WPF will always have a warm place in my heart. It was the perfect skill to have as an undergrad looking for an internship because so many dev teams have annoying problems that can be solved with a simple software tool. I just specialized in fixing these types of problems throughout my college years with WPF and was able to build a strong resume before graduation.
I’m a Swift developer now. Learning Swift UI definitely brings back a lot of those memories. WPF was ahead of the curve for declarative interface programming.
I agree that yard work is phenomenal for mood, but it is sort of captured in the article's list. I see yard work as a combination of light exercise, time spent in nature, and meditation. In your case, it's a personal hobby too!
As an aside to your last thought, there's a local teacher in my town that offers to paint home interiors in the summer time. He expects customers to do all the prep work and acquire the paint, but he will show up with brushes, rollers, etc. He does charge a fee, but it's much lower than any professional. When I asked why he does it, he simply answered that he loves painting and finds it relaxing, so he decided to do it on the side to help locals out. Maybe you could do something similar for yards in the neighborhood.
Wow, this was a joy to read - thank you for sharing. I’m trying to make a concerted effort this year to read 20 books, which has led to me reading 4 Vonnegut pieces for the first time and am currently on my 5th. I was never assigned Vonnegut readings in school, but I have never felt more connected with an author while reading their work. Mother Night has been my favorite thus far, but I’m saving Slaughterhouse Five as the finale for my 20th book.
As stated in the article, there is something unique about how Vonnegut can capture vast ideas and distill them into his character’s expository. For example, here is my favorite quote from Cat’s Cradle:
> Do you know the story about father on the day they first tested a bomb out in Alamogordo? After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said ‘What is sin?’
For anybody interested in diving deeper into this subject, I would recommend reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. It was written in 2011, but is still very applicable today. Brain plasticity is a real concept and our constant connection to the Internet affects us.
Very scary and I do get a sense that my recall ability and general focus is severely diminished after a decade of being active on reddit and other places like here. The problem is I'm on this dopamine treadmill. I see a thread with an interesting topic and a lot of comments, and I want to dive in and spend an hour sifting through it. I check my subreddits and HN every day.
And for what? I get nothing out of it, maybe a little pissed off every now and then. Most articles I read are forgettable and have no impact on my life. There is literally nothing that I've learned on the internet over close to two decades of use that I couldn't learn more thoroughly with a book or by looking at a newspaper, and in recent years it's been getting impossible to find actual factual subject information on the internet that isn't some half assed SEOified article that doesn't even have my answer.
I think I'm just gonna pull the plug and block these websites with some browser extension, because I am just too compulsive at this point, too engrained into this automatic unconscious action of cmd+t->news.y->tab->enter to do it under my own volition. Sometimes I sit down and I don't even remember opening HN, but there I am scrolling through the front page.
I still need the internet for emails, stack overflow, or finding articles in my field, but that sort of use I will allow because I take that information and synthesize it into something novel and useful. I'm going to pull the plug on being a mindless internet consumer, who leaves no time for actual thinking in between the rampant consumption.
Good bye, HN, hopefully for good but we will see how long I'm able to remain disciplined. I'm kinda excited about what sort of mental clarity this might bring me and how much that will improve my life.
Good luck to you! I feel all of the sentiments that you mentioned in your comment. Here are some tips for you that have really helped me:
- Turn off auto-complete on your desktop browser. The "cmd+t > news.y" or "cmt+t > r" is a real catalyst for mindless browsing sites like Hacker News and Reddit.
- Uninstall apps like Reddit, Facebook, or Instagram on your phone. If you really want to access them, then use the web experience through the mobile browser. It's enough to get the job done, but not good enough to be addicting (no auto-play videos, notifications, and the UX is slightly degraded).
- Turn off all non-pertinent notifications on your phone, especially things like news, email, and social media. The only daily apps which have I notifications enabled for me are Messages, a sports app, and daily habit reminders.
- If I feel like I'm using a social media site too much on a laptop, then I change the hosts file to re-direct to localhost. Bam, access revoked for a while. I've found that this works better than browser extensions. With extensions, I used to just right-click > disable, then go to my time-wasting website. With the hosts file method, I need to figure out the path to the hosts file (I never remember it), open it in a text editor, type in my changes, then save the file with sudo permissions. I thought about scripting it, but I think the manual process is more effective at preventing me from constantly enabling/disabling access. There's more intention behind the action.
- Pay for a newspaper subscription. It's so refreshing to consume quality journalism vs trendy click-bait articles. My recommendation would be read one national outlet (NY Times, Wall Street Journal) and your local newspaper. Instead of browsing Reddit/HN in the morning, open up your newspaper app.
Second this recommendation, I enjoyed that book very much. However, I felt defeated by the end, because I couldn't act on the presented information in any meaningful way.
Halfway through the book the author tells about how much he had struggled to write and had to isolate himself from technology for a while, but only temporary. He then came back and felt the "shallows" once again.
Can you describe what this experience is like for the attendees? Are all of the attendees transported into all of these environments with full control of their character given constraints like being underwater, flying through the air, etc? I've played video games my entire life, but not Fortnite, so I find this absolutely fascinating as a future medium.
I found his answer fascinating to the question on what employees can do to improve the current negative perception of the company. He didn't list any concrete actions the company is making or make suggestions on what the employees can do at work, but answered it by essentially telling them to talk up how much they like their job to friends/family:
"And I think it’s tough to break down these perceptions and build trust until you get to a place where people know that you have their best interests at heart. So that’s one thing that you all will be well-suited to do as ambassadors, if you choose to be, having spent time here, as I think you know the heart of this place at this point. And you don’t know every single technical project, but you have a sense of what we care about and what people here think about and what the conversations are on a day-to-day basis. And in the conversations that I have, even with some of our biggest critics, I just find that sitting down and talking to people and having them know that you care about the problems and acknowledge that there are issues and that you’re working through them ... I think it just makes a big difference."
The problem is that if somebody has a negative perception of your company already, this exact type of response sounds disingenuous.
Maybe this kind of speech works in a mass setting. But when you just hear or read it by yourself and you look at every penny they make is by selling your private data, you know it’s all just talk.
It's not disingenuous, it's just ineffective. Zuck and can believe 100% that they are doing good. Very few people are moustache twirling self-awarely evil. But if you disagree with Zuck's values, you're never going to come to a meeting of the minds.
Being nice to people in the workplace is part of being a professional, especially for jobs that may rely on tips.