My productive vacation with books, coding, and writing
I was starting my vacation and it was so boring:
I'm the kind of nerd that really likes to study and learn new things. I play video games for a long time and I get bored. I watch movies and I get bored. I like the idea of designing my life to get the most of it. For some people, it's time to do nothing. For me, it's like a commitment to knowledge.
When I say “design my life”, it looks kind of complex, but it's actually quite simple. I just wrote down what I wanted to do in my vacation days and that's it. The list was something like this:
Books. Read as many as possible.
Coding. Mostly compilers, algorithms, and web performance.
Guitar. Play my songs.
Write. I have so much to say and so much to share.
Exercise & Meditation: a better life. physically and mentally.
At first, I was very tired. Exhausted. So I took one day off to do absolutely nothing. I decided I wanted to do all those things, but I didn’t want to be a productivity machine, so I started studying about Slow Living and I got to write about this topic.
Slow living is not about doing things slowly, but experience life to the fullest.
So I wanted to do all those things, but at the same time doing it on my own time without stress, being present, and enjoying the moment.
I’m kind a slow reader because I like to pause my reading, reflect, write down thoughts, and document my learnings. But I got to finish 4 books:
The Effective Engineer: A book about how to be productive and have a bigger impact in your career as an engineer.
The One Thing: A book about tactics to prioritize and focus on one thing.
Atomic Habits: A book about habit-forming and a practical way to build good and small habits and compound them in the long run.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World: A very interesting book about several researches trying to understand the impact of having a diverse background to solve new and more complex problems in the world. (I don’t have a review or blog post yet, but I’m working on it!)
As I focused on self-development books these weeks, I chose to start reading more technical books for now, so this is my list of books I'm reading right now:
HtDP: How to Design Programs
SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Designing Data-Intensive Application
Refactoring: Improving the design of existing code
Writing an interpreter in Go
I worked most of my career as a backend software engineer and now I'm more focused on frontend engineering and tooling. But I also want to build a more solid programming foundation. This is why I’m reading SICP and HtDP.
Designing Data-Intensive Application and Refactoring are books more related to software design and architecture. I always get myself trying to improve my coding skills and this is very micro. I wanted to improve my macro view, a big picture of the whole software.
And Writing an interpreter is a book, well, about interpreters. I’m a language nerd: natural and programming languages. I'm fascinated about languages and how it works underneath (I'm also studying Japanese in my spare time!).
I’ll definitely share my experience and things I learned along the way.
So, talking about technical things, I also code. Mostly compilers, algorithms, and web performance stuff. It's nice to code whatever I want without any pressure to build a product.
Worked in some interesting algorithm problems.
Open sourced all code from exercism exercises.
Open sourced my resources I used to learn web performance.
Wrote a long-format article about Chunk Prefetch to improve performance.
Open sourced the chunk prefetch demo.
The last quarter of 2020 me and my team had a really interesting web performance project. And I wanted to share the “behind the scenes” and the impact we had improving the performance of a React Progressive Web App.
This is the TLDR;
Measure: metrics as the foundation of performance improvements.
Lock: prevent regressions & scale the performance knowledge.
Analyze: with data and metrics, analyze the possible problems.
Improvements: code.
Impact: measure the before and the later picture.
I hope these things can inspire you to keep learning and improving yourselves. I want to consisntely send more personal newsletter for you all.
So feel free to send me a message and feedback on twitter@tk.