You don’t like your job. You get up in the morning, you look into the mirror and you see boredom. No motivation. No excitement. You don’t know why you go to the office again. In fact, you know it well. Someone has to pay for your bills. That someone is you. For how long can you keep doing this? You don’t know, but you put foot after foot, you write line after line and days pass by. Months pass by.
Given that I really enjoyed Cal Newport’s ideas in So Good They Can’t Ignore You and also the way he writes, I decided to read his other best-seller book, Deep Work, right after. The idea of deep work was far from new to me, but I was interested in the book and the interpretation of it by Newport.
If you are following my posts, you might remember that I went to Riviera DEV 2018 recently where I attended a really interesting talk about Flutter by Florian Loitsch. Flutter is a framework to develop native interfaces for Android and iOS devices, yet you keep only one code base.
I have recently read the eye-opening book of Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. He emphasizes a lot on the importance of deliberate practice. I also decided to take a bit more seriously my practice sessions and I reorganized how I spend my personal pomodoros in the morning and at lunchtime to have more deliberate practice. I want to strech my limits. In C++, it’s not so difficult.
Find your passion that you carry within yourself. Find it as soon as possible and you’ll be great! This is something we can read at almost every corner of the internet.
Cal Newport in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You challenges this view, I think with success. According to Newport, (almost) nobody has that inherent, born-with passion. Instead, you have to work hard and you’ll start loving your work. Passion will form with experience.
I don’t mean your Facebook feed or that news portal full of violence. I mean your books. Including the very ones covering the latest technologies. Including the ones about the most important aspects of your craft. Stop reading them. Throw them away!
If you are into coding dojos and solving katas, you might have already tried the Gilded Rose kata by Emily Bache.
In this kata, you are given some existing code that handles the quality and the number of days before expiration properties of the products in a store. The code handles almost everything in one single huge function. Unsurprisingly, the goal of the kata is to refactor the code. Besides, there is also a new functionality to implement.
Last year I have read the first book of Tim Ferriss, the “Bible of life hackers”, The 4 Hour Work Week(4HWW). Recently I finished reading one of his other books The 4 Hour Body(4HB).
