Weeknotes 2024 W35: Heat

August 26​–​September 1, 2024
1800 words

Quick bits:

For my side projects,2 I’ve been successfully using a pomodoro timer to bring me into a state of flow. The app I use for that is aptly named Flow, and I’ve been happy enough with it that I bought a lifetime subscription earlier this week.

Here’s how it works: I decide on a goal (like “update week­notes”) which I write in the session name, then start the timer, which blocks access to all apps but the ones I need to get my work done. Then, after 25 minutes, I hear a DING sound, and I take a break (or stop working).

I’ve also done 45 minutes of writing with a 15-minute break in between, similar to the format of the Shut Up & Write. But 25 minutes of work is the sweet spot.

I know, I know — It’s not like pomodoro timers are a new invention that only I know about. But it’s great to discover, or maybe rediscover, a way of working that fits me well and gets my creative juices flowing, at least for personal projects.

Achieving the state of flow at my day job as a software developer is much more difficult than for personal projects. I have found this near impossible at every single job I’ve had. I can identify a few reasons:

As a result, focus time is rare.

The situation is very different when I’m writing, whether it’s my week­notes or fiction. There are no meetings, there is no ramp-up time for new tasks (it’s all one project), there is no waiting time, and there is nobody for whom I need to remain available for communication at every instant.

Even for game development, I find that pomodoro timers work quite well — but that is perhaps because that is a solo project for which there are zero automated tests.4

I also can’t seem to share my Flow subscription between my work and personal laptop — Family Sharing doesn’t seem to be working for that one —  but as focus time is rare anyway, I don’t think it’s a big loss.

Berlin traffic is still bad.

Once again, a cyclist came at me, cycling on the sidewalk at speed. They braked and then said “thank you” with a smile, which I have no idea how to interpret.

I realized that when objects (like bikes) come at me at high speed, I just freeze up. I assume that this behavior is a natural reaction to danger. It would also explain why tourists who stand on the cycle path fail to move away when I ring my bell.5

This week, I’ve also seen a cyclist going at about 30 km/h on a shared bike/pedestrian path, where there are pre-teens running around. It is profoundly irresponsible (and illegal) to cycle this fast on a shared path.

I have also seen a car drive on the bicycle lane, against traffic, in my direction. Wild.

My stage play, which does not have a title yet and for which I will not share a synopsis or even a logline yet, is making decent progress.

For the first time, I managed to write the entire story with a properly fleshed-out Act II and even Act III. With other writing projects, I succumbed to the urge to “just wing it” when getting to the second half of the story. For this play, the second half is much clearer to me than the first half, which is not a situation I had faced with any piece of writing before, and it’s definitely a good issue to have.

For the first time, too, I managed to just keep on writing, even when introducing new elements or even inconsistencies. Previously, I could not resist to go back and edit, or start over entirely. I’m proud of this achievement. It is exactly the advice that many writing teachers give: keep on writing and do not edit. It is practical advice that I finally managed to follow.

Even if this whole project leads to nothing, I will have grown distinctly better as a writer.

I found Cory Doctorow’s article Disenshittify or Die interesting as a whole, but this particular piece stood out to me:

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe,” and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

In the golden years, many people outside the industry have told me how incredibly lucky and privileged I was to be a software engineer. God forbid I were to complain, because I (apparently) had the dream job.

Dream jobs, they were not. I remember having to urgently find an empty office phone booth so I could cry without being seen, because I was so fucking burnt out that I could not function as a normal human being anymore. Broken and abused.

While we’re speaking about work: at my (new-ish) employer, the peer review cycle has begun.

I have a cynical take on the peer review process.6 It is a process that HR is intimately involved in, because they very much want to know who is doing well and who is not. All the while, they dress it up euphemistically as providing feedback to each other so that we all can grow. So positive!

Because of this, I on principle do not give negative feedback unless there absolutely is a very good reason for a person to lose their job — which there rarely is.7

The peer review process is also there to encourage people to work more and harder. Multiple employers have dangled the carrot of getting special recognition of embodying the company values/principles, but the title you get for that is pretty much just “employee of the month” — bragging rights without real benefits.

At least my current employer does not have a financial bonus. I have previously written how bonuses are not worth pursuing, and my opinion on them remains the same.

I am cynical when it comes to corporate culture. That cynicism comes from experience. Some of my workplaces were better and some were worse. The worst workplaces made me realize how the evil machine of corporate culture works, and that even the best workplaces have some of those evil machine parts.

My current job is fine, by the way. The company culture is significantly better than at many of the companies I’ve worked for previously.

Entertainment:

Links:

  1. I got a partial reimbursement for it from my insurance, too! I don’t know if that’s a service that all insurers offer, but mine — the Techniker Krankenkasse —  does. ↩︎

  2. Fiction writing, week­notes writing, and game development, mostly — the stuff I can do entirely by myself. ↩︎

  3. In my experience, software systems are generally overly complex. In an ideal world, 25 minutes should be enough to make headway on a new task you know nothing about — but alas. Writing maintainable software is still a dark art. ↩︎

  4. My general principle in software development is that everything needs to be covered by automated tests all the time. For anything with a UI, like games, automated testing is much more challenging. ↩︎

  5. That, or these tourists don’t know what bike paths are, or that they’re not supposed to walk/stand on them — which is at least as likely. ↩︎

  6. I am cynical about peer review processes in general, not specifically at my (new-ish) employer. ↩︎

  7. I have on two occasions gone to leadership to request for someone to be fired, and I have had good reasons for that — gross negligence/malice that put people and/or the company at significant risk. ↩︎

  8. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Ubisoft Quebec, 2018), published by Ubisoft. ↩︎

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Incoming links: One-person stage play, Weeknotes 2024 W40: Unity.