask? Oh, you didn’t? That’s okay, I’ll tell you anyway. I realized that I shouldn’t stress about publishing my thoughts, something that I should have learnt long ago.

I have 8 years of experience writing code in the software industry, and I believe I have things(read opinions) to share with the world. So, let me greet you with the most cliched phrase in the field of computer programming, “Hello, world!”