Andrei Pop

Ain’t it strange how all those processes that were supposed to make us more “agile” are doing exactly the opposite? It is quite obvious that contraining workers in creative fields is hindering innovation. That’s why developers that are always sprinting in the never-ending marathon might fail to grab even the low hanging fruits, let alone truly innovate. On this note, it took me a vacation to later notice an improvement which required an npm package and a single line of code changed, that ended up speeding our CI/CD by 50-75%. ...

I’ve recently read Deep Work by Cal Newport and decided to try out the idea of mid-term planning. The main point is that planning for periods of 3-4 months is better than annual, which can feel too distant, or monthly, that are too short to achieve significant progress. I have read multiple times about planning making your life better and eventually Cal convinced me to give it a shot. Does it actually work though? To be completely honest, I’m still in doubt. We can agree on the fact that it can give a certain direction and keep you on the path, safe from running randomly towards every other butterfly with more interesting coloring. This will reap rewards inversely proportional with how disciplined you are as a person. ...

Doing hard things is what drives the human brain. Challenge. This is also what keeps us in the so called flow state. The state in which you’re being your best self. In which you produce as much as possibly can, both in terms of quality and in terms of quantity. You get better at doing the hard things through experience but also through voluntary discomfort, and this is where the stoics come in. Back in the days of Ancient Rome, stoics would put themselves voluntarily through discomfort, both physical and mental in order to strengthen their minds and bodies. This was because they believed that in order to have a good and meaningful life, you would need to overcome your insatiability and dive into deep, hard work. In todays standards this discomfort would equivalate to climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator, walking to the office instead of taking the car or even disabling coding assistants in your IDE. ...