Day 71: Easing in

Lots of personal posts these past several days because there have been a lot of personal changes!

Today I sat down and coded for a long stretch of time which was quite nice since it’s been a while since I’ve actually done any meaningful work.

I found it quite difficult to concentrate and didn’t get to enter the elusive flow state — instead, I spent 3 hours working on a feature request that probably could’ve been completed in 20 minutes if I weren’t a zombie staring at the screen unable to simultaneously hold more than 2 bits of information. Nonetheless, I was able to complete the feature request. But now that I think about it, I’m not sure that making this change was even worth it. I just went ahead and did it because a friend brought it up, but there is a tradeoff here and I didn’t really think it through. Making product decisions is hard when I can barely keep a train of thought of going.

Why am I finding it so difficult to focus?

I know one of the reasons why, but I don’t feel comfortable writing about it here because the person/people involved read Road to Ramen. Such is the downside of writing a public journal — even though I write mainly for myself, I sometimes do take the public nature of this platform into consideration.

Yesterday, I got to see my friends Nick, Clara, and Potluck in SF for the first time in a while (and probably the last time for a while since SF ordered all its residents to stay home starting today) and we talked about what I don’t include in Road to Ramen. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things that I don’t include in my writing here:

Things I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying directly to the person/people in question
- The omission above falls under this category. Whatever I write here, I want to be comfortable saying it directly to someone. If I wouldn’t, then I don’t write it.
Things that’d reflect poorly on other people
- I don’t notice this one that much because I generally try to avoid speaking ill of other people as much as I can. If this journal were private, I imagine I might include things along the lines of “I felt uncomfortable around X when he said Y”, but not things like “I really don’t like X. He’s a bad person.” because I generally don’t think that way and would rather not.
Things I think people wouldn’t feel comfortable having me share
- People would stop trusting me if I published all their secrets here, y’know?

Hm, I’m sure there’s more, but I’m having a hard time thinking of them. In general, my approach with this journal (and with other content that I’ve created and shared online) has been to err on the side of being too open rather than being conservative. Heck, I posted a video of myself crying on camera while tripping on shrooms in Mexico a few years ago, so everything else I could share is pretty tame in comparison.

Even though we’re all split up now, it’s been quite nice staying connected with the other Hacker Fellowship members through Slack. I also never knew how helpful it is to have a group of people who use your product and are willing to give quick feedback. For example, I revisited the Wall Time vs. Active Time decision today and found that everyone preferred active time which was nice:

This has also been a great way to learn about bugs:

And feature requests:

Didn’t know that people would use sites this way (closing and opening repeatedly instead of keeping a tab open) so it was helpful for learning different usage patterns. — Didn't know that people would use sites this way (closing and opening repeatedly instead of keeping a tab open) so it was helpful for learning different usage patterns.

The Slack channel was also the source of a feature that I’m super excited to build but I’ll write about that some other time.

I feel very lucky to be connected with this group and I miss them lots!