https://canro91.github.io
142 posts · 22 Votes
Tech 42% · Life 35% · Writing 18% · Culture 4% · Art 1% · Film & TV 1%
Subscribe via RSS
Hey there. Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Here’s an alternative to avoid cognitive debt (5min). #2. With AI, almost everyone is euphoric but nothing works (4min). #3. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is wrong. That’s what covers are for. But what if you could judge a book by its first page instead? (1min). #4. Last week, I discovered makestopmotion. A free, open-source, and local stop-motion app. And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about my 8-year…
Every disappointment, breakup, or failure turns into inspiration. A disappointment becomes a short story. A breakup becomes a poem. A failure becomes a lessons-learned post. Writing helps you revisit, process, and reframe. Nothing is wasted. It’s all material. I share some of my life lessons in 10 Surprisingly Simple Ideas That Changed My Life.
After tuning the radio, the taxi driver found a station broadcasting a presidential speech. The president was just days away from leaving the office. I had finished my weekly groceries and was heading home. It was raining, and I rushed home after forgetting to close the windows. So I didn’t put my bags in the trunk, but on the front seat. “That guy talks a lot… He was born to be a politician,” the taxi driver said, breaking the silence after hearing my destination. “Those roles need someone who…
Yesterday, I came back home after a 3-hour road trip. With no phone reception or WiFi, I had no other choice than to sit with my thoughts, watching the passing trees and road signs until I fell sleep. It was the longest “do nothing” moment I’ve had in a while. If you think you can’t leave your phone aside, take a road trip or a flight. Not just for the traveling part, but for the unplugging time.
All productivity advice can be summarized into one single tip: Follow your energy levels. Not in a woo-woo sense, but be aware of your energy levels. Tackle your most important work when they’re at its highest. Learn to rise them: exercise, laugh, or walk. Keep your glucose spikes under control. Notion dashboards, todo lists, and weekly goals aren’t useful if you don’t have any energy to tackle them.
Eight years ago, I published my first post—without any idea what I was doing I was starting my coding career, and one day I googled “how to get better at coding.” I kept finding “start a blog.” So I did. I built a blog on top of my GitHub account. I still host my blog there, after all these years. The early days My first post was a tutorial to compile hours of googling. OK, “tutorial” is a strong word. It was like a word vomit. Here’s my very first post, still unchanged as a reminder. My blog…
I didn’t mean it, but last month I ended up participating in JulyReply. Here are my replies: #1. re: You’re Born to F*cking Create. A simple cure for burnout. #2. My Favorite Seth’s Riffs. Seth Godin published his best lines. I wrote my reactions. #3. re: I Started a “Dirt Notebook”. Beautiful notebooks hold back my bad ideas. And often what you need is bad ideas. #4. re: “Who Is Quitting?” Hits Hacker News Front Page. You know something is happening in the tech world, when Hacker News features…
Hey there. Here are 4 links worth sharing this week: #1. I didn’t use magazines, but I learned coding by typing examples from textbooks. It isn’t as fast as using an LLM. It was something else entirely (3min). #2. One of the lessons from Street-Smart Coding Manifesto is to work on your communication skills. Here are 10 comm rules nobody teaches you (10 min). #3. Productivity isn’t about IDE plugins or AI. That isn’t what matters most (2min). #4. Expertise comes from caring about details. Don’t…
For weeks, I’ve been struggling with a personal decision. I’ve come up with scenarios, built a decision tree, and used AI to analyze my options. It’s made me so anxious, it’s often the first thing I think of when I wake up. Yesterday, wanting a different perspective, I called my best friend to ask him what he would do in my shoes. Among other things, he told me, “you can’t think like an engineer all the time.” He was right! I don’t want to screw this up, and I’ve approached it like a coder. But…
I don’t want to write the same book twice. I challenge myself to make every book different. So far, I’ve experimented with formats: a choose-your-own-adventure, a 10-point list, and a one-idea-per-chapter book. For my latest books, 10 Surprisingly Simple Ideas That Changed My Life and Street-Smart Coding Manifesto, I’ve skipped the prologue and the introduction. From Write Useful Books, I learned to start non-fiction at Chapter 1. It’s like dropping viewers into the TV show drama instead of…
Street-Smart Coding Manifesto Crafting clean code alone won’t save you or make you stand out. That’s not the real edge. Why this book? When I started, I thought my only job was writing code. I obsessed over syntax and lines of code. I ignored meetings, calls, and emails. I only wanted to code, code, and code. But I was wrong. After trial and error, and even getting fired, I realized: Code alone won’t save you. It won’t make you stand out either. It’s always something beyond symbols: The skills…
Nik wrote in Make Your Mentors Ageless: Make your mentors ageless, and, at minimum, you’ll gain one awesome new trait: the humility to learn from anyone, no matter their relative position to you in this life. I don’t like the word “mentor.” It scares people away. Someone you want as mentor is probably too busy for that role. Don’t ask anyone to be your mentor. I’ve never had official mentors, people holding the title. But mentors are everywhere. Reading one of James Altucher’s books I learn, we…
Almost everybody In my first AMA asked the same thing: What helped you overcome burnout? The answer is simple: Bring back a sense of joy to your life. Tim Denning wrote about it in You’re born to f*cking create: If you feel stuck, the easiest way I know how is to start writing publicly. If you’ve got other creative goals, then do those. But make sure every day you are creating things and putting them out into the world to see what comes back. Make creativity your #1 priority. Burnout is…
This month, my blog turned 8 years old…and my dev.to account turned 7. To celebrate it, I ran an AMA session on dev.to. For some moments, it felt I was talking to bots. Most likely true, if you also believe in the Dead Internet Theory. I didn’t take too much time to answer questions that sound like AI. Here are my favorite questions: Before vs Now What changed in your perspective and what makes a Senior Software Engineer…Senior? For me, there’s one true sign of being Senior: when you stop…
Hey there. Quick update: Street-Smart Coding Manifesto is almost done. No more hunting for typos. If you preordered, I’m sending a preview next week. And as usual, here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Google search (if that’s still a thing) and LLMs are great for quick facts. When was America discovered? But the real problem is offloading our thinking to AI (10min), even for simple tasks. #2. LLMs often reply “You’re absolutely right.” For your next project or idea, get…
In 2023, I burned out. It was the darkest moment of my life. It was a long process on the way down…and a longer one on the way up. It took me about a year to wake up with a sense of purpose again. What helped me can be summarized into one line: Taking care of my health (by doing something for my mind, body, and spirit every day) and bringing a sense of joy and fulfillment to my life every day (by going back to some of my hobbies just for fun). Writing played a big role. It worked like therapy.…
It’s sales day, and the whole grocery store is crowded. “We have to be patient, right?” a guy said to me. I’m in the butchery section. The guy is frantically walking from one side of the aisle to the other, phone in his hand. “I have 70,” he said when I asked what turn he had. “I have 94, and I only need one chicken breast,” I told him while taking my U-shaped ticket out of my pocket. The display shows 64 in red LED lights. We both laughed. He knew I was more screwed than he was. A few minutes…
Street-Smart Coding Manifesto is almost here. This past month, I’ve been writing a book to help you become a street-smart coder. It’s my case against syntax obsession to stand out as a coder. This week, I heard back from my awesome beta readers: Ricardo Cardona and Darren Lin. Their feedback helped me simplify chapters and cut duplication. Here’s some of their feedback. “What I liked the most is that it is actually relatable, experiences we’ve all been through at some point in our careers. You…
Blogging for 8 years hasn’t been unicorns and rainbows. I abandoned my blog for months. I’ve also wanted to quit more than once. Even when I preach to write like nobody is reading, my last 100 daily posts made me question if I should keep a blog. Maybe YouTube, Substack, or a social media platform aren’t that bad after all. Then I remember Seth Godin sharing about his 10,000 posts. That’s 25 years of blogging. That reminds me that the real hack is sticking for years. I’m reflecting on my 8-year…
Like an 8-year-old boy, my blog has grown and changed. In case you missed it, yesterday my blog turned 8. The project and habit I’ve kept for the longest. Here’s what I’m doing differently: #1. No more SEO-optimized posts. Google killed blogging as a business. Then LLMs put the last nail in the coffin. I wrote my first posts to rank high in Google search results. I chose subjects and headlines from Google’s “People also asked” and related searches. Not anymore. #2. More subjects apart from…
Eight years ago, I wrote my first blog post. I didn’t know what I was doing. After googling “how to get better at coding,” I found start a blog. That’s what I did. By the way, that search inspired Street-Smart Coding, my first coding book. I spent days choosing a Jekyll theme and a name. I turned hours of googling into a post and hit publish. OK, I vomited some words onto a page. That first post is still unedited as a reminder. That’s how I started blogging. Here I am, 816 posts later. 624…
Since 2024, I’ve kept ideapads to capture bad ideas. Back then, by pure chance, I found the concept of becoming an idea machine. That’s writing 10 bad ideas about anything. Every. Single. Day. That habit has helped me write books and keep my creative juices flowing. It’s been so helpful that I made it Idea #5 in my book, 10 Surprisingly Simple Ideas That Changed My Life And Could Change Yours Too. That book itself started as a 10-idea list. But before starting to write bad ideas, I faced the…
While catching up with ex-coworkers, the conversation inevitable turned to the future of coding. By the end of the evening, “You’re absolutely right!” had become an inside joke. That’s what ChatGPT seem to say when it’s wrong. Each time someone asked a question, they got an “You’re absolutely right!” AI answers aren’t 100% reliable. Coding’s short feedback loops make AI mistakes evident. Now imagine trusting every answer just because “AI said that.” Medical recommendations, investment…
Binge-watching TV isn’t exactly productive. Books are better. But recently, I’ve binged Brilliant Minds. Think a less dramatic version of House M.D. with wilder patients. Near the end of season 2, Dr. Wolf, the protagonist, said: “We’re all just doing our best to hold ourselves together.” A little reminder that: Nobody is normal. We’re all figuring out life as we go. We’re all just holding ourselves together. Want to change your life, but not sure how to start? Check out 10 Surprisingly Simple…
Last week, I found this question on a dev.to post: “Is it just me, or has anyone noticed that articles on dev.to don’t get as many reads/views as they used to before?” Yes! On dev.to, Medium, and on the Internet overall. There’s no point in writing how-to tutorials anymore, unless you’re starting your coding or writing journey with TIL posts. For step-by-step guidance on coding tasks, there’s a magical text-area that seems to understands you and spits out answers fast. Less people are landing…
Anne Lamott has written over 20 books. Among them, Bird by Bird, one of the most popular writing memoirs. I just devoured her interview on David Perell’s YouTube channel. Here are my quotes, extracts, and lessons: #1. “The point is not to try harder, it’s to resist less.” #2. “If it’s literary, you can’t use it.” This line reminded me of Smart Brevity’s beach and bar test: If you wouldn’t use it at a bar, don’t use it. “Don’t use words, you’d have to look up.” As a rule, Anne Lamott decides to…
Yesterday, I found Seth Godin’s riffs: a collection of his best quotes from his blog. He’s one of the writers I’ve stolen from. Here are my favorites: “Seek out the smallest viable audience, not the largest possible one.” The smallest viable audience is you: who you were years ago or who you are now. Write or create for your younger self. And if you make something just for you, at least one person will like it. That’s why I write some of my books for my younger self. And they’re a success if at…
Hey there. Quick update: 4 people have already preordered Street-Smart Coding Manifesto. A small win I’m celebrating. If you want to grow beyond syntax, this book is for you. As usual, here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. The new profitable coding gig seems to be to clean up vibecoded apps. Here’s a team already doing it (3min). It’s time to change our LinkedIn bios to “AI slop fixer.” #2. Cheap and accessible media has changed the meaning of resting, turning us into fat…
As a creative practice, I write 10-idea lists every day. Here are 7 interesting ideas I found recently. I’m writing them as I go, so I’m missing sources. #1. Have a list of alternative activities to scrolling. Instead of grabbing your phone, have a default activity for when you’re bored. That might be opening your journal or reading a book. Or have a creative date with yourself. #2. Rest isn’t the same as stillness. Rest is inactivity that recharges you for later work. Industries profit from…
