I needed to collect my thoughts a little bit this week. This year has been very challenging in a lot of different ways for me.
All in all, I think the end result will be a net positive this year. We made some good money despite the world around us seemingly
falling apart, and we are closer than ever to reaching our goal of becoming permanent residents. BUT. That's not to say this year
was not the scariest I've ever been of losing my employment.
This has obviously made me more anxious than normal for almost the whole year, meanwhile my company's management seems to try and do
every bad decision possibly. At least now I was moved to a different project (the company merged the last two remaining development teams
into a single one last month. Don't ask.) and since I'm joining from the other side of the project I'm no longer holding the meaningless title
of tech lead, which held more responsibility and workload at the exchange of fuck all in return. This last week and a half made me feel like
I could finally breathe.
This year I got back into reading. I'm still far from having back a fraction of the reading speed and stamina I used to have in my college
days, but at least I've read some pretty meaningful books this year. One of them gave me some ideas on how to set and keep good habits, and
I intend on using these to set me on a better path for improving as a professional. I'm going to define and track some metrics of my work over
a year and work on improving incrementally over them, same as with gym weights. And keeping track of them will help me stay accountable of those
metrics.
This year also settled for me that I made the right decision in leaving Brazil. Even though it is true that today I could work remotely from Brazil
and live like a king with the salary I make here in the dark, cold city of Toronto - it's not about my level of luxury. I want to live in a place
that has institutions in place that reward good work ethics and rewards entrepreneurship. Even though Canada is far from perfect, it is miles ahead
from any country in Latin America. Both me and my wife were much more successful here than in Brazil in just 3 years here. It's like we're Goku after
training under 100x gravity, we basically put an amount of effort that would be considered regular in Brazil and get 10x the output here.
This year I also started to learn how to play the guitar. It's been fun and terrifying at the same time, it's hard as fuck but also awesome. I trying hard
to keep practicing regularly and to improve at least a little over time, as I know that eventually I'll be good enough to have fun with it. I always
wanted to learn how to play the guitar, but I didn't really had the chance when I was younger.
So even though we went through a lot of hardships this year, it was mostly positive I'd say. We did our best, and we survived. We stuck together. Next year
we will not have to deal with any of this anymore, and we will be happy again.
Once again I find myself in a place where my biggest enemy is time. Time I have to wait before I can start making my next move in life. Waiting for a visa, waiting for the covid restrictions to be lifted,
waiting for my girlfriend to join me in Germany, waiting for my college graduation, always waiting and waiting.
Every time it seems like time stands still and the months stretch to no end. And I'm stuck here in this limbo, trying to keep busy as to not think about so that time can maybe move faster.
But every night the time that remains is the last thing in my mind, and it is in my mind every morning when I wake.
Nothing I can do other than complain tough. I lived trough those other times, and I will push through this one as well. One year from now my life will be completely different no matter what the result of the PR application is,
that is for sure. I just hope that I'm making the right choices this time, and I'm hopeful that I am. Anyway, here's the song I'm learning to play in the guitar this week:
It seems silly to have to say this out loud, but I believe many people (even some in the industry) do not realize that programming is creative work. Give the same task to 10 different developers, and even if all of them deliver a correct and efficient solution, it is very likely that each one will be different.
That being said, being productive in a creative environment requires that your mind is in the right place. It is very hard to get into your zone, focus on a problem, and see things from different angles when you're sleep-deprived because you've been working 12 hours a day for weeks or months on end. It's not even rare to see people bragging about pulling long nights as if it were a badge of honor— to me, it's just an indication that either you or the company is failing at resource management.
So why, oh why, do developers and managers insist on ignoring this when planning their work? I've seen it time and time again, and it always results in bad or buggy code being pushed out. Being productive is not about putting in lots of hours; it's about producing more per hour. One of the easiest ways to be more productive is to start the day with a fresh mind after a good night's sleep, exercising regularly, and eating well. There is no need for fancy meditation techniques or special drugs—before you ever consider unorthodox approaches, make sure you have the basics covered.
Time being unidimensional is one of the weirdest concepts I ever came across, and the literature regarding it is weirdly spread across physics and philosophy. Unlike space, which has three dimensions (at least as far as we can perceive), time only has one dimension. This means that time has no depth to it, there is no forward / backwards / up or down in time.
If space had only one dimension, there would be no other position other then "here" - you wouldn't be able to move at all, since there would be no spacial direction. Similarly, the only real position in time that exists is "now". We can't travel backwards or forwad in time because those simply do not exist - the past is only what we remember (our memories) and the future only exists in our imagination (often seen in a pessimistic light).
In practical terms, this really means nothing. We perceive the past and future as real as the present, and we all act accordingly (as we should). The past being just a memory does not mean we cannot learn from it and use it to imagine a better future. We can focus on our goals today in order to crystalize the changes we want to see in our lives in the future, and use our imagination to predict what will happen so we can be ready for that eventual present.
But we do have to keep in mind that what we consider to be our past is very influenced by our emotional response to that, not necesserely how things came to be. And that once we are gone, unless written down somewhere, those memories - and that past will be gone.
Going from place A to place B because place A sucks more than place B is a tradition older than mankind itself. But the modern process of immigration, albeit a lot easier than it was in the past in some dimensions still sucks.
I know a lot of people complain about it online, so allow me to bitch about some stuff that I don't see a lot of people talking about:
You lose most of your professional network
You *might* lose your professional credentials, having to get new certifications
You will have to re-learn how to do taxes
You will have to pay taxes without a right to representation for a set amount of time
You have to be ready to the possibility of being "evicted" from the country at any given moment (until you are a citizen)
And I get it, these are minor complaints compared to the stuff I had to endure on my home country, but they are still annoying as fuck.
Today I went back to work after being away for a week. I still hate this company, but it pays the bills so I just swallow my discontent. Never have I worked with so many incompetent people in my life. This company is a joke, the leadership has no idea of what they are doing with the product, and keeps moving the company away from any chance of being profitable. They spent half a million US dollars on a company-wide retreat two months before firing half of the engineering sector in order to cut costs. Both the senior leadership and HR refuse to communicate clearly with the employees, defaulting to radio silence when any question is asked.
If I was not bound to them by this work visa and my in progress permanent residency application was not dependent on it, I would have quitted this madhouse long ago. It has been giving me a lot of unneeded anxiety that my family's livehood is dependent on a bunch of incompetent fucks who would never have a business in the first place if it was not by years of unlimited cheap credit in the market. Now that this faucet is closed, they are panicking and it shows.
It really bothers me when I hear people proudly announcing how they would never consider making small
sacrifices in order to risk a chance of improving their lives or achieving an important goal. Often they are the same people who
constantly complain about their lifes too. They are never to blame for their problems, it's always society's fault somehow.
Never in their lives have they know hardship, so the idea of making the smallest of sacrifices is completely alien to them. They always had
everything they could need for given to them, so they never understood how hard you have to work in order to have things.
7 years ago me and my wife left our home coutry to work lower jobs than the ones we originally had in a richer country. I went back to work as an intern, and she worked in a series of informal and menial jobs before getting an entry level job in her area. Still, we lived in relative luxury compared to our previous lifes, and we still had enough to spare. So much so we were able to have enough money to buy a house in one of the most expensive cities to live in the world, something a lot of these same people can't stop saying is "impossible to do these days".
I swear by god, these people are so soft. So sheltered. They wouldn't last a day in the real world. I pray we don't end up having a third world war because these delicate flowers would wither before the first winter.
Dev for hobby can be quite fun while in edibles. Since this is just a creativety exercise and in no way monetizable I can really have fun with it.
I don't plan on ever crossing the barrier of working under substancies, but when it's just for fun programming while under the influence feels awesome!
I miss having time to program just for fun again. I remember back in college I fell in love with web development, back then I had never though that it would change my life so much as it has.
It's also refreshing to work on something simple and minimalistic for a bit. No product idea, no frameworks, just some simple css and html to put my thoughs out there. And today was the perfect day to work on this too, as I had time for myself.
Today I finished playing Detroit - Become human. It was pretty cheesy, but also very nice. I great casual game, I wish there were more like those. I like the point and click / interactive movie vibe of these games.
Giving this neocites a shot. I always regretted that I wasn't tech savy enough while the og geocites where around in order to have a website there.
In my defense, I was around 9 at the time and didn't knew english, it was a lot harder to find this kind of information for a child in portuguese
back then. Now I can finally add my favourite 90's gif to a website of my own:
It feels good to just create something silly looking anonymously online, a personal little corner. I'll try to keep this as a space where I can write down my thoughs, with the luxury of not having to lie.
