06-07

1. Leverage by Rob Moore

Read this book today and yesterday. Some part of it was definitely worth it.

My summary of the book:

Ways to create high leverage with following tactics:

• Use Paretto's rule as a heuristic to always focus on something whether it be task managing, studying, etc.

  • I always knew this rule existed but never thought it as a rule of thumb to create leverage. Might create huge impact on how I make decisions daily.
  • But on the other hand, I also always felt that Paretto's rule is only correct on certain scnearios and never explains causaility of something. Kind of a double edged sword.

• Spend time on compounding activities. - Accumulating knowledge, building experties, etc.

  • This I kind of knew but was slept on.
  • For my situation this advice can be translated into:
    • don't spend time too much on building softwares that only feed you in short term.
    • spend more time on building deeper tech stuff (in-house project or open source) + study a lot.

• Listen to audio books - auth repeatedly mentioned this as one of his beloved habits.

  • Might try this next week.

• Get a mentor

  • I already watch a lot of youtube & read books.
  • However, I really need irl coach or mentor.
  • My company doesn't have any successfuly software engineers.
  • I need to spend more time on finding one outside

Overall, the book was not really organized. Details were not logically ordered and same details were repeated on many chapters.

Where it was not organized and induced frustration:

• Explains about three stages of controlling emotions - directives were vague. - I assumed that chapter was not well thought-out by the author.
• I believe the book can be shrunken to about 20 pages. Same advices were repeatedly given after halfway through.

2. Writing Scenarios Before Deploying

Getting Slack alerts about fatal errors on holidays is frustrating.

Today and yesterday, I received a ton of Slack alerts. It was caused by a simple bug. On Friday, We deployed without thoroughly testing it.

I feel like there are better ways to handle this—maybe write end-to-end hand-test scenarios somewhere and "check off" whether you've done the relevant new tests before deploying?

3. Dopamine-Driven Development

Saw a video on youtube that having a nice terminal + a great setup makes you feel happier at work.

It made sense. I used to think there shouldn’t be too much effort spent on prettifying the work UX, but I’ve changed my mind.

Some Action Plans:

• Upgrade my terminal's UI UX
• Change my keyboard at home

4. GPT Life Consulting

I prompoted this in korean: "Tell me the biggest things I'm missing in my life right now. Ask me a lot of questions—maybe more than 20?"

Then I answered questions the llm asked, then got a lot of advice about my life.

Action Plans I got:

1. Monitor my growth and review weekly. Did I grow with current schedule of work at my company?
   • I think this can be done by looking at TILs I'm writing
2. Practice habits to grow strong mentality. - I got a recommended list of effective habits.
   • Might gradually implement all of them. Let's start with "Mindfulness Meditation" every single day. Now I will add checkbox on the top of TIL.
   • Maybe add one habit per week?
3. Actively find outside mentors
   • join communities - r/ExperiencedDevs, bootcamps, social events
   • side projects - open source contribution
   • read tech articles regularly
   • tech talk, conferences

1, 2, 3 can all be tracked with TIL.