week seven reflections

idea

What is important for you in your work?
Is it a great product or mission?
Are that people whom you work with?
Is it the deep sense of self-realization that your skills help you bring to the table?

words

This week I learned the term algorithmic prison from Dr. Kleppmann in Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
As developers, we have huge power over the lives of people.
We can deny it or not feel it because of our poor skills in some areas.
Still, we should not have an illusion about every commit and pull request's effect on the users.
If more decisions are made because of the growing complexity of the systems we build, we should ensure the people are not suffering as an outcome.
Does it mean more work, more design, and more caution?
There is a lot I have already learned in that regard that learned in my current team.
German culture encourages that way of development.
That may explain why Dr Kleppmann, a German himself, mentioned it.

blogging

metrics

This week there was a huge jump in blog visitors.
That was thanks to Jahongir.
He shared my latest post on his Telegram channel with 3k+ subscribers.
In Telegram, I got 62 new subscribers.

Google Analytics, last 28 days: 175 users, 168 of them new, with a single spike of about 120 visitors around 12 February.

The stats from Telegram surprised me.
They provide much more than I expected:

number of views
number of shares
the language of viewers

Telegram channel statistics for 10–18 February 2023: most views come from the channel itself; readers’ languages are mainly English, Russian and Uzbek; the top recent posts had about 2,800 and 60 views.

skills and knowledge

This week I continued with a sliding window.
I lost focus because of work.
I wanted to concentrate on one growing in complexity task.
So I ended up just following the daily recommendation by the LeetCode.
Today I have a new contest.
Let's see how it goes.

body and soul

What does decrease the stress level for you?
Dr. Newport in a popular self-help book on attention management Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World mentioned walking in green areas as an effective way to decrease stress.
In a cloudy Berlin, I am more surprised to see empty parks at whatever time of the year or day.
Still, this approach works wonders for me.
Within 30 mins to 1 hour, I usually get back to a deeper touch with reality.
I move out of my thoughts to my feelings, to reality.