Forem: Mario Novak

Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:07:52 +0000

We are constructing a framework to power individual’s continual evolution and meaningful contribution to humanity through Software Development.

What I propose here is a state of constant observation, questioning of everything and a all-encompassing care for each software individual.

Only when a individual is healthy, balanced and has excitement in his eyes for his and overall future, we can expect great things from him and the whole organization, scalable throughout time.

📹 Intro video: We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

After you’re done reading: check the ⬇️ bottom of the page — you’ll find next parts of this series that cover diverse set of related topics!

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

🎷 Background song

Building software is one part of your life. You are at your best when you are balanced across interests and these interests are in synergy.

When a Software Artisan is self-caring, the care will inevitability be greater towards fellow individuals. So we can create a better, more grounded world, that makes sense for us and others.

The most powerful things in life are simple, small, free, and often overlooked.

“Self-Aware Software Artisan” framework consists of:

Observing — yourself and the environment,
Journaling — your thoughts and emotions,
Leading a healthy and balanced life,
Planing,
Acting — based on the before mentioned items.

These are the building blocks for the relationships you have: with yourself, other people, activities, projects, code, etc.

Thanks for stopping by.

This Essay is geared towards anyone in the industry of building software.

We are navigating vast space of opportunities, having in mind your true aspirations, so that you can be fulfilled, i.e. closer to what you truly are, throughout time.

We are exploring a palette of ideas, to pick and scale individual parts and form a system that can be adjusted through time and thus produce more relevant effects for you and people around you.

The most optimal way to advance a group, company and community is by changing many of us on an individual level; and having that ripple transfer through and encompass the whole organization.

Parts of the essay are geared for Software Developers, while other lean towards Product Developers and Leaders. Most of it can be applied to any human involved in the process of building software.

We are going on a long ride.

Grab something to drink and enjoy.

Preface

Source: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, HS Thompson

Words in this essay outline my view and perspective I got from my work and experience up to this point. I do not claim it is the right perspective or that the right perspective exists.

The reader has the responsibility to think as he reads and form his own opinions based on the information outlined.

Author’s experience

Data Sculptor, Architect of Systems and Products.

Founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports and led teams of up to ten people.

Worked, as a Systems Architect, Frontend, and Backend Developer, for a product company, a digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

Purpose of this series

The essay is written primarily for me and my friends, through me, to jot down what I’ve learned and experienced in life.

It is here to remind myself what worked for me in the past and got me alive and kicking to where I am.

It is also here to serve for bootstrapping the culture for all endeavors I’m involved in.

It is an attempt to systematize nuggets of tested and proven steps one can take while living, learning, growing, falling down and picking himself up to continue with respect, dignity and ferocious will to leave a mark on the terms he finds valuable.

Most importantly, it is here to confirm that self-care and self-awareness are crucial to all aspiring, just starting, or deeply in trenches, people involved in software creation.

Ideas laid out are the ones I’ve dabbled with, and my writing showcases my relationship with them and their inner-connectedness to form a system of being and working.

There are miles better, more competent individuals across the planet. Learn from them.

More importantly, learn from your past experiences, and observe your current state, document it, gather conclusions and improve based on it. Herein lies everything that you have and will have for any motion.

Take these words with a grain of salt, think for yourself, and implement them incrementally and personalized to you.

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Cover image source

You — A Human Being: Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:02:54 +0000

We are outlining what makes up Life; how to navigate emotions, cope with problems and nurture our aspirations.

📹 Intro video: Carl Sagan — Pale Blue Dot

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

After you’re done reading: check the ⬇️ bottom of the page — you’ll find next parts of this series that cover diverse set of related topics!

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

Author’s experience

Data Sculptor, Architect of Systems and Products.

Founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports and led teams of up to ten people.

Worked, as a Systems Architect, Frontend, and Backend Developer, for a product company, a digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve looked at the World as a playground where anything is possible. I was ecstatic about the upcoming phases of my life where I could contribute to it and show the world how I see it. It is about that, I think — about showing how you feel the World while interacting with others, to ease suffering and ease into the truth of the individual and the community at large.

🎷 Background song

It is a matter of, continually, finding a way to express your inner battles. That sets us free, from the unbearing desperation of having it unexpressed, sitting deep in ourselves.

A man can express himself through sports, writing, music, talking with others, smiling, frowning, feeling his waves of thoughts, through technology, or any other endeavor.

What I found out, in a crude and basic form, is that life is a succession of paths we take, and, even though they don’t feel connected, if we continue with introspection and ferocious will to solve the mysteries — the paths will come together in the future and it will all make sense.

The constraints of life dictate initial rules, but those rules can and are, continually, being bent

If we experiment and make everything we can with what we have, we’ll get the opportunity in the future to further explore our human soul, mind, and body.

Fear and doubt in ourselves, are the indicators of what we need to explore — to be at peace with ourselves and the World.

Transferring our experience to others further liberates us and encourages others to follow their own path, in the magnitude they find possible.

Your life is — yours to take

The biological and environmental makeup did what they did, with your relationship towards yourself, your family, friends, projects you’ve started…

Some of the ideas crashed and burned. Some of them you’ve picked up years down the road again and morphed them into something that makes more sense.

You have the right and responsibility to live it on your terms. We are all eager to see how your unique life perspective, with all bolts and twitches pans out.

The belief I always had is if I do what I feel makes sense, I will understand things more clearly. It is an never-ending journey worth taking. The only thing I can control is my effort and sensitivity.

The hope, that I have, is that my writing will resonate with you — now or down the road, in the degree that makes sense for you.

The Internet is here, now, and it allows people across the World, from cities and villages to collaborate, learn from each other, find other perspectives so we can have our lives enriched and full of possibilities.

You and the World

One way to live would be — to systematically try out anything you feel pulled to. And write down your experiences with it. Repeat for other things. Add, remove things as you go on.

There is a palette of activities that go hand in hand with all your positive and negative things.

I’ve come-up with a game few years ago. And it shows the relationship of you towards other people and topics in the world.

You are the blue one in the middle, the world is the outer circle. We’ve implemented this on a WhoHack hackathon in Rijeka, Croatia. Onetius — BarFight game.

Journaling to better understand what you are and what you want

Source

It is important to write all the time. Better said, to document.

People will grade you by your current state (last thing they’ve seen) and the high, and low, points. They don’t know about your inner-battles, magnitude of problems you are facing in your art, job, psychology or anything else.

Journaling you do is the collection of your experiences. The extreme points of your emotional states will be translated into high, or low, points, of your writing.

You could be in a rot for few months or years of your life. So, it is helpful to construct a map of yourself, at your best, to have it as a net, that can catch you when you could fall deeper.

On the other hand, if you’re up for the greatest art you could deliver, falling through, or having no net below you, will give you more confusion and, with time, more purified truths about life.

Depending on what you’re capable of at the moment, and your plans moving forward, adjust your actions accordingly.

Ego

Source

Ego could be helpful to attract people to yourself. People will start challenging you from every direction, and if you live it with dignity and courage and have something to teach — it seems like a positive way of channeling it.

Ego, like everything else, is there for a reason. As with most things, it is primarily here to protect the person at hand. It could be destructive or constructive, depending on the situation and the person.

Recognize your patterns. Decide what you wish to keep and what needs to go.

Attention Deficit Disorder

It has become increasingly popular for people with different levels and types of disorders to wind up on pills. For some cases, that could be valid; but it seems a big number of them can be avoided with proper nurturing of the mind, body, and soul.

Maybe you are just focusing on non-interesting things. Find what you value the most, play with it, see how you react.

Breathing and training could also help. Check the next part of this series (Self-Aware Software Artisan: Your Health).

For any serious form of it — contact a doctor.

Anxiety

In a fast-moving world, with all the information floating around, and people functioning in a significantly different way, you could get stranded in the middle ground of being overwhelmed.

Breath is one of the most important things you can control.

In any stressful situation — focus on your breathing.

Train your body, train your mind, and practice a breathing technique — every day.

Music matters

Different music for different situations.

Music needs to resonate with you for you to get healing from it.

Lo-Fi, Metal, Rock, Soul, …, everything in the right time.

Contextual music, example:

Anxiety: Lo-Fi, Synthwave,
Progressing the groove: Rock,
Over-stressful life: Black Sabbath.

Feeling depressed

As our life can be smooth, there are periods where it can get rough.

Try to understand your life from the beginning, up to this point.
Write down every corner you’ve taken, truthfully.
Forgive yourself and others for the bad things.
Take responsibility for the past, present, and future. It is the cornerstone of your life.

Find others who are passing through similar patterns and that look to resurrect themselves and build a better future.

Black Sabbath has a good line:

I used to count in millions then,
But now I only count in one.

Step by step.

Even though you are passing through the hard times — always search for the light. Search for it by doing activities that you find nurturing to yourself, even though you don’t have the will for it. Find it, it will compound through time and balance your shadow. As you go through weeks and months, decrease amount of bad activities, and increase the positive ones.

Talk with friends.

If you recognize someone is not your friend, don’t hold it against them. Move on. Work on yourself, believe in yourself and nurture appreciation for yourself. Good friends will come, but the first step needs to be you believing in yourself.

Ideas laid out in the Self-Aware Software Artisan: Health could be helpful.

For any deeper levels, don’t shy away from talking to professionals.

If you take anything in life for granted, take this — it can get better for you. And it will, through time, if you observe yourself and put in the work. Be patient.

Addictions

Addiction could be:

towards the ingestion of food, from sweets to healthy eating,
cigarettes, alcohol,
gaming,
other drugs,
working and
anything else.

It is important not to stigmatize anyone with any addiction.

It is necessary to lay out what are the potential reasons for any addiction.

For some things, you could go cold-turkey; while others, depending on the involvement —could kill you.

Replace bad activities with the good ones. Do it in a progressive way, you don’t need to be a maniac to do a cold turkey, but scale it through time. Again, depending on the situation at hand.

Use Habitus to track your status and effects on your health. It also offers a Journal feature for you to pour your soul out and a Emotion tracker if you wish to resonate with it in that way.

So, write it down and/or talk with the professional, know that you can solve the puzzle you have in front of yourself.

You are not what others think of you

Nobody knows what is happening in your mind and body. It goes both ways — you don’t know what are other people made of.

Our culture progresses; things and views get de-stigmatized and more understood. Something that is on the edge can be at the center in the near future.

Listen to others, but think for yourself.

Don’t be a bozo.

Friendships

Most of the people didn’t have a supporting upbringing, their parents encouraging them, thus people grow up with less of the faith in themselves. And the effect of that, on life, is staggering.

Be there for your people, believe in them and show them that you believe in them. That’s the first gift friends can give each other.

Don’t text your friends. Call them each week, month — just to see if everything is going fine. Share all the new things you’ve learned, give a helping hand when possible and expect the same from them.

Self-Aware Software Artisan: Team could be interesting to you.

Socialize

Use Whatodoo to find events near you.

Life is an ever-evolving interplay of everything

Source

Human beings are not one-dimensional — being right or wrong, good or bad. But rather a complex system of fears, needs, and aspirations being challenged by mortality.

Each step, thought, look and feeling is an interplay of everything that ever existed. Thus, you, your friends, your job, is a culmination of a palette of previous experiences.

Constrained by the medium, we cannot crunch-out the perfect set of actions you could take to be at the exact place you need to be to be satisfied. Rather, what we can do is, explore the variables in our system we will outline below to allow you to, through time, sense what is more relevant to you and take the appropriate action on it.

Our life is a set of changes of emotional states, that manifest themselves through psychical and relationship effects.

Life is not a straight line, or a unbearable pursuit of the perfection that cripples us of taking any step at all, but rather a ever evolving understanding of the world around and inside us. So, the jobs we take, endeavors we partake in, are the continuation of our past, with a salt of differentiation based on the observed conclusions of our status.

I think we are here to continually explore our fears and make art out of it. This art teaches others, which in turn do the same to us. The fear, at the core of it, is what we love, as it holds the potential to set us free. And through this freeing, we live.

So, our purpose is, day in — day out, to observe what we are and take actions based on that. That could mean changing jobs, relationships with your job, friends, etc.

Technology is one part of our life. To many of us, technology ringed a bell and attracted us, as it allows us to work through a number of industries while talking similar language — a language of technology.

So, where we focus is — self-discovery, to find what you love through technology.

That could mean being, at times, in hard spots, but you know that you will eventually pay the bills with what you love, and that is miles better than crunching tasks that you have no emotional connection to.

Decide on the activity and give it the best you have

Never slack off on anything. If you are going to do anything, do it properly.

If you don’t have the will to do it, maybe it isn’t for you; or maybe — you have other things that are perplexed enough to disturb the normal flow of your mind to solve the problems at hand.

Observe yourself, through time, you will get back to the open space that is tailored for you, where you excel.

Knowing who, what and where you are

If you are in second or third-world countries, you need to take that into account. Or even in the first world countries.

Everything has its upsides and downsides. But know what they are, and how much are they.

You need to stand out, write articles, teach people around you. Show the world what you know and how you feel, that will set you and others free. It will inspire others, and connect you with like-minded people.

Continue to explore, share again, inspire again, attract more open, focused, and capable people.

Stand out from your environment, when you have something you find valuable. Cherish it and defend it enough to expose its true nature. See how people react to it. If it doesn’t vibe with them — maybe it’s not the right environment, or maybe you should question your idea or make it easier to understand.

Don’t be afraid of what you could become. And know that it is that — COULD — it is up to you to see what you will do with your mind and body.

Work hard, work smart, work as you think it makes sense. You will find a way to connect seemingly unconnected parts of you. But know that they are in no way unconnected. If you don’t see it now, you will see it connect later — if you follow intuition.

Allow yourself to do the mistakes

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs”.

Calculating your status

How much do you do for others,
how much do you do for yourself.

All of these parts can be filtered by History, Present, Future.

Balance before mentioned items.

Have fun

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Cover image source

Your Health: Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:02:43 +0000

We are constructing a progressive health framework that creates a solid foundation for your private and working life.

From planning your next day, through sleeping and waking-up patterns, morning routines, stress-handling routines, to relaxing periods.

We are here to create a synergy of your work and playtime to optimize for growth.

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

After you’re done reading: check the ⬇️ bottom of the page — you’ll find next parts of this series that cover diverse set of related topics!

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

Author’s experience

Data Sculptor, Architect of Systems and Products.

Founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports and led teams of up to ten people.

Worked, as a Systems Architect, Frontend, and Backend Developer, for a product company, a digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

🎉 We’ve created a Tracking App for You

Habitus App

We’ve created Habitus to ease you into tracking your activities throughout the day!

Habitus is an easy way to:

track your habit activities (good or bad)
track your emotional states (Happy, Sad, …).
write your thoughts.

Anonymous and Open source (TypeScript, Koa.js, Vue.js, Vuetify).

Guest access, no registration!

Check out the app!

Physical and Psychological health

Source

Before sleeping

Source

For the current day:

write down what you are grateful for,
write down what you’re proud of doing,
write down what you will improve in the future and why you didn’t meet your expectations.

For the next day:

write down your goals,
starting and ending times for any activities.

Sleeping

Try to have as similar patterns of going to sleep and waking up as you can. This is the first step towards stability, and we can work from this towards other things.

Roughly, 8 hours is what seems to recuperate the body for most people.

Try to be in sync with nature, meaning — go to sleep so you can wake up with the Sun in the morning.

Go to sleep so you can naturally wake up 3 hours before any responsibilities towards others. Thus, you will not need an alarm to wake you up — and break up your sleeping cycle.

🎷 Background Song

Morning

Source

First 3 hours of the day set the tone for the rest of it. Thus, it is yours to take. Do whatever you need, so at the end of it, you are as satisfied, calm and focused as you can.

Meditation

Source

After waking up, look at your bed, it’s messy — there were a lot of things going on in your brain while you’ve been sleeping.

Thus, this is a time to see what is brewing in the brain from the night.

No need to get out of the bed just yet.

Clean up the bed and sit in a lotus pose. We are going into the meditation/breathing exercise.

We are constantly thinking, from the time we get up, to the time we go to bed. Ah yes — in the sleep too! We are information crunching monkeys.

Balance is needed in life. And if you are thinking all the time — where is the non-thinking period? You need to carve it out for yourself. Just like we are working out our body... We need to practice our mind.

One of the important aspects of a functioning mind is: 1) it’s ability to focus on a specific set of ideas, and 2) let go of them. We are trained to do first (1) part from the time we are born. Second (2) part not so much.

“Point” of the meditation is “focusing yourself on nothing”. We want to be able to let go of the thoughts that come to us, so they don’t drag us into a mindset that we don’t need at the moment.

Don’t feel bad when you start thinking. Through time you will intrinsically figure out how wasteful is to go into the same rabbit hole, and you will instead re-focus on the breath.

Observe what is happening in your mind. With time, through weeks, months, it will simmer down, and you will have less of the chaos in your mind.

Scaling Daily Meditation

Do it after you wake up.

When you figure out you’ve been thinking — focus on your breathing.

(1) minute; for the 1st week; eyes opened — stare at a point,
(2) minutes; for the 2nd week; eyes opened— stare at a point,
(5) minutes; for the 3rd week; eyes closed,
(20) minutes.

Stretching and Dance (hips, shoulders, neck)

Source

After morning meditation, we are going into the dance.

Nothing special. Nothing fancy.

Start by standing straight,
ease into whatever movement you wish,
allow yourself to feel embarrassed,
do what comes naturally to you,
move around the space,
recognize you have hips, and those hips are extremely important to have mobile. Shake them!

Enjoy the blood flow.

Do this dance for 10 minutes.

Reviewing the plan for the day (from yesterday’s evening)

Source

Review what you’ve written yesterday evening.

Need to add or change anything? Do it now.

With this, you will get an overview of the day.

We are lowering anxiety levels related to not being focused or knowing the purpose of the day.

Avoid Morning Stimulants

I recommend not drinking anything that will give you more energy in those first three hours.

Don’t boost it with caffeine or any other stimulants — let your body wake itself up naturally.

If you need something to pick you up, go with the lightest stimulant possible (e.g. if you’re having coffee in mind, replace it with a cappuccino, …).

What we accomplished with our morning routine

Thus, in the first hour, you did a lot of good things for your mind and body; giving you more confidence for the rest of the day, as you’re satisfied with the time you’ve invested in yourself at the beginning of the day.

The rest of the time is here for you to enjoy.

Either by working on your project, working out, reading, relaxing…

Mid-day — working

Source

Check out Self-Aware Software Artisan: Deep work.

Sooner or later you will hit a hard stop during your workday.

Hard-stop, here, is defined as a place where you need to think, where you don’t have a pattern up your sleeve that you’ve employed previously to solve the problem at hand. The problem at hand is so different from the ones you’ve been tackling before it, that you need to step back and analyze it from the bottom-up.

What I propose, rather than being glued to the monitor, is:

gather all files or information that is involved in the problem,
try to group it, systematize it so that you get an overview of it;
and then step away from the monitor,
try to relax, meditate on it, do pushups, play guitar or anything that seems to relax you into the problem,
let your mind reconfigure the set of items to bring you closer to the solution.

A lot of anxiety comes from having a problem and not having the guts to step away from it.

Remember, down-time (relaxing period), while you hit a hard-stop, is just as valuable as the “hard-work” you do, if you keep the frame of the problem in your mind.

Stepping away from the problem at the office

Being at the office gives more friction between recognizing the problem, and moving away from it, because of the social friction and judgment that — you are not working “hard enough”.

We are not here to outline short-term actions to bring you to the solution. As, most of the time, they will backfire in the long-term.

We are, rather, here to form a long-term system. Following it, and adjusting with time, means optimizing your performance while being integrated, calm and focused on what you find valuable.

It takes guts to step away while being in a people-filled room.

Do it.

Stretch.

Go outside, juggle with the idea while walking.

Or don’t do anything.

Try whatever you feel necessary to get into a flow state of understanding.

As you do those steps — you will influence rest of the team to not stigmatize stepping-back from the problem, stretching, relaxing on the problem, and — it will bring more to the team in the short and long term.

Stepping away from the problem at home

Doing that at home is easier, as you don’t have social expectations.

You have the same responsibility working remotely and working at the office. The difference is, in the office, the social interactions and framework are set by the interplay of people; while at home — it’s about you, and what you make of it.

Evening

Source

We are at the constant inter-play of the good and bad side, inside of us.

Having the day done as laid out above, you need to do whatever you feel to have the balance in the day.

Watch the shows, relax.

Dance again, or do breathing exercises.

Write, play instruments of your interest.

Working-out while working

Source

There are times when you feel so much pressure that you can’t look at the screen anymore. You need a breather. You need a break, to step away from the monitor.

Taking 10 minutes away from the monitor and working on your body will simmer your thoughts down, integrate them and serve as a basis for the next few hours of more focused energy to systematize information better and — bring you closer to the solutions.

Don’t count on gyms, your friends, or colleagues to bring life to you. Or wait for a few hours or days to do a workout. Do it now!

Tech Meetings

We have few tips that serve as a basis for you, whether you want to be as mobile as possible or build yourself up to become a super athlete. And as with any good thing, they are on the smallest possible scale, serving as the building blocks for more advanced stuff, and are mostly ignored by everyone: dancing and crawling.

What?! Dancing and crawling?

Yes.

Dancing — moving your hands and hips to kick-start your body

Source

This is not dancing per se.

Take out trying to look good or impress others.

Dancing is moving parts of your body — your hands and legs and having other parts move in relation to them.

My view on dancing is moving in your living room.

Start by moving your hands in any direction you feel. Our hands are most of our life hanging from our bodies, and thus the whole joint system in our shoulders is weak, and thus our shoulders are prone to injuries when starting harder workouts.

What the basis of everything shoulder-related should be — is moving your hands every day in the air, for 10 minutes.

Then, incorporate moving your legs. Thus, your another big joint area will start moving — your hips.

Now, doing both moves at the same time, whatever makes sense for you — we call dancing.

And, as you are at home, you don’t have to worry about others seeing you or you embarrassing yourself.

Do the dance every day, once or twice (in the morning, mid-day, or before sleeping).

Another reason for doing shoulder dance: having a headache? Your neck hurts? Weak circulation of blood or big pressure in your neck? Do the shoulder dance! Improve blow-flow to your brain by moving your hands, and thus massaging muscles in your upper body area, including your neck and back.

Crawling as the basic exercise

What crawling does to you. Source: Reddit

Kids start like that.

Monkeys are doing it their whole life.

Look at their arms.

Having a shoulder injury? Start small, move fingers on the wall, after it — do light, medium, or hard levels of crawling on the floor.

Do it for 10 minutes per day.

Adjust the timing and level of difficulty to you.

Fasting

Source

People who didn’t eat are bragging they knew fasting was great before everyone. And people who have eaten fields of food now have a framework for change.

We consume a lot of energy to digest the food we eat. Some people, amongst other reasons, can’t handle a meal and need to lie down.

As you eat — your mind shuts down, you are not as sharp as you were.

For most of our human history, we’ve had more accented fasting periods, or better said — periods without any food.

Nowadays, we are ramjamming anything we see into our bodies.

To kick it off: Eat in the window of 6 hours, fast for the remaining 18 hours. The good thing: you’ve got 8 hours covered by sleeping. Or maybe you don’t, I don’t know. Make it happen.

Research shows that fasting periods clean up your body.

You could get addicted to a “I’ve just eaten” feeling, and you could continue with that lifestyle for decades before recognizing that it was, primarily, a bad habit. Cut it down.

Eat clean, track the times, amounts, and types of food you’re eating.

Compare your eating habits with the output you have at work, your hobbies, relationships with others, etc.

Eating clean

Source: punkufer.hr

Most people like to eat “bad” or “fast” food. Don’t shy away from it. Rather, recognize its effects, gradually switch up ingredients with better ones.

And learn how to enjoy food, so you’re not killing yourself.

Psychedelics

Source

A decent amount of people in the Software Industry experiment with all kinds of things. From different teas, sleeping patterns, breathing exercises, workouts, foods, fastings, to mushrooms, marijuana, etc.

Think with your own mind.

Nobody — your country, other people — except yourself have the right to tell you what you can do with your body, mind, or soul.

There is an ongoing War on Drugs, that through propaganda successfully buried any ground for researching most of the drugs (the non-taxable ones).

Nowadays, an increasing number of research is being done on all kinds of plants and chemical compounds.

People across the planet explore their consciousness, heal their chemical and biological problems.

Most, if not all of the things you could get throughout any drug, can be achieved through meditation, working out, living a certain lifestyle. It only takes longer.

Consult experts in any field.

Stay on the safe side.

Breathing and The Cold

Standing desk, Pilates ball

Stand while you work.

Run while you work.

Sit on a Pilates ball to strengthen your core while working.

Evolving the system

Whatever the status is, looking from the holistic point of view, we can take that our life can always get 50–100% better in few months of deciding on the system, evolving it, and sticking to it.

That could be switching out bad habits with the better ones.

You don’t have to run 100m under 5s; do a walk to begin, and adjust your aim with time.

Tracking your life to be able to improve it

Everything has an impact on you

Every picture on the Internet, every color combination, face you see, emotions you sense — everything has an impact on you. As you do onto others.

Use Habitus to track your emotions, habits, and thoughts

Habitus App

We’ve been working on a State-of-the-Art tracker for you — Habitus App!

It allows you to track everything, day-in, day-out,
It is open-source — you can check how it works,
It is anonymous — you own your data, and nobody knows about your activities.

It’s written in TypeScript, Vue.js, Koa.js and uses MongoDB. Join the Development!

Habitus App

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Cover image source

Question Everything: Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:02:27 +0000

Our goal is to transcend languages, tools, and yourself — so you’re able to learn and use anything needed to achieve whatever you find worthwhile.

Read Self-Aware Software Artisan: Product Development for the recommended technology and the tools for scalable software development.

📹 Intro video: Richard Feynman — Why

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

After you’re done reading: check the ⬇️ bottom of the page — you’ll find next parts of this series that cover diverse set of related topics!

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

Author’s experience

Data Sculptor, Architect of Systems and Products.

Founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports and led teams of up to ten people.

Worked, as a Systems Architect, Frontend, and Backend Developer, for a product company, a digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

🎷 Background song

“Why?”

When I was a kid, I would constantly ask my parents “Why?” about everything. When they asked me the same — I’ve responded: “Zato!” (Croatian for “That’s why”).

In my younger years I didn’t know how to express myself; except doing what was on my mind, and replying ‘Zato’. Now, as I grew, I’m able to explain things, relatively, better.

This whole essay is but a series of answers to ‘Why’, which I’ve collected throughout my life. As time passes, the depth of touched ‘Whys’ increases, thus the answers become better, more universal, and more truthful. But that doesn’t mean that my original “Zato!” (“That’s why”) haven’t been truthful, it was — it was the best I could give at the time.

Topics of Self-Awareness, Work, Individuality, Social interactions are extremely broad and ever-evolving; thus trying to convey them in a simple manner is a challenge, and it always will be. At the same time —this makes them necessary to explore.

Form your opinions. Know that I’m writing from my experience and thinking.

Let’s build upon each other’s experience and intuition.

Humans making sense of the world

Source

Human beings:

think, relatively logically, about the world,
think, relatively logically, about the problems they care for,
form solutions,
find tools to use for, more or less, effective way of solving problems,
use the tools in a scalable, transformable way and
are able to evolve ideas.

To cut corners or to invest proper time to learn?

Source

As tools, languages fade away, and new ones come into the play… As multi-field languages emerge (TypeScript — for Frontend and Backend development)… As your life interests and purpose evolve …

Remember to observe how you interact with the environment and continually re-calculate in which direction, and with what kind of activities you feel most at ease with yourself, looking long-term.

Be mindful of what you’re observing, what you’re learning about, how you are processing it, why did the guy made, or explained it, that way; what is another way of doing things; how would a similar language or thing upgrade or degrade environment in some aspects…

Human being, that is mindful in his actions, needs longer time to bootstrap his system of processing and acting on the World and seeing tangible effects. We are not here for 2–5 years, but rather for a few decades (or centuries), and we have enough time to do the things in the right way.

What would you rather be? A guy or girl going through life, cutting corners and never being satisfied with yourself as you didn’t press into anything ever? Or the one that goes with ferocious will and determination to figure out the secrets of life in every thing, no matter how big or little is it?

Feeling as you learn

We learn better when more of our senses are activated at the same time.

Input type, ranked from lowest to greatest involvement of senses:

reading textual documentation,
listening to audio lessons,
watching video tutorials,
journaling, alongside before mentioned items,
hands-on experience: building as you learn, alongside before mentioned items.

The more you feel, the greater potential for understanding there is.

Document as you learn

For any new language, framework or tool, you learn — journal the evolution of your understanding.

If you can’t explain something in easy terms, you don’t understand it properly.

Share your journal on your website, for others to learn from your experience.

Writing a Journal isn’t as stressful, e.g. as writing a book, but it serves:

you to recap what you have learned,
others to learn from your findings.

Build as you learn

As you learn about any new technology or way of thinking— build a simple app, website.

Building, while learning, will test and showcase your understanding or a lack of, allowing you to progress even further.

Publish your work online so others can learn from it, use it and contribute to it.

Algorithms — chess for Technology enthusiasts

Recognize this algorithm type? Source: Flickr

Most people get introduced to Algorithms while applying for a job, and the necessity to do it creates aversion towards it, for many people.

During all of your working life, you are working with algorithms, even while developing a ‘plain’ website. You are going through a list of steps and procedures to get a certain result —i.e. you use an algorithm. Algorithms most of the people work with, during their work life, are, relatively, simple.

Algorithms you’re involved with if you’re applying or working in a more advanced job are going to be, relatively, more advanced. More advanced algorithms have advanced ways of processing and transforming data while having additional constraints in mind (performance, memory consumption, …).

Don’t hate on algorithms, you use them everyday. Play with them, discover deeper realms of logical thinking. It will open you up, bring you a different perspective and benefit you in the long-term.

There is a lot of different types of algorithm problems. Play with the ones that vibe with you the most, and then branch out to other types. There are ad-hoc problems, graph problems, dynamic programming, … Pick the type you like. Develop an enthusiasm for them.

There are a lot of online sites for you to practice on. Spoj, HackerRank…

What you showcase with an algorithm implementation is: logical thinking, problem de-composition to smaller units and construction of the solution from the smaller units to form a working package; while having additional constraints in mind — like memory or speed.

It is a scalable and a reasonable way of checking the problem-solving capabilities of a person.

Algorithms and Data structures go hand in hand

Source

You could have a great recipe, but if you don’t have the tools — you’re out of luck. (Or you could get a recipe to create the tools. :))

Our algorithm (the way we process and transform our data) uses data structures (variables: numbers, strings, arrays) to manage data between it’s steps.

There are more advanced data structures to hold the data and allow easier processing and transformation, e.g. stacks, queues, trees etc.

All of these “Advanced data structures” are extensions of the plain ones (numbers, strings, arrays, …), but with a feature added or removed to them.

Educational system

Source

Firstly, don’t identify yourself with the degree, the high school, or the college you went to. The educational system and the environment can give you certain perspectives on life, as any other activity. It’s up to you to process the information, conclude for yourself and lead yourself to whatever direction you feel makes most sense for you.

Looking from the history perspective— educational institutions are breeding you to become a valuable member of the workforce. Most of the time — they do not exist to further explore your soul and create a job tailored to you, but rather to transform you so you can fill the shoes of the existing needs in the workforce.

Source: George Carlin

Nobody knows what kind of work we will do tomorrow. The same is true for you — you don’t know what you’ll want to work on tomorrow. Rather than trying to find a solution for your whole life, observe yourself, and adjust your actions as you change throughout life.

If you are applying anywhere, find something closest to your interests and people you want to meet there.

Differences between schools and teachers

There are amazing teachers across the World. But as with anything, they are far in between. Find the teachers and institutions that have the enthusiasm for the topic you are interested in.

Amazing teacher:

is one that bursts with enthusiasm for the topic he teaches,
encourages you to think for yourself,
asks you questions to nudge you towards the direction you’re already looking at, but you’re scared of making the first step.

College

Going to college is, in most cases (especially true for the technology field), more of a social experience, than a valuable educational investment for the future.

The college will connect you with different people and you’ll see what kind of characters you like. Some of the friendships will last for life. On that side, it is a marvelous endeavor.

While you’re there:

start, and finish, a project, on your own, or with your friends,
think about life and how you want to live,
learn about anything interesting to you,
have fun.

Don’t waste your time on things or people you don’t care about.

College and the technology industry

To work in the Technology Industry, in most cases, a college degree or any other paper for that matter is not a requirement. Your past experience, portfolio, and will are what matters.

There is a plethora of tutorials online. Create a project, open-source it, apply to your first job or create a job surrounding your idea.

Be able to play in an ever-changing World

Software Development evolves, as everything else. Fields previously inhabited by thousands of Developers are left in the dust; while others are being upgraded to form bigger, more encompassing fields.

Web Development, as well as Desktop App development, Mobile development… All those fields have a lifecycle of theirs.

It is necessary to learn how to learn to be able to play with emerging ideas as soon as possible.

New language or a tool, as a different perspective on the World

You want to be able to speak a decent amount of languages.

Every language has an ecosystem associated with it.
Ecosystem has people in it, that gravitated to it based on the affection towards solving things in a certain way.

Thus, speaking another language will bring you slightly different perspective on the problem and ways of solving it.

Know where you are good

The world is so complex that nuisances of it pass by us in the grind of the day. For some that is more true than for others. The velocity of an individual’s life, and the configuration of problems one faces, has an impact on this.

There is no single point where you will stop and figure out what you’re good at. It is an ongoing re-calculation of your relationship to everything else. Moving in any direction gives you better glimpse of your relationship to the approaching situations, while those — you’re moving away from — echo from your memory.

What you could do is — nullify obstacles to the stillness that you feel right now, and see how the calculation of your status turns out. You should get a clearer picture of what you’re good at and what you’re interested in. Every position you are in has a plethora of perspectives and information you can extract and build upon.

Every job or effort could be done respectfully and “kak se spada” (Croatian for “as it should be done”). The world is made of many levels in many directions, and choosing what stack or configuration sits well with you — is what you’ll recalculate during your whole life.

It is important to constantly look at the world with curious eyes as that is the first step to bring you closer to what you are. People call this happiness, stillness, point of true service to yourself and others… However you call it, it seems a good idea to see how close to it you can get.

Drums, guitars, piano — different strokes for different folks

It is the same with anything you do. Being that Software Development, painting, writing, thinking… There are subtle differences in tools, ways of doing things.

Experiment with everything that makes sense for you.

Amaze yourself and others with the touch you add into the mix of everything you’ve ever witnessed.

Picking a Programming language

Building blocks of a Programming language

Language, being a natural language (like English or Croatian) or a programming language, have the building blocks that make up bigger structures like words, sentences, and in the end — building up to the stories, essays, books.

Scalable programming language

For a language to be scalable, just like you want your startup project to be, it needs to have a small number of reusable and mutable building blocks.

The most optimal situation is where you need to learn the smallest number of blocks that you can mutate (prefix, suffix, or any other type of mutation) and connect them in a certain way to express what you want.

Mutations that you could do on the blocks need to be as simple as possible and have a hierarchy of composition that allows us to construct emotional, scientific, or any other type of, state.

A language that is small in size, but modular and extendable is the one that is more logical than those that are not. Thus, that language is easier to learn and it has more chance of getting evolved as more people are able to play with it.

Programming language needs to allow you to express your thoughts in the easiest manner possible, and have those thoughts easy to extend and modify.

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Cover image source

Deep Work: Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:02:05 +0000

We are cutting down on “ineffective” work, and propelling you into a flow-state where you are able to solve problems — with ease.

If you want to do the best work possible, you need a framework for properly managing your working states. The framework, outlined in this essay, focuses on:

managing your emotional states,
managing your environment,
investigation, formulation, and decomposition of problems.

Deep work means having yourself and the environment in sync, which allows you to tackle any problem and formulate optimal solutions — with ease.

Working like a mad man could do justice if you have a pattern that solves the problem, and you can just repeat the steps.

On the other hand, when working on, previously, unknown problems — it is better to approach them in a sensitive and diligent manner.

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

After you’re done reading: check the ⬇️ bottom of the page — you’ll find next parts of this series that cover diverse set of related topics!

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

Author’s experience

Data Sculptor, Architect of Systems and Products.

Founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports and led teams of up to ten people.

Worked, as a Systems Architect, Frontend, and Backend Developer, for a product company, a digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

🎷 Background song

Sensibility needed for deep work

We are required to hold many different pieces of information in our mind and have their relationships known, while drilling into the hierarchy of the existing and new implementation, simultaneously — to properly implement new mechanics. All of this cannot be done if you are forceful with your approach; although at times — you can combine them. But as with anything, most of the time, it is more costly at first, and more optimal for the future, to let go into the easier mode of being.

To have the right amount of sensitivity after switching context from a problem that required almost none of it (relatively), few different things can be done to ease into the “creativity mode”:

meditation,
dance,
music (drums, guitar, …),
whatever switches you back into the analog world where you can feel your thoughts by your actions.

Step by step: Get the information, analyze, act

Source

It is important to recognize the current mode of working and not feeling bad because you’re not further down the line.

Investigating the topic

If you feel the need to explore, investigate a topic — know that it is what is needed to be done now. Don’t feel bad because you’re not coding or writing emails or whatever else you think you should be doing. Know that you are in the state of the investigation, thus no guilt needs to be in your body. You are doing what needs to be done.

It is an essential part of working. But in many environments it is not emphasized enough, as it doesn’t comply with the overarching idea of crunching, delivering, pushing out code or emailing all the time.

Take the time to investigate, report the findings, implement. Through time it will make more and more sense.

For you to be calm, be sure to write your thoughts in your “Work Journal”.

Work Journal: Documenting your conclusions

Document your questions, thoughts and conclusions during your investigation in a “Work journal”.

Write down your findings — for yourself and/or for others.

Why investigate and not feel bad about it?

A lot of unnecessary stress comes from feeling the guilt of not coding or working, when in reality — what you should be doing is investigating.

Why? Because you feel the push to do so.
Why? Because you don’t know something, and you know that you need to research before acting.

You cannot implement something if you do not understand everything that needs to be understood before going in.

A lot of unnecessary time loss is created by going in too early and having to backtrack in your approach because you didn’t investigate the topic enough.

Development Session — the basic unit of development

Source: Unknown

Single session consists of:

a well-defined problem,
tabs opened in your browser,
tabs opened in your IDE.

Intro to each session is an interplay of:

problem formulation (seeing it, describing it in easiest terms),
problem de-composition to smaller instances,
re-calculation of, eventually, decomposed problems into the original one (to see how they combine and what will they produce together).

During each session:

focus on your breathing (this is at the core of everything you will ever do while working on anything),
if you forgot to track your breathing: find a way to remind yourself (e. g. write a note and stick it on your monitor).

The outro of each session:

stretch,
move away from the computer (except if in a killing spree).

Constraining sessions:

with time,
with stress levels (too big? move away — you cannot lose your grip if you already lost it; you can only recuperate),
20 minutes or more, depending on the type of the session and your experience with it.

How long to work

Most of the time, most of the effective work will be in the window of 3–4 hours.

Group your activities in slots of 20 minutes, or more — depending on the type of the problem and your current state.

Organize your activities around that window of 3–4 hours to re-frame and solve problems while meditating, working out.

Don’t rush yourself while working

Source

You need to respect the value of time invested in the process of discovery, implementation, and testing. All of these cannot be rushed if diligent work needs to be done. It is not possible to do something that takes X amount of time in a shorter period.

With focus and time, you will solve what you need to solve. Don’t be too harsh on yourself while working. There is life, besides the current problem, that needs your attention — don’t blew all your stress capacity on this — or you’ll lose it for other areas of your life, and you will suffer in wholeness.

With all said, it is important to do your best.

If your colleagues or company cannot understand this, and are pushing you towards more stress, while you know you’re losing on your effectiveness, communicate this clearly to them or leave if it cannot be managed. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stress yourself on the right problems, and in the right circumstances.

It is stretching out the proportions of our understanding that allow us to transcend into new realms. The need to challenge ourselves needs to be ever-present.

Balancing all of that, and knowing when to push that extra mile, or 20 miles, and when to stop and step back, is what makes a difference between a mindful person and the one that will perish in naivety.

Observe yourself, observe what is happening around you and adjust accordingly. And speak your mind! Towards yourself and towards others. This world will not take time to stop and ask you how you feel; you need to step up and speak — to yourself and others.

Fixing “feeling ineffective”: Work Journal

Source

Working long hours and feeling, during and after, like you haven’t done anything? Most of the time that is the case when you don’t have something tangible to brag to your colleagues about.

Sometimes, the problems are incomprehensible to you, and the effectiveness (in the lines of code or tasks you’ve opened or commented on, …), doesn’t show up. But nevertheless, you’ve made some progress. You’ve processed the problem, to a certain degree.

You are leaving yourself in the dark by not writing down your conclusions, questions and thoughts while figuring out what you’re looking at.

If you were to write down your thoughts, you would have an essay about the current problem — easily transferable into a task for others, better code, git message, or at least — to show that you’ve thought about the problem after a whole day of not doing any effective work (while chunking it down to the smallest units possible).

Fixing feeling of “not being effective”:

journal each workday: 1) every question you have, 2) every conclusion you reach,
share pieces of your Journal at the end of the day with your team members — to show you’ve invested time; show your mental progress, open new tasks, answer existing questions.

Analyzing your work journal:

evaluate, based on the notes you take, how effective you were, in which periods, after, or during, which activities,
extract conclusions from it. Form a better system of activities (workout periods, resting periods, stretching, type of food you eat) — introduce crawling, meditation, laying down while working (see Self-Aware Software Artisan: Health).

Sitting behind a computer doesn’t mean working. Working means working.

Write a Journal and get the surrounding things in line, to be more effective in the short and long run.

Work environment: Adjust everything around you

Source

Everything matters

Your seating position,
the angle of looking at the monitors,
number of monitors you are using at the time; their size and position,
organization of items (if any) on your table,
the environment surrounding you.

Any items that are not in the right place will subconsciously disturb you

Source

Your focus will inevitably go to all the places that are not ordered as they should be.

Humans are always seeking bad and off-putting situations that need to be fixed.

Help yourself, remove every disturbance to be able to focus on the task at hand.

Consciously introducing a disturbance

On the other hand, there is no single solution that works for anyone at any time.

Maybe there is a disturbance, with a specific level and intensity you wish to have. It depends on your biological make-up, i. e. your sensitivity.

Music could play. As a background, or foreground effect. It could be metal, jazz, lo-fi, …, depending on the mood and the desired effect.

Using the environment to calm yourself down

If you have your mind racing and need to calm it down — try gradually calming it down.

Find your current essence (state of your being, and habits), then add and remove where and how much is necessary. Just like Michelangelo would.

It is much easier to find your inner balance while working at home. You have all the space and freedom to transform your room into whatever feels “you”.

Managing stress in your browser and IDE (tabs, pinning)

Source

You will get lost in the forest of tabs. Not knowing where you should look.

Your browser and your IDE (if you’re a Developer) — are the main places of your whereabouts in the digital space. Therefore, it is important to manage them properly.

Fixes:

regularly close tabs in your browser and IDE,
group things, research, and remove old items. By cluttering your browser with a gazillion of tabs, you will get more anxious than the situation entitles,
pin cardinal pages — sites that you will return to during your session.

Search engines are good enough to find what you need. If you don’t find what you need from opening few links in a row, close all of them and do a better search.

Switching context is costly; plan and have a system to avoid most of it

Source

Each time you switch the context you need to:

think if you can leave your old issue,
think in what status your old issue is,
document status of your old issue,
evaluate the current status of a new issue,
bring up the environment to start working on a new issue,
gather all the information about the new issue, request what is needed, process and start acting on it,
then you need the time to achieve cruising efficiency with working on the new issue.

And then switching back to the old issue — and do everything above — again…

Lowering the cost of switching between contexts

Ensure the tasks, comments, messages, commits, code and everything else is polished and ready for consumption beforehand, by you or your team.

The messier it is, the more time you need to bootstrap into the new direction you are working towards.

It’s best to organize and plan everything in advance. By the type of problems, order of them, and how they build upon each other.

Notifications need to be silenced, and looked at few times a day, preferably once — at the start of it.
Thus, an order of execution during the day needs to be known. This will bring down the amount of context switching that is needed from you.
Organize your tasks so that they form a story you are telling that makes sense. Don’t jump from different kinds of tasks into different ones, or switch between completely different parts of the system.

Switching context on purpose

Do it only when you are fatigued and you need a change, and you find relaxation from it; otherwise — go and relax the other way and return back to the problem.

Keep in mind, any looking, thinking, walking away, talking with others — it is all a context switch.

Some of it makes sense for us — relaxing us to be better in the wholeness of the day; others are reactions out of fear of missing out, not delivering, or of the reaction we could get from not responding promptly.

There are cases where imminent attention is required and we need to respond as soon as possible, but most of the time — there needs to be a tranquility in the environment so we can focus on what is needed to be processed.

Notifications: Slack, Email, Phone

Turn off Slack sounds and pop-up notifications.
Check your email once a day, starting the day.
Turn off all notifications on your Phone, except calls on the SIM card (emergency line).

Longer breaks from work

Source

Our work culture has employees working 11 months and having 1 month to cool down from the work. If you are at the crossroads in your life, that 1 month off will not do the trick.

Take the time off when needed.

If you are having personal problems, or you simply need to think about the direction you are moving in your life — take time off to recuperate, observe your thoughts and feelings, and adjust your path.

If you are a freelancer, it is easier to take a sabbatical. A prerequisite for that is that you are on the top of your game so you can continue playing when you want (you have the clients ready).

If you are in a reasonable and a profitable company, where you are a valuable member (you’ve done your best and that was fruitful for the company), and you wish to stay their member — ask the company for a bigger break. It is in the company’s interest to have you back at the top of your game.

It is a matter of communicating truthfully and clearly. Life gets much easier when we do it like that.

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Cover image source

Joining a Software Company: Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:01:36 +0000

Our goal is to determine what makes a great company, find a company that makes sense for you, plan your growth, outline what is expected from you and vice-versa, and determine the compensation package.

Everything is dependent on the situation and the individual, so suggesting anyone anything, e.g. to join an existing Company or to start a new one, is ungrateful and depends on the situation at hand.

Whether you will go and join others on the journey already started or start your own and attract others to join you — depends on your interests, skill level, will, enthusiasm, and the situation that meets the before-mentioned things.

Related: Self-Aware Software Artisan: Starting a Software Company.

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

After you’re done reading: check the ⬇️ bottom of the page — you’ll find next parts of this series that cover diverse set of related topics!

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

Author’s experience

Data Sculptor, Architect of Systems and Products.

Founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports and led teams of up to ten people.

Worked, as a Systems Architect, Frontend, and Backend Developer, for a product company, a digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

🎷 Background song

Getting closer to what you are — Picking the industry, company and the position

Source

If you are interested in psychology, find a company that is deeply in the trenches with it. The second best option is to find a position that is involved in it, even if the company is not primarily in the industry of your choosing.

If you don’t see anything you like — start your company.

Take everything as a series, or a continuation, of steps you take. If you are not satisfied with the direction, adjust — change your company, position, or start a new company by yourself.

Think and feel what is inside you. Decide the next step that is the closest to what you can understand that is true for you.

Are you and the company a true fit?

I’ve come up with a game a few years ago. And it shows the relationship of you towards other people/companies and topics in the world. You are the blue one in the middle, the world is the outer circle. We’ve implemented this on a WhoHack hackathon in Rijeka, Croatia. Onetius — BarFight game.

If you are not feeling utilized, fulfilled at your work — change it. If you can’t talk about what is on your mind — change the company. It is important to have as many people in the right positions as possible — to contribute more truthfully and meaningfully.

It’s not about the money. It’s not about the dogs, cats, football tables, light show in the office, or bragging how woke the company is.

It is about the interplay of everything that allows you: to have a playground for growth, express your individually while, at the same time, you’re nurturing a team spirit — working on a project you are passionate about. It is about having the freedom to tailor the mode of working to you, and do the best work of your life.

Applying for the job

Source: Seinfeld, YouTube

If you are in touch with a company that is working in the Industry and on the problem you are interested in… Arrange a talk with them, assess the team, their aspirations, state your current status, from where you’ve come, and what you want from the future.

You — applying as a complete Human Being

People are not picking you on the pure grounds of you being a money-making machine. If you’ve got that impression — don’t go there.

People are rather picking you based on you being a human, with your past, experience, steps you’ve taken to get where you are, your sensibility, courage, willingness to go past the hurdles, and your outlook on life.

The bigger picture of you, working at the Company

The most important is that we recognize our state, emotions, and aspirations and actively work on extracting information from it and act accordingly.

Companies or People you should be working with are those that see you as a whole person, the same as you should look at them — like a company with an evolving story written by the people working there or like a complete person, with advantages and flaws.

Remember, this whole generation of people you are currently swimming with — will go away, and the only thing that will be left behind is — the laughs, conversations, and feelings between the team.

Your ski jump for 300 meters doesn’t mean jack shit if there is no one you could inspire.

We are constantly telling the story of ourselves, continuing on the past, changing through time.

Know your responsibilities

Source

It is important to know what are the exact responsibilities of your position.

Be sure to check with the company everything you’re interested in about the position. Namely:

amount of hours expected from you,
part of the day to be reserved for the work you do — to overlap with the rest of the team,
type of the problems you’ll work on,
people you’ll work with,
technologies you’ll work with.

The more things are known in advance — the more you’ll be able to prepare and respond appropriately while starting your work.

List all of the requirements, form a valid agreement

It is a responsible thing from both sides to formalize verbal communication in the form of requirements from both sides, written and signed in an Agreement.

Communicate any requirement in a clear and understandable manner.

If you don’t understand what is in the Agreement— ask the company for clarification and/or your lawyer.

Some of the important things to address:

ownership of the work you do,
monitoring, reviewing processes,
clauses for the way of resolving potential problems,
compensation package,
anything else important to you.

If something is not in the agreement, and you find it important, explain to the other side and request an addition.

Compensation for your work

Source

Money is a crude form of value we’ve come up with to simplify the computation of worth. You need to be compensated enough so that you feel valued as you should, based on your knowledge, experience, and future prospects.

State the amount you wish to get for the work you do so that it hits the middle ground of:

not being paid less than you think your experience, skills, and future prospects are worth and
not being paid more than that — as that would be a lie and will introduce anxiousness because you’re feeling you’re not giving enough.

On the other hand, if you’re just starting, you could settle for the lesser compensation as the experience you will get will be more valuable than potentially missing out on the opportunity. But that doesn’t mean you should sell yourself short for what you’re bringing to the table, at the start of the collaboration and in the future.

Asking for a raise

Source

If you feel you deserve a raise, go and ask for it.

If you feel someone else deserves a raise, encourage them to stick up for themselves and ask for it.

Express yourself

Source

The most valuable part of any company are the people in it.

Each position in the company has the main responsibility that can be, plainly, read from the job posting. (e. g. Frontend Dev: develop UI, …)

There are, also, implicit responsibilities individuals have. These can be summoned to informing on the perspectives you’ve acquired from working in your position, and others may not know.

To optimize inner workings of any company, it is important to continually gather information on all levels, organize it and transfer to the respectable people or groups in the company — to take actions based on it.

There are a lot of moving pieces while building software, thus it is important for all levels to communicate properly — address problems, potential improvements — on a regular basis.

Inform people in your company:

about any new tool that can improve your work-flow,
about a new strategy for doing things (think and question everything, constantly — share it with others as a talk, presentation, document — it will be greatly valued),
about the down-sides of the existing tools, frameworks — that are not discussed or known,
how to improve your and other people’s APIs (how to receive requests for work and how to deliver them in a better fashion)…

Don’t disregard anything, but conclude for yourself

Source

Don’t just rush to a conclusion just to appear decisive if the problem needs to be approached more diligently.

Say it if it makes sense, otherwise — say I don’t know — yet. Get back with the best solution you could come up with.

Respect the people, voice your opinion

Respect people around you.

Say what you mean, voice your opinion. If you are shy — find a way, via email, one-on-one talks — whatever makes sense for you and the people around you.

Contribute as much as you can.

Nurture relationships with people around you so that you can build part of your present and future together.

After joining the company

Check Self-Aware Software Artisan: Team.

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Intro
You — A Human Being
Your Health
Question Everything
Deep work
Joining a Software Company — ✺ You are here.
Starting a Software Company — 👈 Next up!
Team Artisanship
Product Artisanship
Code Artisanship
Finishing up

Cover image source

Starting a Software Company: Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:01:00 +0000

Our goal is to determine what you are interested in, find the opportunities, determine a scalable model of working, define growth stages and make your idea a successful one.

Don’t do it because of the money — you’ll die.
Do it because you are dead without it.

📹 Intro video: Charles Bukowski — Go all the way

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

After you’re done reading: check the ⬇️ bottom of the page — you’ll find next parts of this series that cover diverse set of related topics!

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

Author’s experience

Data Sculptor, Architect of Systems and Products.

Founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports and led teams of up to ten people.

Worked, as a Systems Architect, Frontend, and Backend Developer, for a product company, a digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

🎷 Background song

Without a purpose, we are dead men walking

Source

Find your purpose, through a succession of moves. Observe what is happening while you are in different situations.

You’ve seen or heard about a woman having a child under the car tire, having a godly strength to lift up the car and pull her child from beneath it. This is an instance where the primal instinct of protecting your offspring kicks in. And it cannot be compared to anything else. But in some parallel environment, you can imagine that same drive for life, that presence — of being in the moment, being applied to your calling in life, or — better said — to observing, speaking the truth about your feelings, and getting closer and closer to what you are.

Then, you see a ski jump done by an individual born to do it. You see a football coach dying and living at the same time while coaching and moving his team forward with his guidance. Then you see a man at the right place, at the right helm, guiding the company that makes our lives and environment better.

These are the things we are living for. To be exactly where we are supposed to be when we are supposed to be there.

If it makes sense for you to build a product that will solve a problem for few people or a lot of them, you will get to it. If you are here, to in the next few years help heal a great number of people — you will get there. If you are here to create the most beautiful flower bouquets, you will get there, to do it and bring smile to peoples faces. But at the end of the day, to do anything good for another man, you need to have the energy, the will and enthusiasm to do so — so work on your strengths and weaknesses, improve yourself to be able to contribute to others in greater fashion.

Whatever you do, keep observing, keep going deeper into what you truly are. How? Write down your emotions, your thoughts, your habits. Write a journal, every day; see where you are, how you are feeling and how do you want to feel, what do you want to see.

You cannot expect the world to be better if you don’t imagine and sketch out exactly how it needs to look. In most instances — you will sketch out how you need to be — to have the world react to you in a manner you value.

Make a sketch, outline who you want to be, how you want to be. Who you truly are. Make it happen in the next few years. Go for it. See how life feels then.

Observing, doing what makes sense

Source

I go through life, observing myself, observing others, observing the interactions and the feelings I get about things — I’m taking action. I could play the guitar, go on a run, read a book, work on a software project, or all of the mentioned. At the end of the day, I’m expressing what is happening in myself.

If I play the guitar, I want to express myself in an analog world, and the guitar makes sense at that moment. If I feel another movement makes more sense, like for example, drumming — I do that. The same thing is with feeling the need to create in the digital world. Medium is different, tools and technology are different, but the underlying concepts of transformation and utility have remained the same.

We are expressing our interests, being that playing the guitar, or building a web site, app, AI, blockchain, whatever you can think of. Things we pick (analog vs. digital, technologies, tools) give a sense of our character, but at the end of the day, we are expressing what is happening inside of us, only on a different level and angle.

Thus, while we are here — alive, our goal is to, through time, be more in synchronicity with ourselves. Meaning, being less stressed through time, less anxious, and more at peace with our path.

Finding what you love — building around that

Starting and going through life, tuning to the spot after each step.

A lot of people go around and yell for ages, decades — “I don’t know what I should do! I’m not good at anything!”.

You are, you are already doing it. It might not seem to you that your interests are connected. You could ask yourself how it will all work out for you…

If you don’t know what you should do, know that things are relative, and take something that makes most sense to you. As the time changes, and your perspective — you will calculate things differently and position yourself differently.

Example:

If you are interested in Sports, do something in that realm,
If you have interests in Education — learn, teach, build learning software,
If you are interested in Psychology — build something around habits, states etc.

We can represent our life as a continuation of steps we take.

But, keep moving. Keep thinking, keep feeling.

Never give up on yourself.

It is infinitely hard to start, but we do it anyways

Source

Starting a new endeavor, here, means:

tackling something unknown or previously unsolved by you (having a specific functionality you’ve come up with, that you think changes the field at hand),
using tools, languages, frameworks unknown to you.

Avoid doing something just to brag about it

Do not work on a problem if you’re not improving the current best solution by 10x.
If you wish to create a clone of something just to showcase your skills — invest more time and come up with an original idea or a remix of the existing ones so that the product has a profound impact on you and, hopefully, on other people.

Resistance to new things

The level of resistance to new endeavors is proportional to:

the stress level in your life,
uncertainty of your endeavor.

If you are starting a new project, even though you know most of the ingredients… the reason for friction is — you not knowing a language, or a tool well enough or you not understanding what exactly makes your project tick. For example, when switching out a framework for a different one, even though it is in the same language, and by the documentation, you see that there will be no problems, you will feel the resistance towards it that is proportional to the level of stress in your life.

It’s easier to be a sheep

It is easier to continue on the well-beaten path than is to switch even a tiny amount of the configuration. That’s why we can predict a relatively good amount of things going forward, and the trends towards the next decades.

You cannot evade your feelings, and the inertion you feel while switching things up. You can accept it and build through it.

Accept uncertainty, fulfill your heroes journey

What you can do is — accept it, learn that it is a mechanism of perseverance that in this situation probably doesn’t make sense, and know that your body is giving wrong signals for it and that you are better off digging deeper and continuing with the new work, than to ponder, procrastinate and pontificate everything about it.

Give yourself time

Take your time to simmer the anger, the fear of the unknown. Start slowly. Investigate, play with it for some time, get the familiarity of the environment you are stepping in, and soon you will be up and running, hopefully in a better state than in your previous environment.

Magic of working on your projects

Source

That rush you feel when you get something right. After a long road of wandering, trying…

As with any good thing, as soon as you complete something, a new unknown appears on the horizon.

You are in that loop of moving the horizon further, while in the meantime you need to manage yourself to handle the stress levels. (Check Self-Aware Software Artisan: Health and You — A Human Being).

You’ll get beaten up along the way. You don’t care. It is better get beat up and improve yourself, doing what you love than from the things you don’t care about.

Pick your battles. Everything takes something away from you, and gives something to you. Know as much as you can before going in.

The uncertainty of the impact of your idea on the World, and the interplay of the World and your idea is where the magic is. The magic of life is not knowing that last 20%.

Picking the team, transferring the vision, doing the best work of your life — together

It is of utmost importance to pick the right people for the job.

As with everything, you can screw it up. If you did the best you could, and the relationship doesn’t work — cut it. It is best for both sides. Don’t waste time for the other person and for yourself.

Pick the people so that your vision is truly an aspiration of theirs, also.

Motivate your people with the truth and the necessity to focus on getting every step as it should be.

Expect and give the best of you to them and the Company, and not an inch shorter than that. Expect and demand the same from them.

Read Self-Aware Software Artisan: Team for more.

Picking the technology for scale: frameworks, languages, tools

While working on your project you have the opportunity to pick the best palette of tools. It is not the case while joining ongoing projects, so don’t take this lightly.

You have the opportunity to bootstrap your application in the right way, securing its scalability into the future.

Read Self-Aware Software Artisan: Product Development for the recommended technology and the tools for scalable software development.

When to release a product

Your work style, your ideas, processing of the information — all comes from within you — your past experiences, feelings intertwined in you.

Perfectionist style could derail from your balanced life, trying to achieve perfection in the product you’re involved with. It could possibly kill you, or it could revive you. It all depends on your genetic and/or environmental makeup.

Test or try to envision interactions people will have with you and your product if you launch it in a specific state. What will happen in the next few weeks, months, years? Will you have anything to eat for a foreseeable time?

Plan everything you can in advance, set goals to know how far or close you are to them.

Ask more questions than you can answer and start answering them with time. See how you feel and decide on the actions.

Read Self-Aware Software Artisan: Product Development.

“It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.” ― Alan W. Watts

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Intro
You — A Human Being
Your Health
Question Everything
Deep work
Joining a Software Company
Starting a Software Company — ✺ You are here.
Team Artisanship — 👈 Next up!
Product Artisanship
Code Artisanship
Finishing up

Cover image source

Team Artisanship: Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 14:00:42 +0000

Our goal is to ensure individual’s and team’s purpose go hand in hand, reward and punish behavior appropriately, and make your time together the best time of your working life.

Team is about challenging currents of thoughts and feelings inside an individual, to achieve cathartic rejuvenation, while gathering around and bringing a resonant idea to life.

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

After you’re done reading: check the ⬇️ bottom of the page — you’ll find next parts of this series that cover diverse set of related topics!

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

Author’s experience

Data Sculptor, Architect of Systems and Products.

Founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports and led teams of up to ten people.

Worked, as a Systems Architect, Frontend, and Backend Developer, for a product company, a digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

🎷 Background song

Team vs. Own project from start to finish: Single mind versus many of them

Source

If you are a single mind working on the code, if you have the strength, will, and determination to pull it off from beginning to the end by yourself, you will have a greater chance to standardize the way of working than you would while managing a team of people.

It is possible to standardize the way of working while working in a team, but it requires more upfront systematization and planning while taking all of the stakeholders into account.

The amount of work that goes into the synchronization of multiple people in the team, in the way they work together, how they write software, goes up by their number and their characters.

A development team is like a national football team, you need a clear vision and strategy for every situation, you need to manage characters, styles, aspirations, defects, and prospects of everyone included.

You have a greater chance to win with 11 people than you would by yourself, but that also means more effort into managing everything.

Working with the team involves knowing: in what way and how much to reward anyone included, on individual and/or group level; how to punish individuals or the whole group for not carrying out what was in the strategy, etc.

It is of the utmost importance to develop a system of working so that all participants know the rules of the game and can accept, reject it or improve it on an individual and/or group level.

It is not as simple as pulling people into your group, growing the company to 100 or 500 people. Sometimes, a team of 11 in a few years, achieves more than those 500 in their lifetime. That’s on what we’re focusing here. (In the previous parts we’ve been focused on a individual.)

Leadership, Hierarchy, setting the differences, and moving forward

Source

In a healthy environment, the ideas need to be examined to determine the most optimal way forward.

Improving lousy ideas, learning from them

The best ideas need to be voiced and the lousy ones need to be determined exactly in which way they are lousy — to learn the lesson for that kind of thinking in those situations, for the future, and to improve them where it is possible, and possibly have those improved ideas take precedence over those better looking at a first glance.

Brewing the ideas, creativity needed for them

Ideas are created and voiced by the individuals. Biological makeup, environmental background (history, experience) of an individual — influence, and carve the ideas being laid out.

As those differences between individuals can vary… to have the most optimal results: it is important to have a mechanism of brewing those ideas and laying them out in a systematic manner.

How long to juggle ideas, when to pick and move forward

As we, as humans, are included in the process of brewing the ideas and wanting to hear the best ones from people included — you can quickly get into a loop of “meetings”, “brewing” that lasts hours, days, weeks, and nothing gets done, as more of the focus is given on spinning the wheels than on really moving forward.

Depending on the project, environment, short term, and long term goals — the system needs to decide upon the best ideas at a point in time that is logical. The main prerequisite is a short and long-term strategy that then guides the decision process in the future. People that are in leadership roles need to take authority, after enough time of brewing and competition between the ideas, and decide upon the best one, set out the strategy for carrying it out, and expect from the team to conform to the decided strategy.

Delegate responsibility incrementally

For any bigger in scope project, constrained in time, intertwined with complexity — it is important to have a system of delegation in place to bring long-term stability to organization.

Balance the responsibility throughout your organization.

Setting the differences

The role of a leader is deciding on the strategy of a team and taking every possible input into account.

When a decision is made, the team needs to carry out the orders.

The leader needs to settle any disagreements in a merciless but righteous manner.

Never underestimate anyone

People are in different spots in their life.

Appreciate each human on the base level and give respect where respect is due.

If you encounter a human that is in a rough spot in her/his life, know that you don’t know what is really happening in them. Even tough the problem seems like an easy one for you, the biological makeup of the individual could process the problem completely different from you, and vice-versa.

Don’t look at the clothes, watches, title of an individual. Look them into their eyes. There you will find the truth.

While speaking with people, know that everyone is afraid of you exposing their weaknesses, just like you are. The pressure goes up in a social situation — that’s why most people play it safe and try to be a chameleon while hanging out in groups. And the true nature comes up while being one on one.

Never underestimate anyone. No matter how sure you are in reading the other person, there is something deep in every human that can prove you wrong — if it is triggered.

Also, to be noted here — don’t overestimate people — clothes, titles, money — those are all indicators of something. And I will leave it up to you to decide how much it means to you.

So, to bring it home — value others as they should be valued while having basic human respect towards others.

Admitting that you don’t understand

Maybe this is the most important piece of the puzzle. Of telling when you don’t understand something. It allows you to grow, as you now know what needs to be tackled next. Otherwise — by being quiet to others and yourself — you are left in the dark. Acknowledge what you don’t know, firstly to yourself, then to others.

Maybe your family or friends don’t work that way. Or the environment around you. But in order for the professional part of your life, your art, your achievements to matter and spill that to other parts of your life — the crew you are artificially choosing need to be al-pair with this thinking.

The team needs to nurture and value individuals that can say: “I don’t know”. Or “So far, I haven’t figured it out”. Or “We didn’t solve that problem yet, but here is what we do know, maybe that will help you”.

But don’t hide from the problems with: “I don’t know. I’m out!”. Try your best, invest your time and focus on finding the solution.

Allow others to speak, to have the best ideas float to the top, but take dominance when you sense you’re right

Thus, present your truth to others.

And let the pieces fall where they may.

You are not in the team to make each other feel good.

We are not here to make each other feel good. We are here to kick ass, together.

And the feeling will come with time, on an individual and team level.

Don’t be nice. Let the creativity pour out of you. Say what you mean.

But also allow for good ideas to climb the hierarchy. Give a helping hand when it’s needed.

Helping others in your team

Help anyone you can with the transfer of knowledge, give everything you’ve learned to people around you.

Don’t worry, the ones who will value it — would get it anyways, with some time difference.

Help them with a personalized shortcut if you can. They will be there for you down the road. If not, at least you know you’ve helped someone to have a better life. That has more value than getting something touchable back from them on a fake intention.

Individual integrity

If you have any problem — solve it by talking face to face. If you’re right and if it doesn’t work — then escalate, appropriately.

You could degrade someones reputation with a single sentence. Especially if the other person cannot defend himself, or the information you’ve outlined is such that disqualifies the other person from ever playing again.

The same could happen to you. Be mindful and cultivate fair-play.

The one that talks to you about others, behind their back, will tomorrow talk about you — behind your back.

Look at the person as a whole, not from a single burst of positive or negative activity.

Teaching yourself and others

Teachers, like any other endeavor, can have multiple modes of being.

Most of the time, default mode, could be observing and injecting minimum amount needed to move the person where the person is already looking, but doesn’t yet have the courage to take the next step.

Thus, this is primarily, emotional support of trying out what the person already thinkers with intrinsically.

Whether you are teaching your sister, mother, father, friends, colleagues, or yourself — a status needs to be known of what is available and brewing in every person, before advising anything. This allows for accountability of what and why is being done.

Most of the time, the prize needs to be defined, this is mostly an emotional state that the person or the team achieves for a shorter or extended period of time. Honor and heroes' journey, we are mostly striving towards, intersect with these prizes. Thus, motivation needs to be known. And eyes need to be on the prize or on the ball.

Leading by example

A great leader knows how to follow; holds truth and heroes' journey as the ultimate tool of transformation and knows how to motivate his troops to get through the bad times.

The general idea is a all-encompassing pursuit of truth, awareness, and fulfillment on shorter and longer time spans, through a theme of working, depending on the objective.

Source

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Cover photo source: Remember The Titans

Product Artisanship: Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 13:59:49 +0000

We are defining a framework to ensure product development is scalable and on track. From on-boarding, problem decomposition, status tracking to solution construction.

A product is something tangible, e. g. a painting, music or a software ecosystem, that is an extension of the inner-most truths, of a team or an individual.

If you are interested in the social perspective of a project — check Self-Aware Software Artisan: Team.

📹 Intro video: Charles Bukowski — Style

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

After you’re done reading: check the ⬇️ bottom of the page — you’ll find next parts of this series that cover diverse set of related topics!

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

Author’s experience

Data Sculptor, Architect of Systems and Products.

Founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports and led teams of up to ten people.

Worked, as a Systems Architect, Frontend, and Backend Developer, for a product company, a digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

🎷 Background song

Preparing product for the success

Everything is important — prioritize, but know repercussions of any compensation you do,
re-think your idea until it becomes at least 10x better than anything on the market,
know the main problem you’re solving,
know surrounding pillars of the solution (surrounding features that are needed to hold the product together),
find technology solutions to the problems,
find people capable of solving the problems; manage them in the most optimal way (know your team, know how to pick new members and onboard them properly, know how to handle when someone falls out) (Check Self-Aware Software Artisan: Team Artisanship),
run everything, from the first day, to be asynchronous, remote-first,
document everything in a readable and extendable fashion: tasks, code, wikis, git commits,
have tasks in a single place (ultimate source of truth),
have outlined weeks, months regarding any work you need to do — known in advance and accessible to the stakeholders,
have meetings to celebrate or debug problems, only with the relevant people,
focus on having the Code in tip-top shape,
continually update the product to improve user interaction and feature cohesion,
have analytics in place to validate user’s movements throughout the product,
have available pictures, GIFs, videos of your product, landing pages polished — so when you get that one person to land on your site — it will be as understandable as possible.

Essentially — you are mitigating the problem of being misunderstood. By your team and your users.

You are trying to explain yourself (as a person, company or the product) in the moment, and in the future so that people get back to your product again and develop a relationship with the thing you’ve built.

Avoid debugging on Slack— have your tasks in a single place

Move all of the communication to your task tracking software.

You never know who will need a snippet of your conversation for a specific problem. Do them, and yourself a favor — move communication to a single place so it can be easily viewed by others in the future.

If you had a conversation over Slack or other chat software, move it to the Task tracking software upon conclusion, with all-important corners you’ve taken in the conversation.

Document in English

Write everything in English, even if you are from countries where English is not the first language.

This is generally recommended for easier scaling. Having everything documented in English (documentation, tasks, comments, git commits) will prepare you for it.

Constantly updating the status of the project

Tasks, milestones, documentation — everything needs to be accessible at any time. So, when you pick the project up in a few days or weeks, you will know exactly where you left off.

Tasks need to be documented from A to Z. Every corner case of it needs to be explained in the task at hand. Every advancement needs to be documented there. If you chug up a new view on the task during a meeting — write it down in the task.

Tasks need to have a hierarchy, so they can be traced from top to bottom.

It may seem like a lot of overhead, but it will save you a lot of time down the road; and that’s what we are looking at here — long-term optimisation and balance.

Meetings — defining goals; relevant entrance, and exit of participants

Audio or Video meetings are there to share the joy and discuss any hard-hitting problems.

Meetings need to include only people having a true stake in the topic at hand, the rest of the people need to drop out and focus on whatever else is on the priority list.

Optimizing performance — sprints and cool-down periods

The Company wishes to optimize human performance. That is surely not done by having sprint after sprint, for a year or two.

It is a marathon.

Introduce cool-down periods for recuperation, so people can recuperate from the killing sprees.

Plan and review on multiple scales (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly).

e.g. 2 sprints, 1 cool-down period.

Each lasting a week.

Optimizing performance — Giving or taking tasks based on the emotional state of the individual

Sometimes a person will be more effective refactoring the code, than working on a new feature. It depends on the person outside of the work — its physical, psychological and sociological state.

If you have the data about the emotional state, given to you con-sensually, by the person — you could optimize output much better than ramming any type of issue to a pseudo-random person.

Don’t micromanage — give trust, demand, and expect the best from the people

Know the state you wish to get into with each person, the team, and the project — on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly scale.

Clearly communicate any determined scope with the stakeholders.

Prepare everything in advance: tasks, wikis, any other inputs — i.e. have your next week unwind itself naturally. The need to micromanage and interject needs to be minimized. Less wasted time on Slack, fewer interruptions, more deep work, and more effectiveness from the whole organization, scalable throughout time.

When the framework is known for any aspect of the work, you can easily measure and adjust where and when needed. Communicate to people clearly and leave them alone. Expect them to do the best work of their life.

Scalable Apps: Picking the technology and the tools

Pick the tools, languages, frameworks that together:

allow to write scalable code by design (e.g. TypeScript instead of PHP)
will be popular and useful in the future — times change, tools get deprecated — pick what makes sense long-term for attracting a right set of people (e.g. for the backend: you are better off with Node.js than PHP).

For most use-cases, I would recommend using a UI framework like Vuetify — this will handle UI (buttons, tables, fonts, relative relationships between the components (size, colors, …) so that you don’t have to write CSS. Focus on writing the logic, not styling buttons.

Scalable way of building:

document your code (firstly: through the code, secondly: with comments, thirdly: through tasks)
write your git messages as essays, with a straight-to-the-point summary in the first line
track every feature, bug, thinking you have through tasks (JIRA, Trello, Asana, GitHub Issues, GitLab, …)

Check “Self-Aware Software Artisan: Code Artisanship”.

Technology palette for your stellar, enterprise-grade Web Apps

A palette we use @AndromedaTechnology:

General language: TypeScript,
Backend: Node.js (Nest.js, Koa.js) with TypeScript,
Frontend: Vue.js with TypeScript,
Database: MongoDB,
Event-tracking: Kafka,
Backend-Frontend layer: GraphQL,
Search Layer: ElasticSearch.

Product Development Example: Status and Future Development of Habitus

Habitus App

Live site
GitHub — Frontend (TypeScript, Vue.js, Vuetify)
GitHub — API (TypeScript, Koa.js, MongoDB, Jest)
Medium
Twitter

API Status

Used to show initial data on the frontend,
[Emotions, Habits] CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete),
admin can CRUD,
guests can read the data,
tested (Jest, MongoDB InMemory Server),
technology: TypeScript, Koa.js, MongoDB.

API TODO

Saving encrypted user data,
seed more initial data (emotions, habits),
implement teams.

Frontend Status

Features: emotions, habits, notes,
standalone client,
can be used completely without the API,
offline-first,
saving data only in your browser (localStorage),
getting initial data from the API (if available),
Progressive Web App,
technology: TypeScript, Vue.js, Vuetify, Vuex, Axios.

Frontend TODO

refactor few components (GitHub Issues),
passcode / PIN access,
encrypt data in the localStorage,
sync encrypted data to the API,
implement teams (API),
implement system creation (habit constellation),
improve the UI.

Use and join the development of Habitus!

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Cover image source

Code Artisanship: Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 13:59:18 +0000

We are constructing a behavior framework that simplifies your Code and makes it scalable.

We are primarily focusing on problem decomposition, status tracking, initial construction, and refactoring.

Check Self-Aware Software Artisan: Deep Work.

If you are looking for a palette of tools, languages, frameworks to quickly bootstrap projects, while having scalability and ease of development in mind, check Self-Aware Software Artisan: Product Artisanship.

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

After you’re done reading: check the ⬇️ bottom of the page — you’ll find next parts of this series that cover diverse set of related topics!

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

Author’s experience

Data Sculptor, Architect of Systems and Products.

Founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports and led teams of up to ten people.

Worked, as a Systems Architect, Frontend, and Backend Developer, for a product company, a digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

🎷 Background song

Looking at the bigger picture — The Ecosystem

Source

Software Artisan doesn’t just care about the code, but the whole ecosystem:

from your body, mind,
git messages,
scope of your commits,
variable, function, file naming,
chunking methods into smaller units,
your relationship with people in your team,
accepting requests for work and
delivering it in a fashion that is document-able, and understandable by you and others, now and in the future.

Don’t get overwhelmed by all the things before-mentioned, with time, as your skills progress, and your body has less friction in movements you do, your mind will calm itself down, and these things will be approached intuitively by you and others.

It is important, however, to know what we are aiming at, to know how much we are approaching or moving away from it throughout time.

Software Artisans as Writers and Editors

“Margaret Heafield Hamilton is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo program.” — Wikipedia Source

Document everything

We strive to organize information in our development environment.

Focus on naming things properly and grouping them — putting them in the appropriate place (i.e. file, directory, docs, readme, file, task tracker) etc.

Express yourself through:

tasks — with full-blown comments in tasks (not just (NOT)COMPLETED statuses, but whole essays about what is on your mind about the task),
code (so you don’t have to write comments),
comments (when you don’t know how to express yourself through the code, or you legitimately have other things to do with greater priority),
docs (Readme, specific-online-docs-software).

Can’t express problems and solutions in the code? At least express yourself in the comments

It is better to have a problem described in natural language (English) than to have a “hole” in understanding and leave only complicated/bad code, without any explanation.

Coherent code

Bible: Cross-referencing. Source. Jordan B Peterson Video.

The code is cross-referencing itself all the time. The more coherent the relationships are, the more understandable the code is.

We grade a developer by the cohesion one leaves behind himself in the code

A developer is like a gardener, planting flowers, fruits, vegetables in different places of the field; having a grouping of items in mind. When you look at the garden from the sky, you could see how much colors complement each other.

Tools for creating cohesion in the code:

(re-)naming (variables, functions, classes),
(re-)grouping (code in a function, class, …),
not repeating yourself (don’t have two things doing the same thing, under different names),
connecting parts of the code properly with each other.

Use the tools outlined above as much as you can to save yourself hassles down the road.

The cohesion of the code is influenced by the:

experience and will of the developer,
complexity of the assignment and,
constraints of any sort (time/priority, intersection ratio with the existing code, …).

If you are constrained by any factor and don’t know how to express yourself in the code, leave comments. You will be valued for at least admitting lack of proper or complete implementation and leaving breadcrumbs for easier problem solving later on.

Git messages and The Code: The dance

Source

We are always trying to trickle down the work we do into smaller chunks.

Git messages are here to re-articulate what you’ve actually done

You will find potential flaws in your approach while writing a git message.

If you cannot write a simple and precise git message as a recap — you don’t understand what you have done.

Too deep in the complexity? Re-articulate current state in the git commit, stage changes and move forward!

When you are unable to implement thoroughly, use git message as a means of documentation. Stage the changes to mark parts that are explained in the git commit.

e.g. you could have a bigger number of files that are being changed, and you are in the middle of working on the functionality, and being stuck with it… It is a good time to go to git and describe everything you’ve done the best you can, in the form of bullet points or an essay where necessary.

It is better to document a solution with comments, than moving away from the code and getting back to the half-implemented functionality with 20 changed files and no overall description for it.

Constantly switch back and forth between Git message construction and the code.

WIP and TODO tags

Leave WIP: and TODO: annotations in the git message — associated with the individual files or the functionality you are accenting.

Functions: Parameters and Naming

Source

The purpose of the function needs to be the smallest possible. It will allow you to easier rename it and fix it.

Keep the body of your function (logic) simplest possible, as well as its arguments list.

Refactoring the code

Source

To be able to do the refactoring properly, we need to understand what the environment of the feature we are refactoring is made of. That means having all the pieces of the puzzle visible and knowing how they are connected.

Steps to refactor the code would be:

splitting larger chunks of code or functionality into smaller ones,
re-naming variables, methods, files, directories to show what is inside, at a glance,
re-grouping — moving variables, blocks of code in the methods, whole methods, files, or directories.

What goes into the refactoring:

doing the work in the smallest possible chunks that are understandable,
committing the changes,
documenting any newly found understandings of the inner-workings of the code with comments,
updating the tasks,
constantly re-evaluating status of the work.

When to refactor and improve, and when to move onward

If you have a more complex case that needs to be refactored, you could get caught up in changing one of its parts and having to discard everything or mixing that with the previous attempts of refactoring. That’s why it’s important to do the refactoring in the smallest steps possible.

Move forward when you see the cost of context switching too high.

If the refactoring takes a lot of time, and it expands, without having the ability to chunk it up — it’s too late, you’ve gone too far. It is important to stop, comment on everything you see and try to move as swiftly as possible.

Do the work in advance, don’t sandbag yourself into days or weeks of refactoring, if possible.

Handle one problem at the time

A person can truly handle only one or two problems having in his head. Do not stretch it to two, three, or more.

If:

you are implementing a feature A) and
you find a bug that is not directly connected to the feature A).

Then:

above the function, piece of function, class, or file ADD: TODO: message
add a new Issue to your task tracker.

Why:

cost of context-switching is too high,
so that all potential bugs and possible improvements are on the task list and get solved when the time is right.

Refactoring: Search&Replace in one sweep

Source

Have a system (a convention) of naming variables, methods, files.

Even if you were wrong, you’ve done it in a systematical way — and you can search&replace in one sweep!

Think about searching and replacing in the future (changing the variable, method names, …).

How will you organize your files, directories? Know everything, develop a system for it. Evolve it with time. The more systematic you are with it, the easier you’ll evolve it.

So, even if you’re “wrong” with a convention, you are better off being wrong in the same way across the code base — as you will be able to search & replace in one sweep.

You can use basic commands in your IDE (e.g. VSCode):

match case sensitive,
match whole words,
match via regex.

Testing

As with anything, there is a good balance that needs to be struck.

We are going about it by prioritizing issues. Test individual units of code, as well as — parts that integrate them into bigger pieces.

Focus more on testing the business logic, than testing features that you expect your language, framework, or library to handle properly.

Can’t solve the problem? Getting out of the rot

Sometimes, just sitting on it makes sense.

You can try a different angle of looking at the problem in your mind (you will try to get new information and solve the puzzle from another viewpoint, while remaining glued to the monitor, the pen or whatever).

That could work.

Most of the time sitting behind a monitor isn’t optimal — gather information and get away!

If you are deep into the complexity of the newly encountered problem… If you feel you are not looking at it from different angles or moving through your mind by analyzing and getting new views in your mind, and the time just passes by… Gather information, go and do another activity to break up the monotony.

Running, being on the sun, eating, walking around, drinking, sitting under a tree, or whatever — will give you new information through your eyes, nose, ears (…); thus re-configuring your mind, and shocking it to re-compute problems you’re tackling.

Sleeping on the problem also helps.

This is probably one of the most important aspects of managing yourself while solving difficult problems. To know when to stay, and when to go.

Check Self-Aware Software Artisan: Deep Work.

Check Self-Aware Software Artisan: Your Health.

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Cover image source

Finishing up: Self-Aware Software Artisan

Mario Novak — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 13:58:54 +0000

Thank you for reading.

Find this useful?

👏 Clap so more people see the story.

❤️ Support your friends and colleagues at work — share this essay with them!

🚀 Use it as a, Company or Personal, Manifesto! Fork and Adapt on GitHub!

📹 Intro video: Hunter S Thompson: Life

📣 Coming soon!

I’m continually refactoring this series.

Subscribe to receive a single-page Manifesto: Scalable Software Development distilled to the ultimate truths; from the viewpoint of an Software Artisan.

Do your own mistakes and successes. Do you. We are all here, eager to see how your unique life perspective, with all bolts and twitches, pans out.

You can always pass the enthusiasm to someone else, so mentor people around you, that’s all that is needed to spark something great in someone.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or interesting challenges, feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me.

Join state-of-the-art Emotions, Habit tracker and Journal — Habitus App.

Written in TypeScript, Koa.js, and Vue.js.

Anonymous and Open-Source.

Just launched: “Whatodoo — Events near you” platform!

Check it out to see all of the things happening near you!

All the best,

Mario Novak

🏆 Your progress 🌏 🏄‍♂️

Cover image source

Progressive Web Development — Invest your time wisely

Mario Novak — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 14:18:38 +0000

Preface

Essay is geared towards beginners.

The goal is to nullify Fear of Missing Out, with respect to all the technologies out there, and bring clarity and peace to the roadmap you will outline for yourself if you wish to jump into web development.

Having that in mind, words in this article outline my view and perspective I got from my work up to this point. I do not claim it is the right way or that the right way exists.

The reader has the responsibility to think as he reads and form his own opinions based on the information outlined.

Author’s experience

Over the past 8+ years, I've founded startups in the fields of Education and Sports, led teams of up to ten people, worked, as a Frontend and Backend Developer, for a product company, digital agency, and as a remote freelancer.

Nowadays I'm focused on Architecting and Developing scalable Backend systems.

For more information, check my Personal Website.

Mastering the basics

Source

Don’t get fancy with all of the new languages, frameworks, and bling-blings. Focus on what is important. The basics. Basics are the building blocks for anything advanced.

If you wish to build great products, you will need to have a solid ground with the basics. Don’t go further if you are not comfortable with variables, if statements, loops, functions…

As you go higher in complexity, all of the basic building blocks repeat themselves, only in different forms.

If you master the basics, you will recognize patterns and have less of the fear when tacking something new.

Basic Building Blocks

I’m primarily talking about:

usage of variables,
usage of IF statements for conditional checks in your code,
usage of loop statements to repeat a procedure X times,
usage of functions to group your code

Don’t underestimate the power of the strong foundation.

Don’t just look at the examples for IF statements, loops, etc., practice them! Come up with your own tasks, and implement the solution so that it feels casual and robust!

Basic Building Blocks: Naming and Grouping (Architecture)

We use languages to exchange information; mastering its use allows us to do justice when conveying our ideas to others.

If you don’t know how to name something properly, you don’t understand it. Being that your variable, function, class, or whatever.

The second lesson, to be noted here, is grouping things properly. Code that makes sense being around other code should stay there, rest should be moved to a properly named place.

Combining proper naming and grouping brings more clarity to what we are doing. Re-name and re-group things as much as it is needed for you to have a clear understanding of the code you are looking at.

Stop worrying about all the patterns out there and different programming paradigms; if you put everything in its own place (named, grouped) you are on a good track to have an understandable code.

You will lower the need to leave comments around the code if you name and group blocks of the code properly.

Think about the code you’re leaving behind

You’ll find patterns at the lowest levels that repeat themselves on a bigger scale.

Spacing, how many lines do you leave after some block of the code. How do you feel when you look at the code? Don’t just run forward, enjoy the sight, no matter how crappy it seems to you at first.

There is beauty in every sight, you can feel what’s going on, observe, learn from it, and mold it into something more beautiful.

And a few years down the road, the only thing you will feel brought you the knowledge is just that — gazing and feeling the code, deciding how do you want to leave it to resonate with other people.

Whenever you are not feeling good about the thing you see, step away, look and think about it, rewrite it, re-group it, re-name it until it evokes the feeling of “Ah, that seems pretty; that seems nice!”.

Understand the solution before writing any code

Why are we solving that problem in the first place? Is the problem clearly defined? If not, re-define it. De-compose it down to smaller blocks (again, Re-name and Re-group).

State the solution, understand every corner of the solution, it’s details and the bigger picture. Take as much time as it is needed to understand the problem and the environment, formulate potential solutions, effects of the changes to be made, …

And only then proceed to implement the solution.

Half of the work you do needs to be pondering upon the architecture.

Learn as you Build

Source

If you are just starting, learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These languages allow us to build Frontend interfaces, i.e. what people see, use, and click.

Later on, you can focus on building Backend systems, which store and manipulate data your users create by using the Frontend interface you’ve built. Languages we use here are JavaScript (yes, same as for frontend), PHP, Go, …

Build simple projects while learning a new language, framework (…). It can be a TODO app, but I’m sure you can come up with your own version of it. Maybe you wanted to track the amount of food you’ve grown over the years. Implement that! It will pull you in more than any classic assignment you will have no emotional connection to. Doing a spin on an assignment you see on the Internet will give you more confidence down the road.

And even better — create something for yourself and the people around you. Once you build something that’s interesting to you, you will never look back. And eventually, others will find enjoyment in your work.

Taking a project from 0% to 100% will give you the confidence you cannot get if you are only tackling half of the problem. You will face all of the obstacles and move past them to have a working thing. Being that a TODO app or the next thing people enjoy using.

Personal Website

Build your own personal site, with the technologies stated above, and open-source it.

Outline who you are,
What are you learning,
Document your progress,
Learn new languages and frameworks,
Build simple projects (TODO apps etc.),
Open-source and write about them on your page.

Open-sourcing projects

Open-sourced projects expose your code publicly and keep you accountable to do the best work possible. They also serve as a connecting hub for you and like-minded people.

Anytime you update your project, your activity will be shown on your (GitHub, Gitlab, …) profile, enabling you to attract more relevant projects and people in the future.

As you build your products, write a good README.md file, document your code, and write an article per project to address challenges and solutions you’ve deployed to tackle them.

Building your products

If you want to bring your ideas to life, you will be a jack of all trades and a master of none. But that will not hold you down, because you will have your idea alive and kicking, and that is all that matters.

You need to do the best possible work, you never know when other people will join your team or when you need to fix something you did a few months ago. Make it easier for yourself, and others — plan and then implement.

If you lead a team, you have great power and even greater responsibility. This is a topic of great importance and complexity and needs to be approached with great diligence.

Plan and stick to your roadmap

Source

You can easily get lost in all the trends, trying to catch a lot that will not make sense for you in the future.

Outline your roadmap,
Outline who do you want to become,
What values you hold strongly to,
What do you want to do,
What kind of people you want to work with,
Reflect, adjust, and stick to YOUR roadmap.

Know what is important in the upcoming day. Prioritize your goals for the day, focus on having one task that will make that day worthwhile. The rest of the tasks are there to bring balance to the day. Reflect at the end of the day and go into the next one with clarity.

Scaling daily planning onto the week, month, and year interval, with regular reflections, will keep you on track with your roadmap.

When interacting with other people, see where you are, and pick your projects and jobs that are relevant to you and that are aligned with your roadmap. This is the way to be true to any endeavor you take.

Your life is YOU and the PEOPLE around you, and not “Web Development”

Meaning you have in your life will come from the good people around you and the interactions you have with them, and not the jobs you do.

Don’t expect better treatment for yourself than the one you give to others. What goes around, comes around.
The people surrounding you and their interactions with you are reflections of you. Change your ways if you wish the World to interact with you differently.
Know that there are many things in life you can do. Know that time carves beauty if you love what you do and don’t underestimate the power of a single step, and weight of the path it continues or sets.
You can work however you wish and however you think is the best for you; to provide as much as you can to others. If there are other things you need to be doing to have a balance in your life, do them!

Choosing your technology stack

Source

If you are going to build your own product, you wish to find the easiest-to-understand-and-prototype tools out there, that also have a great community.

If the community invested a lot of time into their website, guides, and the onboarding — I’m interested! They probably invested as much diligence into making that language or framework to be easy to use. And that’s what will help us build great things, quicker.

To be noted here, there is no reason to chase getting everything done quicker if you don’t have time to relax with a cup of coffee and have a normal and balanced life.

My technology stack

Basics:

HTML5,
CSS3,
ES6 (JavaScript), TypeScript,

Frameworks:

Frontend: Vue.js (JavaScript, TypeScript)
Backend: Nest.js (Node.js), Laravel (PHP)

Your technology stack

Beyond the basics stated above…

Most of the people start with Frontend development. I think it’s fairly safe to say, following the principles outlined in the article, you will land a job in 3–6 months of working smart and hard. Besides HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, take a look at Angular, React, and Vue. Vue seems easiest to get started.

Developing a Backend or an API is what allows sites we created to persist data and allow others to interact with that data. Backend or an API could be built in all sorts of ways, I’ll note Node.js, Laravel, and Go here.

Postface

Thank you for reading.

There are many experts and more qualified people in the fields I’ve covered. Learn from them, their mistakes, and successes.

But most importantly, do your own mistakes and successes. Do you. We are all here, eager to see how your unique life perspective, with all bolts and twitches, pans out.

You can always pass the enthusiasm to someone else, so mentor people around you, that’s all that is needed to spark something great in someone.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or interesting challenges, feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me.

If you wish to join an open-source project written in Vue.js and TypeScript, take a look at Habitus — Gamified Habit Tracker and Journal.

All the best,
Mario