A collection of blog posts by Hrvoje Šimić
This Christmas is special because my little daughter realizes it’s Christmas for the first time today. I’ve woken up early, turned on the Christmas lights and put the present under the Christmas tree. This feels better than receiving a gift ever did and so from my experience it’s definitely true that “giving is more blessed than receiving”. Jonathan Haidt writes about this in The Happiness…
I keep them in IDEAS.md file on iCloud. I have shortcuts on both my phone and laptop to open the file instantly. I don’t need the sync to be instant. I just want to have the latest version when I run these shortcuts. I added some ideas on my phone yesterday. Today, I opened the file on my laptop, but I didn’t notice it didn’t sync the huge <0.1KB change, so when I saved the file, the changes were…
I’ve deleted LinkedIn for the second time. I originally did it back in 2015 (maybe even earlier, can’t remember the exact year) because I couldn’t stand all the recruiter emails asking me to relocate even though I had specific instructions for them to not email me about non-remote job opportunities. Then two years ago I had to look for a new client so I thought LinkedIn would help with that. It…
For the past couple of days, I’ve been waking up around 3:30 AM, excitedly jumping out of bed to make some tweaks to the website you’re reading this on 1 . I’ve spent a lot of hours updating it to the latest version in hopes of improving the build time of 3 seconds, which is abysmal. After all this work, the build time is now down to about 100 milliseconds. Of course, for one reason or another,…
I’ve recently stumbled upon “Stockdale Paradox”, named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, a prisoner of war who was tortured during his eight-year imprisonment during the Vietnam War. He said that he survived because he maintained the faith that he could and would prevail in the end, but at the same time had the discipline to confront the harsh reality. He mentions that it was not the pessimists, but…
I like Schopenhauer’s ideas more than I like Nietzsche’s and I agree with him that one can make oneself stupid by reading too much and I’ve re-read “On Thinking for Oneself” a couple of times, but that’s about it. See, a couple of years ago I’ve read this in “On the suffering of the world”. In it, he claims that “misfortune in general is the rule” and that we think more about the unpleasant and…
Following MacIver’s Daily Writing Practice made me roam through my Roam Research highlights in search of good prompts for the daily entry. I’ve stumbled upon this one, from an article by Henrik Karlsson : You can also get into this feedback loop by chasing your reading . You read and reflect on what you learn. Then you use those reflections to find even more interesting nooks in the history of…
I’ve been using Aeropress for about ten years and I still consider it one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. To me, this is a much better alternative to the most popular coffee style in Croatia: Turkish coffee. The coffee made with Aeropress tastes less bitter and generally more tasteful which is why I’ve also stopped adding sugar to it. I think adding sugar is so popular because it masks the…
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer,” said Camus. When I was younger I used to hate winters, but they have grown on me. Every season reveals its magic for those with eyes to see and that is true about winter as well. There is something alluring about the brisk winter air, about coming back to the warm indoors, and warming with a hot apple cinnamon tea. My…
I keep thinking about Henrik Karlsson’s great (paywalled) essay on writing in a way that improves your thinking . He says his essays are good because he doesn’t write them in one go, but returns to them over and over essentially having a dialogue with different versions of himself. This means that his essays are not written by one Henrik, but by ten Henriks, which makes the essays more interesting…
A list of things that I regret is not long, but there is one thing on that list that stands out: not journaling before 2018. Journals age like wine, and this is why I regret not writing about my life earlier. I regret not documenting the important events in my life as I experienced them in that moment. For instance, I don’t have anything in my journal about the experience of meeting my wife for…
I’ve been writing an essay every month for almost two years now and this practice has started to feel tiring. The deadline to publish forces me to write, but I don’t think it forces me in the right way. The writing starts feeling stiff and forced and there is no joy in writing and the readers can feel that. I’ve tried removing the deadline in the past to fix this, but that made me stop writing…
Twitter’s direct messages are the best aspect of Twitter, so of course the new Twitter leadership decided to make it worse by automatically opting-in everyone to the setting that only allows messages from verified users. This is the reason why I’ve subscribed to Twitter Premium but I’ve just canceled my subscription and I’ll stop using Twitter. The “For You” feed is basically a 1:1 copy of TikTok…
By Willy Eisenschitz As any writer, painter, designer or software developer worth their salt would tell you, detachment is necessary to be able to assess your own work. In order to create an article that doesn’t suck, it’s necessary to read it as a reader and not like someone who has written it. (Are chefs the best food tasters and writers the best editors? Maybe, because they know what to look…
I’m back. As you might’ve noticed, I’ve stopped the practice of publishing every week. I’ve decided to stop putting out low-effort pieces weekly and to start giving more thought to my writing. I think spending more time writing each piece (which is difficult to do on a weekly basis with a day job) will increase its quality. Sacrifice regularity for quality, I say. Hopefully, you will notice the…
I’ve been writing three literature notes per day for the last three months. This has been the biggest lesson: quantity is not important. What matters most is thinking better and everything should serve that goal. However, writing three literature notes not only doesn’t help in that regard, but actually prevents thinking from happening. The point of note taking is not in writing a huge amount of…
The main reason insurance is such a powerful industry is because people are more afraid to lose than they are eager to gain. The Loss Aversion Principle says that you get more displeasure from losing $50 than you get pleasure from finding $50. Everyone wants to have a fifty-fifty chance of winning $100 if they have to put $50 on the line. People go out of their way to avoid loss. Because of this…
Not all developers like debugging. They consider it a chore and, in fact, actively avoid it. There is no glory in the grueling work of fixing bugs all day. When debugging is done, there’s little to show to the client. It feels like there’s no value added when all you do is make things work the way they should have worked from the start. But I’ve always enjoyed finding and fixing bugs. Every bug…
If you have studied computer science, you have probably encountered UML diagrams and the waterfall model. Like with a lot of things from the college days, I’ve never had any use of that in the real world. But since I’ve studied it, I assume some people still use it. To be honest, I don’t have much exposure to the “Enterprise” world, where I think UML diagrams are much more popular. As I use Ruby,…
Most ideas are bad. But if you don’t have patience for the bad ideas, you’ll never get the interesting ones. Your creativity is like a pipe of water where the first mile of the piping is filled with wastewater . The wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives. Writing 750 words first thing in the morning is letting out the wastewater. The hardest thing with this is completely…
I. Instagram creates the illusion of knowing people. We become aware of all the minute details about someone’s life, without knowing them as a person. It gives us too much details about people that we don’t know personally. Although Instagram reveals what we eat, where we go to, and who we hang out with, it can’t compete with a personal blog where we reveal something much more intimate: what we…
Since I've moved this week, I didn't write as much as I would like to. So here's something unusual. Inspired by Eliezer Yudkowsky's essay: Guessing The Teacher's Password . Please sit. Here’s the set of questions some committee has decided we should ask you. Give us the correct answer from a set we have provided you. “What set?” you ask. The set of question/answer pairs we are currently learning.…
The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don’t find themselves at all. Andre Gide Beethoven produced his best work when he became deaf. He stopped listening to the tune of his contemporary society and produced original work that changed classical music forever. On the other hand, most people are swamped by other people’s opinions, which makes it increasingly…
What’s better — articles or books? Nassim Nicholas Taleb claims that the longer something has been in print, the greater the chance it will remain in print, and the higher value it has (aka The Lindy Effect). Since old articles that have remained in print don’t exist, books are more valuable, per this rule. Nick Maggiulli from “ Of Dollars and Data ” agrees and thinks that books provide more value…
No writer likes to confront the dreaded blank page. That moment before the first word is written. Enter, the Zettelkasten. This system for writing notes allows writing large pieces of text in smaller chunks and therefore preventing the dreaded confrontation with the blank page. Zettelkasten is not just a note-taking system but a tool for making writing more enjoyable. Writing is not a separate…
As a writer, you can fall into the trap of thinking about your readers too much. Will they like what you write? Will it resonate? But, the best writing is the one you don’t care how many people read. Stop thinking what other people would like to read and start writing about what you’re interested in . Writing what others want to read is work, and people can sense it in your writing. Writing what…
Since some meetings not only distract me from Deep Work, but increasingly annoy me, I want to elaborate why. Instead of meetings, I prefer documents, and not just because I’m a stereotypical introvert. Clear writing eliminates work. A clearly written document doesn’t only save you time (since you won’t have to repeat the same information later), but it also saves time for anyone reading it. Speech…
There’s a beautiful lesson from Stoicism about traffic jams that applies to entrepreneurship and the frustration people feel towards bureaucracy. Suppose while commuting to work, you’re suddenly stuck in a traffic jam, and you become annoyed. In that case, your expectations might’ve been set too high. While you expected a ride without any traffic, the reality turned out completely different. The…
René Descartes famously said that reading books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries. But, I don’t agree with that statement. Reading is not like a conversation; writing is more like it. Reading is more like seeing the thought process. It doesn’t allow us to ask questions, unlike writing, which invites us to ask questions and seek answers. The problem with infomania We…
As a developer, I easily get carried away building new things. Side projects are fun for me, especially when they are useful. In fact, I actively avoid programming that is useful only as a learning exercise, like puzzles and tests. Instead of that, I try to build useful things. The most recent example of this is adding analytics to this blog. Instead of using a service, I’ve built a rudimentary…
I’ve published an article or a book review every week for the past six months. But is publishing consistently the right thing to do to get better at writing? The lesson of the pottery class The pottery class parable is a story about the two groups that each wanted to create the perfect pot during a single month of practice. One group wanted to create as many pots as possible in order to create a…
I’ve had a learning journal since 2011, but only recently have I realized the main benefit from it: it makes me learn more by paying more attention to bugs. I wasn’t aware I had a learning journal back then since I was simply sharing short programming articles. But in essence, my entire blog was a learning journal back then. Only after seeing Rico Sta. Cruz’s TIL page have I decided to create a…
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is the best thing I discovered in 2019. I’ve since tried a couple of different approaches and too many (six) apps. In this article, I would like to share everything I’ve learned about it over that period. Investment in knowledge pays the best interest. Benjamin Franklin Why bother? Given that every PKM system requires a significant time investment, it’s worth…
When I first encountered this concern in the Rails app that I was working on, I was initially impressed. It felt like magic. Like a cool trick to avoid unnecessary complexity. This concern enabled using let in Rails controllers. It inverts the relationship between controllers and views, so instead of controllers providing data for the views, it makes views ask for data from controllers. This post…
All my previous side projects flopped because of this. I looked at them from the perspective of a creator. I was stuck in that role. I didn’t have the experience of all the other people that were supposed to use the end product. Yet, the ability to detach from one’s product is critical to producing something valuable. Not being able to detach makes evaluation impossible. This applies to essays,…
My bike got stolen a while back. It happened because I got lazy carrying my bike up the stairs and left it in the much less secure basement. I thought that taking it up the stairs is not worth it. Nothing will happen. No one will steal a bike from my building since it hasn’t happened to any of my neighbors. That has reminded me of the Coronavirus preventions. Preventing the spread of Coronavirus…
There’s a tension that you’ll discover if you start publishing articles. A tension between writing what the world wants from you and what you want to write about. Thinking about your audience can paralyze you to stop exploring what’s interesting. Instead of exploring your interests, you get distracted by the opinions of others. The worst effect of this is self-censorship. Not publishing articles…
The most common piece of advice you’ll receive if you want to learn programming is that you should do programming to learn it. While this is well-meaning advice, since doing programming is better than reading about it, it’s incomplete. Following this incomplete advice alone can prevent you from falling in love with programming. One of the worst implementations of this advice is learning…
If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable. Seneca the Younger For the past couple of months, I’ve been doing more planning and reviewing. So far, the most useful review session was also the longest one — the one I did for the current year. It gave me a kick in the butt to change things with my work and made me realize that I needed to change things. Not doing these…
There are so many great books to read, but so little time to do it. How to pick a book from a list of hundreds or even thousands of recommended books to read? I read about a lot of different topics. This leads to reading about things that might or might not be useful in the future. Reading in this way is like the education we get in school. We learn about concepts and facts that might or might not…
When Hey came out, I wasn’t sure that I’m going to use it. But, I was interested in trying it out. I thought it was an overpriced email client and that there is too much hype around it. The App store drama didn’t help. Yet, I was interested in it since I would like to stop using Gmail as my primary email address. That’s why I’ve tried to spin up my mail server. Tried is the keyword here. I…
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” These are the famous words of Leo Tolstoy. But why is that the case? It all boils down to the law of ever-increasing entropy. This is the second law of thermodynamics. It states that the entropy, or the amount of disorder, in a closed system, increases over time. The harmony is one state, while the chaos comes in many…
I had a crazy idea in the morning two months ago. I was drinking a lot the night before, and that usually causes waking up earlier and with some unusual ideas. I’ve decided to start an online writing group. How it all got started This idea didn’t come out of the blue. It was brewing for months. I was very pumped up about writing, so I wanted to find people that share my passion for it. That would…
I’ve stopped writing regularly. I’ve published a couple of articles about personal knowledge management and stopped. I’ve broken the habit. I’m trying to get back to it now, but at the time I felt that there is nothing else to say about the topic. The inner critic My readers aren’t interested in anything outside of my usual topics: product attempts, freelancing, or personal knowledge management.…
I’ve recently quit the US company that I’ve co-founded. That makes it three — my third failed startup attempt. I’ve been working on it for 18 months, so this is my longest-lasting startup attempt so far. Here are the lessons I’ve learned. Not being patient with incorporation My co-founder and I decided to incorporate pretty early. It made sense at the time because it formalized our relationship.…
Robert Heinlein, claims that “specialization is for insects” in his science fiction book “Time Enough for Love”: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch…
Journaling is one of my favorite habits, and I love it. I do it almost every day. If you’re not sure about the value it provides and are thinking about quitting it, this article is for you. I’ve started journaling two years ago, and I’ve been doing it on and off for a while. I’ve since become more regular with it. At first, I didn’t understand it. It was nice to remember what happened during the…
This website is powered by Jekyll and hosted on Github Pages. I’ve been using this setup since 2011 and I’m really happy with it, and there are multiple reasons for that. 1. It’s completely free Hosting this website doesn’t cost me anything. The only expense I have is the domain registration, which is $35 a year, but I can live with that. 2. No server I don’t have to worry about managing a server.…
The 1% rule says that within an Internet community, such as a wiki, 90% of participants only consume content, 9% edit or modify content and only 1% of participants create content. This is applicable, as a rule of thumb, to publishing essays on the Internet; most of the participants only read them, while only a small minority writes them. However, there are certain benefits to being in that…
Update: For some reason this post ended on the 1st place of the front page of Hacker News . Since the start of the year, I’ve been making mistakes with with my free time. I’ve been spending some of my leisure time on wrong activities. Wishing to improve in the open-source department, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to become more active with Rails contributions. I would learn about Rails…