Chris Krycho - Bloghttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019-11-17T15:30:00-05:00Sympolymathesy, or: v5.chriskrycho.com2019-11-17T15:30:00-05:002019-11-17T15:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-11-17:/2019/sympolymathesy-or-v5chriskrychocom.htmlI’ve just officially launched v5.chriskrycho.com, “Sympolymathesy”. As such, this is the final post on this site!
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> literally every single subscriber of this blog!</i></p>
<p>I’ve just officially launched v5.chriskrycho.com, “Sympolymathesy”. As such, this is the final post on this site! For all the details, check out <a href="https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/relaunch!/">the relaunch post</a>!</p>
A Silly Spreadsheet Mistake2019-11-12T20:30:00-05:002019-11-12T20:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-11-12:/2019/a-silly-spreadsheet-mistake.htmlI am a huge nerd who is tracking his November writing project in a spreadsheet… and I apparently don’t know how to do math anymore.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people who find nerdy mistakes amusing—especially my wife, who rolls her eyes at all my shenanigans of this variety.</i></p>
<hr />
<p>Offered for your amusement, reader:</p>
<p>As I’ve been working on my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/at-least-15000-words.html">November writing goal</a>, I set up a spreadsheet to track it—being a good nerd and all.</p>
<p>I was confused because while I had estimated that 500 words/day would see me hit 15,000 words, and I had been averaging a bit north of 800 words per day, my spreadsheet kept showing the expected final count going <em>down</em>… from ~17,000 a few days ago when I looked it up for <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho/archive/edges-across-the-sundering-seas-28/">the latest issue of my newsletter</a>, to ~16,000 when I looked at it after today’s time working on an essay.</p>
<p>I stared at the math in the spreadsheet for a minute tonight, before it finally hit me: I had gotten fancy with the calculation, pulling in the number of days remaining and multiplying that times the average so far… but not including what I’d already written. It turns out that the only way I could hit my goal following <em>this</em> math would be exponentially increasing my output until the on final day I was <em>averaging</em> 15,000 words per day. (15,000 words/day × 1 day = 15,000 words.)</p>
<p>The <em>correct</em> math is, uhh, “Multiply the average per day by 30. Done.”</p>
<p>The postscript, of course, is more nerdery: I redefined my expected output to use that simple math… but then also added a column so I could see what my expected total would be if I took the words I’ve written up through today and then only wrote 500 words each day remaining: the <em>minimum</em> I can expect to hit if I stay on track. You can’t stop the nerdery.</p>
Four Miscellanies2019-11-11T20:55:00-05:002019-11-11T20:55:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-11-11:/2019/four-miscellanies.htmlA bit of evening writing, of the scattershot sort: poetry, meta-writing, an answer to an email, a few thoughts on learning.
<section id="i.-another-thing-word-count-goals-are-bad-at" class="level2">
<h2>I. Another thing word count goals are bad at</h2>
<div class="line-block">Poetry!<br />
In some (important) sense<br />
the core of the art is<br />
brevity<br />
so word count goals<br />
best come inverted<br />
if they come at all</div>
</section>
<section id="ii.-an-answer-to-craig-mods-question" class="level2">
<h2>II. An answer to Craig Mod’s question</h2>
<p>I’ve been reading Craig Mod’s fabulous <a href="https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/">Ridgeline</a> newsletter all year. It’s a letter about walking—kind of. That’s the jumping off-point, anyway. Mod asked a question, back at the beginning of the newsletter, and I kept thinking about answering it but never getting around to it, until in today’s issue he poked and prodded: “Just reply to this email with a sentence or two. Brevity is godliness. Don’t overthink!” So, I did:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wasn’t always a walker (though I grew up in a family that loved hiking and even backpacking). I got to running first, in fact. But I picked up the habit during my years in seminary: looooong days of reading and writing for school and programming for work, needing to somehow keep my brain moving—and finding that getting my body moving did the trick better than anything else. 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of walk. Repeat. Circumlocute the little mall where the coffee shop is a few dozen times. Walk a few miles in a day. Body loose, mind still working, even 12 hours along. And it stuck—so you’ll still find me, even on a cold Colorado winter morning, bundling up and stepping out of the house and walking halfway down our street and back.</p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="iii.-keeping-learning" class="level2">
<h2>III. Keeping learning</h2>
<p>My friend <a href="https://benmakuh.com">Ben</a>—look at that lovely new website! He just relaunched it—sent me <a href="https://www.wix.engineering/post/breaking-chains-with-pipelines-in-modern-javascript">an interesting article</a> tonight, and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, where by “broke the camel’s back” I actually mean something much less… destructive? Something like “the pebble that started the avalanche,” but that too is destructive. Same goes for “tipped me over the edge.” (I didn’t mean for this paragraph to be a reflection on these destructive metaphors, but here we are.) The point is: the article got me digging into something I’ve been thinking about for a while,<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> and now I want to dive so <em>very</em> deep into that subject. I spent the better part of an hour tonight wrapping my head around it a bit more, starting to get the <em>feel</em> of it by way of a bunch of examples.</p>
<p>I <em>love</em> that feeling. My brain stretched a bit in a way that I love: like a set of muscles feeling a hint of pain, but a pain that means <em>progress</em>. We were explaining this to our 7-year-old daughter recently, as she was learning something. “That feeling—that almost a pain, a special and strange kind of tiredness in your head—it means you’re learning!” We celebrated it with her, let her know that it is good and that we still feel it too: we hope she comes to love it the way we do. I hadn’t felt it quite like I did tonight in a while. It was good to dig in a bit, and it makes me want to do so all the more.</p>
</section>
<section id="iv.-which-words-should-i-count" class="level2">
<h2>IV. Which words should I count?</h2>
<p>The point is to be writing. But which words count? The issue I wrote up on the TypeScript repository this evening? The answer I offered to a question on a forum about a software library? The notes scribbled in a notebook this morning, gestures toward the essays I would like to finish this year? The couple paragraphs of documentation I wrote for an open source project? The contents of this post? Would the words I sent to Craig Mod count if I dind’t include them in this post? I’m overthinking this. It is my way. It doesn’t really matter, of course. There’s just the silly part of me that wants to <em>know</em> how much I have written when the month comes to a close. And so I have a spreadsheet! It tracks the daily average so far, has a little calculation for the expected number of words at the end of the month given that average. But spreadsheets demand specific numbers, and so I need to count my words, and that in turn makes me want to know: <em>which words?</em></p>
<p>Again: it does not matter. This whole project would work equally well if I opted <em>not</em> to track it this way. Somehow, though, I find it motivating to do so. And so here we are.</p>
<p>(Because I know at least one of you is dying to know, will be driven a little mad if I do not say: the contents of this post, and the documentation I wrote for that open source project—but not the words in the open source issue I opened or the answer I wrote up on a forum. Entirely arbitrary. That’s what seems right for this project, though.)</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/function*">Generators</a> in JavaScript, if you happen to care. The article was ostensibly about the proposed <a href="https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator">pipeline operator</a><a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
The Problem with Word Count Goals2019-11-10T08:10:00-05:002019-11-10T08:10:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-11-10:/2019/the-problem-with-word-count-goals.htmlI started the day by cutting 40 words from an article. How does that work with a word count goal?!?
<p>I’m a little over a week into my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/at-least-15000-words.html">November writing project</a>, and I’m <em>very</em> much enjoying it. However, I ran into a fairly obvious problem today: word counts goals don’t handle <em>editing</em> well. This morning I picked up a piece I started a few months ago, which I’d like to finish and publish by the end of the month. After ten minutes of working on it, I had written some new words… but there were 40 fewer words than when I started.</p>
<p>This is to be expected. Good writing requires editing. This shows the downside of word count goals quite clearly, though: progress on good writing <em>often</em> entails the word count going <em>down</em>.</p>
<p>In the case of this little project, I’m fine with it. The point is to get all these muscles moving again. Most days this month, I <em>am</em> working on new materials. Hitting my goal won’t be hard even with editing involved. Still: a reminder that <i>time spent writing each day</i> might end up being a better metric in the long run for these kinds of goals than <i>word count</i>.</p>
Happy Birthday, inessential!2019-11-07T22:20:00-05:002019-11-07T22:20:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-11-07:/2019/happy-birthday-inessential.htmlBrent Simmons’ blog’s 20-year anniversary got me thinking about how long I have been running this blog myself. 14 years!
<p>Brent Simmons’ blog <a href="https://inessential.com">inessential</a> has, as of today, <a href="https://inessential.com/2019/11/07/happy_20th_to_this_blog_">been online for twenty years</a>. That seems an astounding feat to me… and then I remember: I have been blogging for 14 years myself, and could not possibly have been blogging when Simmons started. I started a <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanga">Xanga</a> sometime in mid-fall 2005, my freshman year of college. In July 2006, I set up <a href="https://v1.chriskrycho.com/2006/07/parallel.html">the Blogger site</a> that first mirrored that Xanga and then quickly replaced it. That site ran from then until 2010. In 2011, I worked primarily on <em>other</em> projects—mostly getting myself up to speed on web development.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> In 2012, I relaunched my site as a <a href="https://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com">WordPress MultiUser site</a>, which I maintained through 2013, until the frustrations of WordPress drove me to rebuild the site with a static site generator—the same one I am using for this very post.</p>
<p>This site, in other words, has gone through a number of revisions over the last decade and a half. It has, however, remained a fairly constant presence in my life for the duration—and to great profit, as I suggested <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/tending-my-word-garden.html">yesterday</a>.</p>
<p>I have been blogging longer than I have known all but a handful of people outside my family—longer even than I have known my wife. Lord willing, I will hit that same 20-year mark for the blog (though I won’t be able to mark the day, as Simmons did today, unless I go digging through the Xanga archive I have lying around somewhere). In truth, I think it far likelier that I will hit that 20-year anniversary of active blogging than that I will succeed in nearly any other goal I set out for myself—not for lack of confidence in my ability to accomplish other goals, but entirely because I have discovered that I essentially <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/cant-stop-wont-stop.html">cannot stop blogging</a> even if I try to make myself.</p>
<p>People often speak of blogs as a career-building tool, at least in the tech industry. While my own blog has served that way, and I am grateful that it has, I did not set out to blog for that reason. My discovery of the medium far predated any such consideration, for one thing. For another, my use of the medium has always been far too varied for it to serve as an effective advertisement. Yes, there are technical materials here, but also a non-trivial amount of mediocre poetry and an awful lot of theology (much of it <em>quite</em> academic in nature). This has not been an effective way to build a personal brand. It has, however, become a rather deeply-integrated part of my identity.</p>
<p>I consider, from time to time, taking my reflections private—or at least, primarily so. I end up finding, most of the time, that the notes I take could just as well be public blog posts, though. So: why <em>not</em> share them? There are many reasons not to share them, of course. The world likely does not need the noise of yet another opinion on many of the topics I touch. At the same time, thinking out loud in public allows others to respond to your thoughts, to critique them and sharpen them. This is good and valuable. Still: I <em>do</em> sometimes now choose to put a note in Bear instead of writing it as a blog post. This <em>also</em> has upsides, in that it allows me to develop my thoughts by way of interactions with others <em>without</em> the specific kinds nof social costs that can come in the form of judgment of my ideas! I am free to opine, consider, and revise <em>without</em> a great deal of direct external input.</p>
<p>Here’s to Brent Simmons’ work on inessential, and to another 20 years for him and 14 for me—at least!</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I <em>thought</em> I was going to spend the year working on a novel; that… didn’t pan out. I’d still like to revisit that novel idea, though, possibly even for a NaNoWriMo some year in the future!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Tending My Word-Garden2019-11-06T21:55:00-05:002019-11-06T21:55:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-11-06:/2019/tending-my-word-garden.htmlThe commitment to actually sit down and write may be hard to follow through on—but it is worth it.
<p>There is something about the commitment to write that I always find not only tiring—as it is, at times!—but also liberating. Much of my best thinking has been done through the work of putting pen to paper or keys to keyboard, for well over a decade now. I do not recall when I first discovered the power of the act of writing itself for focusing the mind and sharpening thought, but certainly by the end of high school and early college I was figuring it out. Somewhere between the point my freshman year when I started a long-since defunct Xanga site and the time I wrote a paper on art in the Great Depression late that year or early the next, the switch had flipped and I had come to understand what so many authors before me have: that writing can be a wonderful discipline for clarifying one’s own thoughts and understanding the world more clearly.</p>
<p>Blogging is the easiest expression of that reality for me, but that does not necessarily make it the best. In the post in which I committed to this November-long effort to write every day, I noted that part of what I want to be about is longer-essay-writing. This is because the work of building out an essay—not unlike the work of constructing a <em>good</em> paper for an advanced degree—requires the development of an argument. In a blog post, I can easily get away with a gesture (much as I can do verbally on an episode of Winning Slowly). In something that grows out to 4,000–5,000 words, though, a gesture will not do. An outline is a necessity.</p>
<p>This is not to say that a blog is a bad thing—not at all. As I have <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.html">noted before</a>, this site is a very useful kind of journal of my thoughts, a <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/what-is-a-zettelkasten.html">Zettelkasten</a> that just happens to be public. To riff on an idea from Alan Jacobs, a blog can be a kind of <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/the-blog-garden/">garden</a>—perhaps one that is well-tended, or perhaps one that is gone a bit wild and overgrown, but either way a place where the structure is organic and emergent as much as it is planned. Even the most carefully-kept gardens have surprises in them, courtesy of the infinite variety that is <em>life</em>. And the beauty and delight of a well-tended garden is distinct from the goodness of a well-built piece of architecture. So too the beauty and the goodness of a blog is organic and emergent, whereas an essay or a paper (much less a book) is structured and rigorous. Both are good. But one of them requires more, and yields as much or more, than the other—for the thinker producing it at least, and for others as well if the thing is blessed with an audience.</p>
<p>And so while I am publishing this tonight—largely as a way of just keeping some forward momentum on this project, keeping my mental muscles moving, keeping myself from giving up simply because the task is not <em>trivial</em> and I am tired late in the evening—I am considering, too: what <em>should</em> I write? What subject would I benefit from tackling with a long essay?</p>
<p>There items on my docket which I could finish, and perhaps I will. There are also places where there seem to be gaps, gaps to which I might be able to speak—but even to think so then seems so audacious (especially given my lack of rigorous reading or training in those areas!) that I struggle to pick up the task. Writing well, perhaps especially writing to persuade, is <em>hard</em>. Doing so at length the more so.</p>
<p>That does not make it <em>less</em> worth doing. Rather the opposite! But it does mean that on an evening like this one, I am hard pressed to make progress on any such task. I can tend this little garden, though, and keep these muscles moving. And so I do.</p>
At Least 15,000 Words2019-11-02T14:00:00-04:002019-11-02T14:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-11-02:/2019/at-least-15000-words.htmlI cannot commit to NaNoWriMo… but I can commit to a writing goal for the month of November: writing every day, averaging 500 words a day.
<p>I am going to try something a little bit audacious in the month of November: to write every day, averaging (at least) 500 words each day.</p>
<p>I have wanted for years to do <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Novel_Writing_Month" title="national novel writing month">NaNoWriMo</a>, but at this point I am unwilling to commit to the time to write 1,600 words of a novel per day—not least because of the up-front planning it would take me not to run out of story-telling steam.</p>
<p>I have <em>also</em> wanted to get my writing muscles back in gear for quite some time. While I have been blogging off and on over the past few years, my rate is much lower than it was even during certain parts of seminary. Perhaps most importantly, my longer-form work has simply come to a stop. I have started and then failed to finish a <em>lot</em> of essays over the past few years. I’d like to see that change.</p>
<p>So, for November, in the <em>spirit</em> of NaNoWriMo, I’m going to try to write every day. I’m aiming for an <em>average</em> of 500 words per day: a count that should be achievable, even if I don’t get there on every single day. (You’ll note that I missed yesterday… because I did not decide to take on this goal until today. However, I’ve already more than hit my target word count for the month <em>so far</em>, because <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho/archive/flux-across-the-sundering-seas-27/">today’s issue</a> of <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho">my newsletter</a> and this post together come out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 words.)</p>
<p>Note that this is not a commitment to <em>publish</em> those 500 words per days on this site. It is a commitment to <em>write</em>. Some of those words I may throw away entirely; some I may publish here; some will certainly be newsletter issues (both for <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho">Across the Sundering Seas</a>); some may be <a href="https://github.com/typed-ember/ember-cli-typescript/projects/1">open-source software documentation</a>; some may be actually making progress on some (possibly actually important!) essays that I want to publish <em>elsewhere</em>. But if I actually manage this, I’ll come out of the month with at least 15,000 words written. That’s not a novel worth, nor even a novella. But it <em>does</em> represent a real bump in output, and it should get my writing muscles moving again—especially if I can push some of that into essays and not just off-the-cuff materials like this blog post.</p>
<p>So this is me, rolling up my sleeves and getting to work. If you have been wanting to do more writing, give it a go with me! Write a little, every day. Maybe it’s just 100 words—that’s fine: the point is to keep moving. If you do, I’d love to know about it; shoot me an email!</p>
No More Alarms2019-09-10T07:15:00-04:002019-09-10T07:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-09-10:/2019/no-more-alarms.htmlI may never regularly set an alarm again. Instead, I’m leaning into my body’s natural rhythms.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> pretty much everybody. Everybody sleeps.</i></p>
<p>I may never regularly set an alarm again.</p>
<p>Last year, in the midst of getting increasingly <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout">burned out</a>, I hit a point where I <em>couldn’t</em> set an alarm. I found myself needing 8½–9½ hours of sleep every night, and even in that range, setting an alarm often left me feeling exhausted for the rest of the day. As I have slowly but steadily <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/stewarding-my-reserves.html">recovered</a>, I started setting an alarm again at times. But, at least for now, I’m done with that.</p>
<aside>
What I’m about to say may or may not hold for you. It’s not advice. Take it for what it’s worth, and with a big grain of salt.
</aside>
<p>First, over the past few weeks, I found myself fighting the alarm. No matter when I set it, inevitably I’d end up awakened out of a deep sleep. I would spend the first chunk of my day struggling to be really alert and awake. This is, in a word, frustrating.</p>
<p>Second, I have long observed that even when I don’t set an alarm, I usually only sleep about 7–7½ hours. If I sleep longer, it’s usually because I <em>need</em> more sleep—whether because I’m recovering from a <a href="https://www.strava.com/activities/2687727432/overview">particularly long, hard run</a>, or because I’m fighting a cold, or because I’ve been traveling, or simply because other things in life can leave me tired!</p>
<p>The two things came together for me last week, in the (obvious?) realization that I don’t <em>have</em> to set an alarm, and in fact I probably <em>shouldn’t</em>. My body has healthy rhythms. I can and generally should trust those rhythms. I can make adjustments over time by going to bed earlier or later, and by changing what and when I eat and drink, and how and when I exercise. But, given my body’s existing healthy rhythms, if I naturally end up sleeping 8¼ hours instead of 7½… that probably means I needed it!</p>
<p>I will still use an alarm judiciously: to make sure I get up on time when traveling, for example. (Even there, I tend to wake up on my own before the alarm goes off. Still, better to be safe than sorry: airline tickets are expensive!) What I am not going to do for the foreseeable future is use an alarm regularly.</p>
<p>A lot of the productivity advice out there insists that you <em>must</em> set an alarm if you want to get things done in life. I can attest that it <em>can</em> be helpful, and I leaned hard on setting an alarm and getting up when it went off throughout my time in seminary. But I also suspect that pushing myself<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> that way for so many years was a significant contributor to my burning out.</p>
<p>At this point, I will probably get a <em>little</em> bit less done on a day-to-day basis than I did at times in the past. Certainly I am not able to <em>commit</em> to <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/the-value-of-a-good-habit.html">writing every morning</a> as I did for a while. That tradeoff is fine with me, though. My health matters. If I want to continue working effectively and well at <em>all</em> the areas of my life throughout my long life, I need to steward my strength.</p>
<p>Some people struggle with laziness. This isn’t advice for them; the right medicine there is the book of Proverbs’ admonitions against lying abed all day! For those of us who are inclined to push too hard, though, turning off the alarm may be an important part of remembering our finitude. Learning to live with our limitations teaches us us trust God with the things we cannot do and helps us be more faithful and effective in the things we <em>should</em> be doing.</p>
<p>So, while I may revisit this question at some point… no more alarms for me.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I initially wrote “my body” but changed it because my <em>body</em> and my <em>self</em> are one and the same, even if my body is not the <em>whole</em> of my self.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Stealing a Page From Bullet Journals2019-08-29T07:40:00-04:002019-08-29T07:40:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-08-29:/2019/stealing-a-page-from-bullet-journals.htmlI’m experimenting with using the bullet journal notation style as a complement to my existing way of tracking tasks, making notes, and so on.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people already persuaded of the value—at least to some extent—of “getting things done” strategies.</i></p>
<p>I have tried <a href="https://www.tinyrayofsunshine.com/blog/bullet-journal-guide">bullet journaling</a> as a full-on way of tracking and planning my work in the past. It never stuck. The <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/just-write-down-what-you-do.html">system</a> I’ve landed on instead—making heavy use of <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a> and <a href="https://tadamapp.com">a pomodoro timer</a>—has been <em>fantastic</em>. However… I realized yesterday that the way I take notes during the workday in a notebook already has a lot in common with bullet journaling. So I’m trying something new, and we’ll see how it goes.</p>
<p>For my daily task logging, I’m still going to use Bear in exactly the way I have been already. However, I’m writing down notes in my notebook in the bullet journal style:</p>
<ul>
<li>dots for to-dos</li>
<li>putting an ‘x’ through the dots when I’ve done them</li>
<li>turning them into an arrow if I move them into Bear to tackle later (the next day, the next week, the next month, etc.)</li>
<li>dashes for information I learned</li>
</ul>
<p>I don’t need to bother with all the things that never actually worked for me in bullet journaling, like keeping an index, various kind of date logs, collections, etc.: my logging and note-taking system in Bear already handles all of that in a way that I like much better. But stealing the lightweight notation and the idea of pulling incompleted tasks into a place where I <em>can</em> use them later? That’s worth stealing, I think. We’ll see how it goes.</p>
Cronos Follow-Up2019-08-26T08:50:00-04:002019-08-26T08:50:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-08-26:/2019/cronos-follow-up.htmlYesterday, I wrote a post extolling the quirky virtues of Cronos. Today, I report that Adobe has made it all but impossible to use outside a subscription.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> design types and typography nerds… and digital economics and licensing geeks.</i></p>
<p>Yesterday, I wrote a <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/cronos.html">post</a> extolling the virtues of the lovely (and quirky!) typeface <a href="https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/cronos/">Cronos</a>. Today, I’m back to report on at least <em>one</em> of the reasons why it’s not in wider use. In short: Adobe has made it available for web font usage <em>only</em> if you’re on a subscription plan through Typekit or one of their other partners (e.g. Fonts.com).</p>
<p>For context, most web fonts are licensed on a per-pageview basis, where once you exceed the number of allotted views using that web font, you need to pay again to extend or increase the license. The aim—whether it works well or not, I can’t say—is to make it so that high-volume sites pay more to the type foundry (and hopefully designer). The idea makes sense: if your brand relies heavily on someone’s design work, and specifically you’re raking in the profits because of your website’s use of that design work, one way to monetize that effectively is to align cost and usage.</p>
<p>Many foundries allow you to get this two ways: either via a subscription, or via a one-time purchase, which you only need to revisit if you exceed the number of page views you paid for. This is how the fantastic type faces at <a href="https://klim.co.nz">Klim Type Foundry</a> work, for example—and it’s one of the reasons I went with <a href="https://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/tiempos-headline/">Tiempos</a> for the <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> site redesign last year. Unfortunately, Adobe is <em>not</em> one of those foundries.</p>
<p>As I’m in the process of reworking this site—you can see the work-in-progress version <a href="https://v5.chriskrycho.com">here</a>; I will probably launch it in a couple weeks—I wanted to move off my subscription to Fonts.com, and simply pay for these fonts on a one-time basis. I don’t use anything near the actual page views a normal license would account for, so that would be far, far more cost effective for me than paying $300 every three years. But… I can’t, if I want to keep using Cronos. Worse: that Fonts.com license is the lowest rate I can pay. If I try to get it directly through Adobe, I have to pay for <a href="https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html">a Creative Cloud subscription</a>—which <em>starts</em> at $20/month for a plan that includes their fonts (vs. the ~$8.33/month that Fonts.com works out to).</p>
<p>These plans no doubt make sense for Adobe, and they’re no doubt economical if you’re a designer who is providing typography work (including web fonts) for a large number of clients. But I’m not. I’m just building my own website, and I only need a couple typefaces for it. The math isn’t there for me.</p>
<p>And the net of that is that I might drop Cronos from <a href="https://v5.chriskrycho.com">v5.chriskrycho.com</a> and replace it with something that I can justify price-wise. The prospect makes me genuinely sad—because I meant every word of yesterday’s paean to the typeface.</p>
<p>This is one of those places where the absolute best commercial outcome for an organization is at odds with the best overall outcome: because the point of a typeface is to be <em>used</em>. And Adobe’s current licensing means Cronos (and many other of its fonts) will get used a lot less than they otherwise might. Alas.</p>
Cronos2019-08-25T12:10:00-04:002019-08-25T12:10:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-08-25:/2019/cronos.htmlI’ve been using Cronos for half a decade now—and as far as I can tell, I’m one of the only people out there using it! This lovely typeface deserves a wider showing!
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> design types and typography nerds.</i></p>
<p>I’m not sure when I first stumbled on <a href="https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/cronos/">Cronos</a>, but it was a <em>long</em> time ago at this point. I launched a version of this website using Cronos for titles back in 2012. I’ve experimented with a number of typefaces for the body text since then—including <a href="https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/minion/">Minion</a>, <a href="https://software.sil.org/gentium/">Gentium</a>, and finally <a href="https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/sabon/">Sabon</a>—but Cronos has never changed. Every time I’ve thought about moving away from it, I’ve been dissatisfied with everything else I’ve looked at using in its place. It makes for a <em>solid</em> choice for body text, but is a <em>remarkable</em> titling face.</p>
<p>And yet no one seems to know about it. I have never seen it on another website, or in print. (The three body typefaces I’ve used I have seen <em>plenty</em> of other places—online, in apps, and in print.) On the one hand, that’s kind of delightful: it gives my site a fairly distinctive identity. On the other hand, it’s a shame, because it’s such a lovely sans! It deserves a wider audience! I’ll gladly give up some of my site’s uniqueness to see this beautiful thing get more use.</p>
<p>It has <em>just</em> enough character to stand out from the wash of geometric and humanist sans that are in vogue these days, but it doesn’t call attention to itself or cross over into being <em>weird</em>. (“Weird” isn’t bad, to be clear: it’s often very good! But Cronos isn’t weird.) It’s interesting, but only if you stop to look at it closely. It almost wants to be a serif: there are little curls and hooks—as on the <em>r</em> or <em>m</em> or <em>n</em> ascenders, or at the caps of the <em>A</em> and <em>N</em> and <em>M</em>. The <em>t</em> has a little jag between its ascender and its crossbar. The descender of the <em>y</em> is curved, just a little. End caps all swoop away, refusing to be totally straight. And yet when you take it all in on the page, none of those details are so bold that they actively draw your eye. They make it interesting, but never distract. It’s quirky and balanced and pairs perfectly with just about any serif you can throw at it (and many a sans, too). Go wild and pair with a monospace if you want! It somehow just <em>works</em>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/cronos/">Go use it</a>, people!</p>
A Healthier Calendar2019-07-31T18:30:00-04:002019-07-31T18:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-07-31:/2019/a-healthier-calendar.htmlDon’t let other people keep you from doing deep work. Use your calendar’s tools to carve out time for things that are genuinely important—not just what others think is urgent.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people already persuaded of the value—at least to some extent—of “getting things done” strategies.</i></p>
<p>One of the things I’ve found over the last couple months is that my calendar is increasingly <em>full</em>—full of meetings with this person or that team. This is not unexpected in an organization as large as LinkedIn, and I had a feeling I’d probably run into this as I transitioned from <i>new guy on the block</i> to <i>someone whose expertise people want</i>. That it’s happening means I’m doing my job: I am in a <em>leadership</em> role, and my team’s customers are other developers! It’s important for me to be a resource to other people.</p>
<p>However, I am not a manager, and have no desire to be a manager. That means that it’s also important that I not <em>only</em> be a resource to other people. I also need to continue doing technical work myself, and indeed <em>growing</em> technically myself. It’s impossible to do that when each day is punctuated by anywhere between 2 and 8 meetings, often in no particular arrangement. Building software <em>well</em>, like most other non-managerial work, requires time to think and sustained attention to a specific problem.</p>
<aside>
<p>To be clear, some parts of managerial work require that as well, but much of managerial work is <em>coordinative</em>: that is, it is much more focused on connecting the right people and getting them the right information. That’s necessarily heavy on talking with people and lighter on sitting down and thinking uninterrupted for hours on end. And it’s worth noting: that work is <em>incredibly important</em>, especially in larger companies and organizations. Engineers (like me!) who are interested in the technical problems can often be blind to the importance of non-technical work. In reality, good management <em>enables</em> good engineering work, and good engineering work is responsive to the inputs communicated by good management! The two are complementary.</p>
</aside>
<p>This week was the tipping point for me. I’ve had multiple meetings every single day, and <em>no</em> sustained blocks for working except in the early morning before any colleagues were working.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> My progress on a feature I’m implementing has been predictably slow as a result. While many of the meetings I have had were somewhat or even <em>very</em> valuable, many others were in the dread urgent-but-not-important bucket. Even for relatively straightforward programming tasks, half-hour blocks with meetings in between just won’t do it.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
<p>My solution is one I’ve employed before when similarly starting to get over-busy: <em>book myself</em>.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> People check my calendar to see when I’m available for meetings, so I have simply blocked out large stretches of my time under the heading Getting Things Done. I left open a few hours each day for people to book meetings with me—remember: it’s part of my job to help others, too!—and of course I have recurring team and project meetings. But outside of those, I now have time allocated to do the hard technical work I was hired to do.</p>
<p>When someone wants to book a meeting with me, there are times available to them. Importantly, they’re in times of day when I know from experience that I <em>won’t</em> be effective on hard technical work anyway. And if someone ever complains that I’m not <em>really</em> busy in those slots I have booked, I’ll remind them that in fact I <em>am</em> busy: busy doing the <em>other</em> parts of the job for which I was hired!</p>
<p>I encourage you to do the same. Use your calendar’s tools to carve out time for things that are genuinely important—not just what others think is urgent. Make space for deep work.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I tend to start my day early and then slot my workout into the middle of the day; I’m not working extra-long days or any such nonsense.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>You might be curious how that maps to <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/pomodoro/">my habit of doing pomodoro sessions</a>. The difference is that 25 minutes of hard thinking with 5 minutes of mental rest and then diving back in for another session <em>enables</em> deep thought for sustained periods. They allow me to keep pushing on a problem without hitting a mental wall. From experience, I can say that a 5-minute break—especially if I’m walking!—does not cause me to lose context, but in fact simply re-energizes me and often provides new insights into the problem. By contrast, 30-minute blocks interrupted by 30 minutes or more of <em>meetings</em> mean I lose all my working memory and therefore context. 5 minutes is very different from 30, and a meeting is not a walk! What’s more: meetings are <em>very</em> rarely generative of insights into problems I’m working on (unless they’re <em>about</em> that problem).<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>In a healthier culture, like the one the folks at Basecamp <a href="https://m.signalvnoise.com/wait-other-people-can-take-your-time/">have built</a>, this might not be quite as necessary. Certainly I think our culture could improve in the direction of defaulting to how Basecamp does things calendar-wise. But also: Basecamp has 50 employees; there are more engineers than that on the app my team supports! <em>Some</em> of these dynamics are simply a matter of scale. If you want to argue that no company should ever be the size of LinkedIn, of course, that’s a possible solution. As much as I share a hostility to scale-for-scale’s sake, though, I also think there can be something <em>good</em> in large groups of people collaborating to do something far bigger than a small group can accomplish. There are goods in <em>both</em> of these approaches. There are also negatives. The key, in this broken world, is learning to encourage the goods and minimize the negatives.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Update: Writing Down What I Do2019-07-29T19:25:00-04:002019-07-29T19:25:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-07-29:/2019/update-writing-down-what-i-do.htmlI’m still writing down the things I do every day, but I’ve made a small tweak—making better use of Bear’s “Archive” functionality.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people already persuaded of the value—at least to some extent—of “getting things done” strategies and having an idea of what you accomplished over the course of the year.</i></p>
<p>A few months ago, I described <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/just-write-down-what-you-do.html">my current workflow</a> for tracking what I do every day, using <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a>. I’m still doing that, but I’ve made one small tweak that makes for a <em>much</em> nicer experience, and I figured I’d write that up for anyone else who’s thinking about using Bear in a similar way.</p>
<p>The main pain point I’d had using Bear as a daily logging app is that I <em>also</em> use it for <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten/">my general note-taking</a>, and I increasingly found that my pomodoro logs ended up mostly being <em>clutter</em> in my overall list of notes. I also realized that I don’t look at, say, my daily logs past the end of a week, weekly logs past the end of the month, and so on. However, I <em>do</em> like keeping them around through at least the end of my performance review cycle in case I want to drill down into more details about a particular task or accomplishment. I wasn’t really sure how to enjoy both long-term access and shoretr-term eliminating of clutter.</p>
<p>Then I noticed that Bear has an Archive function:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://cdn.chriskrycho.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/archive-bear.png" alt="Archiving in Bear" /><figcaption>Archiving in Bear</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Archiving removes your notes from your normal list view and makes them non-editable. However, they remain searchable in your library and wiki-style navigation links, like <code>[[2019.07.21]]</code>, still work. This is <em>exactly</em> what I wanted.</p>
<p>Once I discovered this, I made one very small tweak to my previous flow: whenever I do the work of summarizing a given time-span, I simply archive all the notes at the level below that. So, for example, after copying the daily summaries into a week and summarizing that week, I simply archive all the day entries. Any given set of logs only ever has a handful of notes in it—at most 12, in the case of my year-level log. This made the already-great experience of using Bear for this kind of logging that much better. Again: I commend it to you!</p>
Starting2019-07-16T21:00:00-04:002019-07-16T21:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-07-16:/2019/starting.htmlI am trying to start actually building <b><i>re</i>write</b>… and I actually have no idea how to do this!
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> anyone who has ever struggled to start something new and unknown and therefore difficult and intimidating.</i></p>
<p>I am sitting here on a weekday evening, trying to figure out exactly how to <em>start</em> building <a href="https://rewrite.software"><b><i>re</i>write</b></a>. There is an enormous amount to be done, and I genuinely have no idea how to do… almost any of it. I asked myself: “Where would I start if this were a web app?”—because web apps are my bread and butter, the place I have spent the majority of my time over the last half decade.</p>
<p>But the answer is that I <em>still</em> don’t know. I have only started two completely “greenfield” projects in my entire career. In every other case someone else had done <em>this</em> part, and in most cases I was working with a product manager or someone like that, who was divvying up the tasks. And those two greenfield projects were (a) extremely well-scoped and (b) of a very different sort than this one is. The last time I started a truly greenfield app, it was for a web app… but a web app <em>extremely</em> heavy on words: exactly my home terrain, as it were, on the web. Not that different from a blog.</p>
<p>This is not like that. The problems to solve—managing references, dealing with PDFs, writing large documents, building up projects, you name it: they are all <em>completely</em> new to me. And it’s just me: no product owner handing me feature specs.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I’m out of my comfort zone even in terms of the technologies I’m using: no deep comfort with the web stack here to fall back on.</p>
<p>Can I do this? Yes. I can. I’ll figure it out. I have figured out hard things before. But it doesn’t change the fact that <em>starting is hard</em>, and I have no idea how to begin.</p>
<p>I’m going to start anyway. Most of what I build these next few weeks will almost certainly get thrown away. That’s okay. I’ll have started. That’s enough for now.</p>
<hr />
<p>An aside, a confession: I have made an enormous amount of progress on my website redesign over the last month. Some of that is because it’s just plain fun. Some of it, though, is because it’s easier to keep working in my comfort zone than to buckle down and get started on the hard new thing where I have <em>no</em> comfort at all. Time to get into it.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>however ill defined!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
All Things Open 2019!2019-06-25T20:15:00-04:002019-06-25T20:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-06-25:/2019/all-things-open-2019.htmlI’m giving a talk at this year’s All Things Open, October 13–15 in Raleigh North Carolina, titled “Don’t Go Bankrupt! Managing Technical Costs”.
<p>I’m very excited to announce that <a href="https://allthingsopen.org/speakers/chris-krycho/">I’ve been accepted</a> to give a talk at this year’s <a href="https://allthingsopen.org">All Things Open</a> in Raleigh, North Carolina, October 13–15. Here’s the pitch for the talk, titled “Don’t Go Bankrupt! Managing Technical Costs”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every engineering organization—whether in a startup, a Fortune 500 company, or an open source project—must both <em>sustain</em> (keep the lights on!) and <em>innovate</em> (deliver new functionality!). Simultaneously sustaining and innovating requires carefully managing technical costs: debt, maintenance, and investments.</p>
<p>But managing those technical costs requires <em>understanding</em> them—and most of us don’t. Not everything is “tech debt”! Lumping all our costs into that one moniker misleads us as engineers and fails us in communicating to our users, whether those users are colleagues, customers, or the open source community.</p>
<p>Too often, that confusion ultimately leads us right into technical bankruptcy. But we can do better!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I gave a shorter, less polished version of this as an internal “tech talk” at Olo back in November 2018. My colleagues’ reception was remarkably positive. (If it gets <em>half</em> so enthusiastic a reception at All Things Open, I’ll be <em>thrilled</em>.) Not just engineers, either! Members of Olo’s product, sales, client success, and executive teams all said they found the material helpful and clarifying. If you’re in a technical business, I trust you may find it helpful as well.</p>
<p>If you end up at All Things Open yourself—it looks to be a great conference quite independent of my being there!—please <a href="mailto:hello@chriskrycho.com">send me a note</a>—I’d love to meet up and chat.</p>
From My Sent Folder: On Social Media Tradeoffs2019-06-14T08:30:00-04:002019-06-14T08:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-06-14:/2019/from-my-sent-folder-on-social-media-tradeoffs.htmlIn response to a thoughtful email from a friend: the non-neutrality of our tools, and the ways wisdom plays out in our using them.<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> anyone <em>willing</em> to think hard about social media and its place in our lives.</i></p>
<hr />
<p><i>I got a particularly thoughtful email from a friend about his family’s use of Facebook in response to <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/breaking-up-with-social-media.html">yesterday’s essay</a>. I’ve reproduced most of my response here because I think it’s a helpful extension on that essay.</i></p>
<p>I (a) totally hear where you’re coming from, and deeply sympathize; and (b) deeply disagree about the notion that they’re “just tools – not good or evil in themselves.”</p>
<p>I agree in the strictest sense that the tools are not evil in and of themselves. But I think that particular framing is actually extremely misleading. Tools have <em>shapes</em>, and those shapes form us in ways that may prove out to be particular bad. The usual example is: use a hammer for hours a day every day, and you’ll end up with calluses and quite possibly some hilariously out-of-proportion forearms if you don’t figure out how to be ambidextrous at least for hammering. That tools are not inherently moral does not mean they’re <em>neutral</em>. (I also am not persuaded that tools are themselves always <em>morally</em> neutral, but that’s another discussion and a subtler one.)</p>
<p>In the case of the social media tools, I <em>do</em> think there are differences in both degree (the extent to which they shape us) and kind (the particular shapes they press us into as we use them). Thus my willingness to work for LinkedIn and my <em>un</em>willingness to work for Twitter or Facebook! And with that in mind, I do agree that the tradeoffs around Facebook can look very different than those around Twitter today.</p>
<p>What’s more, I’d go so far as to say that a service much like Facebook but retooled in certain very important ways could be a much-less-alloyed good in the world! (There are no unalloyed goods in our fallen reality, of course.) A service that was less interested in <em>driving user attention</em> and therefore constantly working in ways that actively undermine people’s self-control and ability to disengage could have most (probably all!) the upsides Facebook offers you and your family today, with few of the horrid downsides we’re seeing with it at the macro scale and few (if any) of the downsides I have felt with it personally at the micro scale. It’s those vicious little loops driving me to check obsessively that I want out of—not the ability to have geographically distributed people able to stay in touch and indeed even to connect, of the sort you and I have benefited from so much.</p>
<p>None of that is an argument for everyone to get off of Facebook. I certainly think you and your family have very <em>good</em> reasons to be there. Rather, it’s more that the more of us who make the kinds of moves I’m making, the more it opens back up the <em>possibility</em> that those communities could form in other spaces, and creates the <em>reminder</em> for others that in fact many people are <em>not</em> in those spaces. It’s a very long play, for sure, but, you know: <a href="https://winningslowly.org">winning slowly</a> and all that jazz.</p>
<p>In that regard it’s not so different from my rejection of Amazon: I’m under no misapprehension that I’m going to have any meaningful effect on the company itself, and in fact I have friends who I think are <em>very wise</em> to continue using it because e.g. Prime eliminates needless frictions from their very challenging lives. It’s that my opting out allows me to support <em>other</em>—healthier!—businesses and hopefully keep them going.</p>
<p>All of which is kind of a long way of saying: these are <em>wisdom</em> questions, and I think that wisdom not only allows but indeed <em>dictates</em> different courses for different people.</p>
Breaking Up With Social Media2019-06-13T15:15:00-04:002019-06-13T15:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-06-13:/2019/breaking-up-with-social-media.htmlIn which I commit to a kind of social media monasticism—because enough is enough. (I took a vacation and realized I actively dislike Twitter. So now, just shy of 14 years after joining Facebook, I’m quitting social media.)
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> anyone <em>willing</em> to think hard about social media and its place in our lives.</i></p>
<section id="i.-the-itch" class="level2">
<h2>I. The Itch</h2>
<p>I began writing this post from our vacation bedroom in Jamaica, about five days before I could possibly publish it: before we left, I shut down the machines which can generate new versions of my site. I wished, as I started this post, that I had an equally effective measure for cutting off access to social media on this trip.</p>
<p>I tried, of course. Before we left on June 1, I removed Slack and Discord from my iPad (I had long since taken them off my phone). I likewise removed email from my phone, and I have also mostly been leaving my phone in our room. I kept an email client on my iPad, but I have checked my email only once a day or so—mostly in the interest of clearing my inbox, but also because the newsletters I subscribe to make for very good reading materials.</p>
<p>All of this preparation was good. It worked well. The first few days of our vacation were filled, blissfully, with mental silence.</p>
<p>Then I signed into Twitter on June 3, as news started breaking from Apple’s <a href="https://developer.apple.com/wwdc19/"><abbr title="World Wide Developer Conference">WWDC</abbr></a> event. It was fun seeing people’s reactions, and I learned a fair bit about <a href="https://developer.apple.com/xcode/swiftui/">news which excites me a great deal</a>—people were already digging into the new tools and tweeting about them! But it also flipped back on the part of my brain that has been trained (by 14 years of using first Facebook and then Twitter) to <em>obsessively check social media</em>. Mid-afternoon on June 7, I recognized the difference this was making in my mental life. (Yes, it took me most of a week to see it clearly; social media’s effects are insidious.) I signed back out of Twitter’s web client and committed not to sign back in until after our vacation.</p>
<p>I have felt throughout the ensuing days—especially the first—what I can only describe as a mental <em>itch</em>: and it can be scratched only by signing into Twitter, and skimming down through the things people have said, and clicking the little heart button on some of them, and seeing if anyone has interacted with any of my own posts along the way, and trying to say something clever or interesting to elicit more such responses, and refreshing the feed, and skimming down through the things people have said, and…</p>
<p>I dislike the feeling intensely. The itch itself is a distraction, and scratching the itch would produce only more (and worse) distraction. As Craig Mod <a href="https://craigmod.com/roden/027/">described it</a> recently:<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Something fires off in the back of the skull, and then again. No conscious complicity, all autonomous, micro-stimulations. Triggered by: A scroll, a reload, a pull to refresh, a like, a share, the right headline. I can now pinpoint this sequence of involuntary response to be the tiny <em>physio</em>logical loop my body runs through when using Twitter or Instagram.…</p>
<p>I find the tiny loop problem to be terrifying. Tiny loops tend to be perfectly designed to satisfy the id’s raw impulses. That raw id is great fuel for creativity. The concern I have coming back and feeling the loops again for the first time in a long time is: if you’re not careful, tweets and their ilk can burn all your fuel with nothing to show.…</p>
<p>This pain is a withdrawal symptom. But if you get over that compulsion for info-stimulation, you are presented with an opportunity to replace the tiny loops with much more rewarding activities.</p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="ii.-the-costs" class="level2">
<h2>II. The Costs</h2>
<p>I have long observed that my use of Twitter hijacks my mental habits in many other contexts.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> I find myself responding to a book’s ideas not with consideration but with ideas for clever or snarky tweets. (This happened to me multiple times on this trip, including after I had already drafted and repeatedly revised this post!) It is not only Twitter which can have this effect, of course: I have experienced it with blogging as well. But I find that this particularly twisted, <em>distracted</em> form of thinking increases in direct proportion to the amount I use Twitter, and much less so with other forms of writing.</p>
<p>Twitter misaligns my mind even when I am away from it. It discourages <em>thought</em>. As Mod put it, “if you’re not careful, tweets and their ilk can burn all your fuel with nothing to show.” Exactly that. I spend time on Twitter and come out feeling like I have done <em>something</em> but in reality the cycles spent there are pure waste. No thought. No writing. No learning.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> No time spent with my family or friends. Nothing but more fodder for the <a href="https://stratechery.com/2018/data-factories/">data factory</a> and the advertisement money it generates.</p>
<p>The counter-arguments mount up, of course—as they do whenever we think of eliminating a pleasurable vice:</p>
<ul>
<li>But how would I interact with other people in the Rust and Swift communities around ideas or questions I have?</li>
<li>Wouldn’t it be a waste of slowly-built-up influence in the Rust and Ember and TypeScript communities to be absent from that space?</li>
</ul>
<p>…but it turns out, those are the only questions. Both of them are easily answered, too. The aforementioned communities exist, <em>and exist in much richer ways</em>, in contexts besides Twitter—forums, chat, etc. Those other contexts have their own dysfunctions (chat particularly so), but those I will address in their own ways. I can use what influence I do have in those communities more effectively by writing here, answering questions elsewhere, and building software or writing docs or the like. There is simply no sense in which I <em>must</em> be on Twitter for professional reasons.</p>
<p>Moreover, very little of what happens on Twitter is of any lasting import. There is a great deal of Thought Leading,<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a> but the medium discourages careful, rich, context-sensitive writing: just what is necessary for real work (and not just screaming mobs or fanboying). This is equally as true of software development as of theology. The medium dominates the message. Twitter threads, as I have <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/on-tweeting-instead-of-writing.html">noted before</a> (and see also <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/tweet-less-blog-more.html">here</a> and <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/the-value-of-silence.html">here</a>), are much worse than something like a blog post for their intended purpose. The defining feature of Twitter—the <em>reply</em>—is a bug and not a feature. I <em>love</em> thoughtful replies to my writing… which is <em>precisely why I don’t have comments here but encourage people to email me instead</em>—and Twitter has a far, far worse signal-to-noise ratio than do blog comments. Where’s the upside?</p>
<p>Mod again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think we’ll look back with shock on many “fundamentals” of the internet as it exists today. I’m still amazed that any private organization would allow unfiltered public commenting. I remain totally unconvinced of its benefits. Twitter, in this sense, is just insanity — an endless stream of public comment posturing and signaling and, largely, screaming. Dumb dumb. Basic ’net folly 101.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If I still feel a bit <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2019/06/08/devils-bargain/">the way L. M. Sacasas does</a>,<a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5" role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a> too—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ditching the platform and going indie, as it were, works better when you’ve already got a large audience that is going to follow you where ever you go or an established community (a convivial society, I’d dare say), online and off, with which to sustain your intellectual life. I’m pretty sure I don’t quite have the former, and I’ve struggled to find that latter, making my way as an independent scholar of sorts these last several years.</p>
<p>But again, this is not to say that Alan is wrong, only that my counting the cost is a more conflicted affair.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>—well, so be it. For as he notes himself, the toll <em>will</em> be paid, one way or another:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In any case, I can feel Twitter working on me as I’ve begun to use it more frequently of late and allowed myself to tweet as well as read. I can feel it working on me in much the same way that, in Tolkien’s world, the wearer’s of the Ring can feel it working on them. It leaves one feeling weary, thin, exposed, morally compromised, divided, etc., while deeply distorting one’s view of reality. And, as far as I’m concerned, there are no Tom Bombadil’s, immune to the ring’s power, among us in this case.</p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="iii.-complicity" class="level2">
<h2>III. Complicity</h2>
<p>Counting the cost is complicated in another way for me, too: To what extent can I do this <em>because</em> of my use of Twitter? This site’s audience includes readers who first encountered me and my work <em>there</em>. Even my freedom to leave social media benefits from having used those tools. I cannot escape a degree of complicity in the degradations and distortions that social media have wrought in our culture and our public and our civic life. The best I can say for myself is that I have consciously chosen to eschew click-driven writing for half a decade, whether using Twitter or no. As regards that inescapable complicity, all any of us can do is acknowledge our faults—or, as <a href="https://biblehub.com/james/5-16.htm">my faith</a> would <a href="https://biblehub.com/1_john/1-9.htm">have it</a>, confess and repent of our sins—and seek to make amends.</p>
<p>And there is yet more at stake here. Twitter (like Facebook) is more than merely <em>complicit</em> in the transformation of our world into an attention economy. They have <em>driven</em> it. Their technocratic, restraint-less approach to the world is foolish—at best. And they are unrepentant; “wicked” may thus be not too strong a word.<a href="#fn6" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref6" role="doc-noteref"><sup>6</sup></a> Continuing to use these services only further cements their primacy. As Alan Jacobs <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/to-put-the-point-plainly/">put it</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The decision to be on Twitter (or Facebook, etc.) is not simply a personal choice. It has run-on effects for you but also for others. When you use the big social media platforms you contribute to their power and influence, and you deplete the energy and value of the open web. You make things worse for everyone. I truly believe that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even insofar as I do get value from being on Twitter—being able to throw out a question about Rust or Swift or Ember or TypeScript, confident that I will get a knowledgeable answer—I increasingly wonder about the power and social dynamics in play. Is it <em>good</em> or <em>right</em> that, because I have blogged, have worked on open source projects, and have run a successful podcast, I have a greater degree of access? While I have worked hard at those projects, my success in them does not make my questions or interests <em>more important</em> than anyone else’s. Put more bluntly: I do not <em>deserve</em> the attention of Swift compiler developers or Rust or Ember core team members or the TypeScript <abbr title="product manager">PM</abbr>. But I can get that attention, and easily, on Twitter. Some of this is ordinary human social dynamics: earned social trust and so on. But I wonder if Twitter does not <em>heighten</em> the effect. Certainly it seems to me that it may.</p>
</section>
<section id="iv.-the-end-and-a-new-beginning" class="level2">
<h2>IV. The End, and a New Beginning</h2>
<p>Leaving Twitter myself will not begin to undo all of that. But I can undercut, in some small way, the pressure so many other people<a href="#fn7" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref7" role="doc-noteref"><sup>7</sup></a> feel to be on Twitter for professional reasons. Insofar as my own public work succeeds without Twitter, I hope that success helps others come to feel the same freedom. Something more like the <a href="http://tantek.com/2010/281/b1/what-is-the-open-web">open web</a> and the old indie blogger network ethos is a step in the right direction—not in spite of its frictions; rather <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/scale-is-the-enemy/"><em>because</em> it does not scale</a>.</p>
<p>And more than that: getting <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho/archive/the-slow-web-and-the-limits-of-solutions/">offline entirely</a> at times and for seasons. Remembering the rhythms of life common to all human beings up till a few short years ago. Quietly reading books and talking with friends. It’s time for many more of us to embrace the kind of social media monasticism <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/03/27/vows-of-digital-poverty/">Sacasas outlined</a> in the midst of the #DeleteFacebook movement (and which Stephen and I have talked about so much <a href="https://winningslowly.org/season-7.html">this season of Winning Slowly</a>). I want my attention back, but even more importantly I want to show that <i>this is not all that can or should be</i>. There are alternative paths we might yet take.</p>
<p>So: I have deleted all my tweets save one: a link to this post. I am doing much the same with Facebook and LinkedIn.<a href="#fn8" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref8" role="doc-noteref"><sup>8</sup></a> I hope you’ll consider doing something similar!</p>
<p>Going forward, I will be doing much more writing here. I will also continue to publish <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho">my newsletter</a>, normally on a weekly basis. I will still be <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/podcasts">podcasting</a>. I hope (and expect) to be writing more full-on essays—the area more than any other where I have felt the drain from social media’s interference. And I will be working on <a href="https://buttondown.email/rewrite">rewrite</a>! And if you’d like to get in touch, you can always <a href="mailto:hello@chriskrycho.com">email me</a>!</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>in a newsletter he published after I had already written two full drafts of this post: it was confirmation, not inspiration.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>So do a number of other platforms, whose use I am reconsidering as well—mostly anything <em>chat</em>-like.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>Not <em>truly</em> learned. A new fact found, perhaps, but facts acquired are not the same as learning done. More rarely, a link to a place I <em>can</em> learn something. But such links exist in many places!<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>and, worse but in far greater quantity, <em>wannabe</em> Thought Leading<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn5" role="doc-endnote"><p>in a post, I note, which I had not seen when I wrote the <em>first</em> draft of this post! There is something in the air right now, and I’m glad of it.<a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn6" role="doc-endnote"><p>conclusions I have drawn the more starkly through thinking-out-loud about it with my friend <a href="https://stephencarradini.com">Stephen</a> throughout <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> seasons <a href="https://winningslowly.org/season-6.html">6</a> and <a href="https://winningslowly.org/season-7.html">7</a>.<a href="#fnref6" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn7" role="doc-endnote"><p>I initially wrote “everyone” instead of “so many other people” here, but I noticed that that’s simply (very!) wrong: it’s central to the vicious cycle of pressure that social media <em>creates</em>. “Everyone is here; you’ll miss out on such important things!” is <em>the</em> lie of these platforms.<a href="#fnref7" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn8" role="doc-endnote"><p>While I do have reservations about LinkedIn, they are different both in kind and in degree than my concerns about other social media platforms—as my taking a job there just a few months ago should indicate! I would <em>not</em> have taken a job with Facebook or Twitter. I will probably elaborate on this at some point, as I think it’s worth tracing out how and why I see these as meaningfully different!<a href="#fnref8" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Finishing Things on the Internet2019-05-27T21:40:00-04:002019-05-29T16:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-05-27:/2019/finishing-things-on-the-internet.htmlReflections on the event of finishing New Rustacean—with some thoughts on the goodness of finishing things both for individuals and for the public which observes them.<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed audience:</a></b> most anyone, but especially people who have followed along with New Rustacean, my experience with burnout, or both!</i></p>
<hr />
<p><i>I am cross-posting this to this site and <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho">my newsletter</a>, and the reason it is a couple days late will be apparent in the content below. A <em>good</em> thing, but a big thing!</i></p>
<hr />
<p>I have in mind today the finishing of things. No surprise, given that today <a href="https://newrustacean.com/show_notes/meta/_3/">I concluded</a> a 3¾-year-long project: my Rust programming language podcast, <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a>.</p>
<p>This conclusion has been a long time coming. I had meant it to happen last year, originally planned it to coincide with the Rust 2018 Edition release, when <em>that</em> was planned for October. The Edition release slipped till December, and this conclusion slipped till now: the end of May, 2019. The reason will be clear to anyone who has followed along with me: <em><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout">burnout</a></em>. 2018 took a serious toll on me, and so this act of finishing was much delayed.</p>
<p>But more than 100 episodes along, with more than 165,000 words of material—I don’t know the actual final length of the show in minutes, though I have a mind to figure it out sometime in the next few days—New Rustacean is <em>concluded</em>. That’s a really good feeling. It is also, I note, a <em>rare</em> feeling as an adult. I <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/a-new-job.html#ii.-on-the-experience-of-change-as-an-adult" title="A New Job – On the Experience of Change as an Adult">noted this</a> back when I moved from Olo to LinkedIn:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Life changes like this are simultaneously momentous and strangely quiet. When I was younger, I expected large shifts in life to have some sense of their importance: a “big bang” feeling to them, and a feeling of finality. It would seem that days like yesterday — as I wrapped up everything that was on my plate and even had a little (all-remote!) hang-out to say goodbye — would lend themselves to just such a sense of import and finality. Instead, it was mostly a day like any other, and at the end of it I was left only with a lingering melancholy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The mix of emotions is different today—but that it is a <em>mix</em>, and that there is no <em>big bang</em> feeling to it, are the same.</p>
<hr />
<p>It is not only that the <em>feeling</em> of finishing a thing is rare, though. It is that, in many cases, actually properly concluding a thing at all is rare. Or at least, in my experience it has been. I have yet to both <em>start</em> and <em>finish</em> a given major project in any of my “regular” day jobs. I have managed major milestones in some of them, and in my consulting work I have finished a few projects as well. But much of my work life has consisted of carrying the ball a few yards further down the field and then setting it down for someone else to do the same.</p>
<p>New Rustacean is <em>not</em> like that. I started it back in September 2015, and I finished it today. It has a real beginning and a real end, and the end is not merely a petering-out, a slowly-giving-up, but rather a long-planned specific conclusion to the project. I started the show to teach people Rust. I stopped when I felt I had done so to my own satisfaction. As I said in the final episode, it is not that there is not an endless array of more I could cover: but that I have covered <em>enough</em>.</p>
<p>Conclusions like this are good for the soul. They are good for the individual soul, to be sure: my own feels lighter and freer and I am very ready for this next phase (the research writing app I have mentioned here before). But I also think that conclusions are good for the public soul, as it were. We burn people out—and I use that phrase advisedly!—by expecting their efforts to go on so long as we, their consumers, enjoy them. By contrast, it seems to me, seeing someone carefully and actively <em>finish</em> a thing helps us remember that people’s lives <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/intentional-cyclicality.html">have seasons</a>, and that no one can (much less <em>should</em>) do a given thing indefinitely, and above all that people exist with lives and interests of their own beyond the ways we may encounter them.</p>
<p>This is perhaps doubly true on the internet, where we have but these small windows into people’s souls. Not that we have perfect windows in person—but people far more often let down their guard and let us see them as they really are (even on accident) when face-to-face than when avatar-to-avatar. Too easily does avarice for attention corrupt—even when we aim at authenticity. And too easily does our communication devolve to perfectly curated self-presentation: even our online authenticity is often performative. It makes it easy to forget how human people are, how we need to find these moments of closure, how much we are <em>not</em> mere factories-of-content but people, possibly with other dreams.</p>
<p>(I’m grateful to report that I have only rarely had nastily-communicated demands from listeners of New Rustacean. But it <em>has</em> happened!)</p>
<p>Conclusions serve as those kinds of reminders. Projects can be good and still come to a close! Sometimes, even, projects are best precisely when they <em>do</em> have definite ends. I hope and think that is so with New Rustacean: that in ending it as I have, I will let it be not something that I burn out on and which someday pitifully trails off, but instead a thing good in its wholeness and its completeness. So I hope, and I can but act, and hope!</p>
2019 Colfax Half Marathon2019-05-19T14:30:00-04:002019-05-19T20:40:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-05-19:/2019/colfax-half-marathon.htmlI ran a mile-high sub-1:30 (despite making some mistakes)! I am so very happy with this outcome—though of course I’m already thinking about how to beat it in my next race.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed audience:</a></b> people into the details of endurance running and races. (Yes, I know that’s probably a vanishingly small part of my normal readership. That’s just fine.)</i></p>
<p>Today I ran the half marathon event in the <a href="https://www.runcolfax.org">Colfax Marathon</a>. You can see the details <a href="https://www.runningahead.com/logs/2667b469aeda433382cbcc8ed413d964/workouts/b6d8515e11024cd5badd240ef0515b11">here</a> (I prefer <a href="https://www.strava.com/activities/2380401838/overview">Strava’s presentation</a>, but you have to have an account to see most of it.) I finished at 1:29:56 wall time, and 1:29:50 chip time. (The difference is because I started at the <em>back</em> of the first corral instead of the <em>front</em> and had to wait for a few dozen people to get moving in front of me.)</p>
<p>I am exceedingly pleased with this outcome. It would have gone better had I followed my race plan and not pushed so hard on the climbs—and the fact that I am still a bit sick I noticed throughout. Still: I could not be happier with my first race at altitude.</p>
<ul>
<li>58th overall, out of 4617 = top 1.25%</li>
<li>48th among men, out of 1830 = top 2.7%</li>
<li>19th among 30–39-year-olds, out of 671 = top 2.9%</li>
</ul>
<p>This is particularly happy because it’s coming on only about 3 months of active training. That bodes well for future efforts with more miles under my feet!</p>
<hr />
<p>Somewhat more details observations on the race:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p>I went out too fast. I felt <em>really</em> good at first, and paid for it at the end. This is not new to me; I’ve done it in most races. Over the summer, I need to actively practice doing negative splits on tempo runs—and I need to do that with both downhills <em>and</em> uphills… see the next point! I also need to practice hitting specific tempos so I can do a better job holding myself to a given speed at a given time.</p></li>
<li><p>Hills, even little ones like this, still just murder my legs’ ability to keep spinning. <em>Especially</em> given the profile of <a href="https://www.strava.com/routes/18686447">my next race</a> (it has literally 4× as much climb as today’s race did, and it starts ~1,800 feet higher), I need to spend some time this summer doing two things (in <em>addition</em> to continuing strength training and the point noted in #1):</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Cycling! That should be a really helpful complement and strengthen exactly the muscles I need.</li>
<li>Speed work! Now that I have a really solid aerobic base again, I need to start amping up my anaerobic capacity in kind.</li>
</ol></li>
<li><p>Not being sick would also help. Not that I can perfectly control that, of course, but I could feel the effect that had in terms of general physical fatigue and getting light-headed and a rather unhappy headache for the last five miles or so.</p></li>
<li><p>Bringing my own water is essential. I can <em>never</em> hydrate well enough with cups along the way. Best bet is probably a belt: I don’t need a <em>lot</em>, but more than I had today. I hydrated reasonably well ahead of the race, but I do not doubt this contributed to the headache and light-headedness. (I know they were at least partially from being sick, though, because I had those symptoms <em>all week</em>.)</p></li>
<li><p>Next time I run a race, I want to actually plan out a specific tempo and effort level on a per-mile basis, and see how that works. I <em>suspect</em> it will help. The main possible downside I see is that I might <em>under</em>-do it going at it that way, but if I end up having a lot of juice left I can probably make up a fair bit of that just by crushing the final 5k.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>All of those thoughts on what I do next notwithstanding, I remain <em>really</em> happy with this outcome, and I am glad to be getting back into the swing of things.</p>
<p>One final note: the best data I can find online suggests that 5,000 feet of altitude is worth ~15–20 seconds/mile at this distance; that would make this race <em>very</em> close to my best. I suspect I would have run the same course at sea level <em>somewhat</em> faster… but not 15–20s/mi faster. Why? See #1 and #2 above: the real problem was that I went out too fast and didn’t have enough leg strength left over at the end, <em>not</em> that I didn’t have the aerobic or anaerobic capacity. (Looking at the <a href="https://www.strava.com/activities/2380401838/overview">heart rate data</a> from the race confirms this, and I noticed it even during the run: my problem the last few miles was leg endurance; my HR was actually <em>dropping</em> in miles 10–13.)</p>
Burnout, Six Months Later2019-05-05T19:15:00-04:002019-05-05T19:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-05-05:/2019/burnout-six-months-later.htmlA bit more on what “recovery” from burnout looks like—because, as much as too few people talk about burnout itself well, even fewer talk about the recovery.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> anyone who cares about mental health and recovery… but perhaps especially people who have been following me on <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout">this journey</a>.</i></p>
<p>It has been just over six months since I hit the rock-bottom point in my experience of burnout: when I had a panic attack… because a programming task came back with a list of small things that needed tweaking. I have made a lot of changes since then, and am—<a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/stewarding-my-reserves.html">as I wrote earlier this year</a>—not <i>recovered</i> but <i>recovering</i>. I am trying to write about <em>this</em> part of the process too: burnout itself is under-discussed in many ways, but the process of <em>recovering</em> from burnout is not something I have seen discussed at all.</p>
<section id="signs-of-recovery" class="level2">
<h2>Signs of recovery</h2>
<p>So… what does recovery look like so far? And how does it compare with when I was <em>not</em> recovering?</p>
<section id="i-am-sleeping-my-normal-amount-again." class="level3">
<h3>1. I am sleeping my normal amount again.</h3>
<p>For much of late last year I simply had to turn my alarm off and sleep as much as I slept… and that was a good 8½–9 hours. That was pretty unusual: as an adult, I have normally only needed 7–7½ hours. I tried setting an alarm for a bit earlier this year, but found I wasn’t ready for it yet. I kept finding myself unable to drag myself into consciousness most days. Other times, I would manage it, but then find myself exhausted the rest of the week. The tradeoff wasn’t worth it, so I went back to sleeping till I woke up—no alarm.</p>
<p>Over the past few weeks, I’ve been returning to that previous baseline naturally. Still setting no alarm, I have been awakening after 7–7½ hours normally. Some of that is no doubt helped by the early sunrises of late spring, but I have also not been <em>tired</em> at all—I’m ready to go as soon as I wake up, and have the energy to get through the rest of the day and indeed the rest of the week.</p>
<p>This is a relatively quiet change, but it feels rather significant. When people have asked me about my productivity over the years, this is one of the things I’ve pointed to. It is far easier to get a lot done if you only need 7–7½ hours of sleep than if you need 8½–9. That’s an extra 7–14 hours a week!<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I honestly wasn’t sure if those hours were ever coming back. That they have is a huge relief, and it has been a huge boon to my ability to do the things I want to do.</p>
</section>
<section id="i-am-reading-again" class="level3">
<h3>2. I am reading again</h3>
<p>One of the earliest signs that I was dealing with burnout was that I largely stopped reading books on theology, culture, ethics, etc. I didn’t stop <em>completely</em>, mind—but my pace slowed to a crawl, and I had a hard time maintaining momentum. From roughly June 2016 until the last month or so, reading anything more than popcorn-level fiction just felt like <em>really</em> hard work. I could rarely make myself get through anything longer than an essay.</p>
<p>I made myself do some anyway. With friends, I worked through <cite>Evolution and the Fall</cite> in 2017, and over the course of 2017 and 2018 I read <em>most</em> of Oliver O’Donovan’s <cite>Resurrection and Moral Order</cite> and a good chunk of each of Stewart Brand’s <cite>How Buildings Learn</cite> and <cite>Theology and the Mirror of Scripture</cite> by Kevin Vanhoozer and Daniel Treier. I started working through Augustine’s <cite>City of God</cite> with friends in 2018… and dropped out because I couldn’t make myself get to it.</p>
<p>I read roughly an order of magnitude less than what’s normal for me over those years. To describe this as “out of character” for me is to understate things rather a lot. By the same token, the return of my appetite for books means feeling normal and healthy again in a way that I can hardly put into words. This week I ordered <em>three</em> books—having dug into the first a fair bit via the ebook preview!—and read most of one of them the day it arrived.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/3-new-books.jpeg" title="Sanders and Swain's Retrieving Eternal Generation, Barth's Dogmatics in Outline, and Anderson's All That's Good, sitting next to each other on a table." alt="3 new books!" /><figcaption>3 new books!</figcaption>
</figure>
</section>
<section id="i-am-excited-about-projects-again" class="level3">
<h3>3. I am excited about projects again</h3>
<p>Keeping up any kind of momentum on personal projects over the course of 2018 was difficult at best. I mostly managed to keep <a href="https://newrustacean.com/">New Rustacean</a> going; <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> took a worse beating; and <a href="https://massaffection.com">Mass Affection</a>, sadly, stopped basically entirely. (Curiously, I’ve observed that my interest in playing video games at all seems to have waned and waxed in fairly direct proportion to my burnout.) My other outside interests all ground to a halt as well. I did no writing other than blogging, and a good deal of the blogging I did was publicly reflecting on burnout itself. My open-source software contributions were minimal: only what was absolutely necessary to keep those projects moving.</p>
<p>In the last 6 weeks, my interest in those projects has been reviving. I actually started working on in earnest <a href="https://buttondown.email/rewrite">a project I have been planning for ages</a>—including by doing some work to clear the deck for it in my schedule. I’ll probably play a session of <cite>Mass Effect</cite> with Jaimie <em>tonight</em> and we’ll record and publish the corresponding another day this week. I’m more excited by and engaged with Winning Slowly than I have been since late 2016.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> I am, as you can see, blogging again (though, <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/some-closing-thoughts.html#reading-and-writing-1">as promised</a>, I intend to keep a relatively tight limit on this for the sake of actually making good progress on other projects).</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="signs-im-still-recovering" class="level2">
<h2>Signs I’m Still Recovering</h2>
<p>The net of all these steps forward is that I feel a good deal more <em>myself</em> than I have in a very long time. But there are also signs that I am not yet recovered. In particular, I continue to have less emotional reserves is normal for me. Grief comes bursting out at unexpected times—and, unfortunately, also in unhelpful ways. I find myself fighting hard not to let little annoyances blow up into big frustration or anger. I sometimes get hit by whole days of deep inability to think or concentrate. One day last week I simply had to take a sick day and spent a good chunk of it napping. (And I. do. not. take. naps.)</p>
<p>One aspect of this is that the original triggering stressors that pushed me from <i>deeply (but not consciously) emotionally fatigued</i> to <i>burned out</i> are largely out of the way. This means I have the mental and emotional space to decompress a bit. But when you’re as compressed as I was, decompressing means little bursts of emotional steam come jetting out at surprising moments and in surprising ways. Coupled with all those other symptoms, this is a good sign! It is also a bit hard, but I think that is to be expected.</p>
<p>Another aspect is that the process of unwinding and disentangling the mess that got me here in the first place is <em>ongoing</em>. Identifying, and reckoning with, the pains that I set aside for <i>later</i> until later became <i>right now</i> is a slow process. I had intended to block out some Saturday mornings this spring to go sit with a journal and work through some of those; I found myself too busy to do so. This has to change! It’s no good at all if I let even those good things keep me from dealing with these deeper-seated problems. Letting them go so long un-dealt-with is a major part of what got me here in the first place. I have bumped that up in priority for the months ahead, and have told people close to me so they can hold me to it.</p>
<p>More soon. (But not too soon! I have things to do that aren’t blogging! I have to keep reminding myself of this…)</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Another major factor I point to in my output is not having a commute—which makes for <em>at least</em> another 5 hours.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I loved what we did in Season 6—though it didn’t quite achieve what we were hoping for, in no small part because of my experience with burnout.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
What is a Zettelkasten?2019-04-29T20:00:00-04:002019-04-29T20:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-04-29:/2019/what-is-a-zettelkasten.htmlDefining a Zettelkasten—a way of organizing notes for long-term usability and effective learning.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> People interested in note-taking, effective learning, or the idea of a Zettelkasten (which <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten/">I’ve written about before</a>).</i></p>
<p>A friend recently asked me: “What exactly <em>is</em> a Zettelkasten?” Unfortunately, there aren’t any (easy-to-find, anyway) answers in a single place online… hopefully until today!<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> The short answer is: a well-organized box (or group of boxes) of notecards. The word itself is just German for <i>an index card box</i>. Given you likely landed here via an internet search, though, I expect you might want a bit more.</p>
<p>A Zettelkasten as an idea dates to the work of the 20th century German sociologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Niklas%20Luhmann&go=Go">Niklas Luhmann</a>, who used a large system of carefully labeled notecards (an index card is a <i>zettel</i>) as a form of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext">hypertext</a>. (The linked Wikipedia article notwithstanding, hypertext works perfectly well without any digital technologies: the real key to the idea is <em>links</em> that you can easily follow.) In the system Luhmann devised, each notecard gets a unique identifier, which can then be used to reference it from other notecards, and which have a well-defined order of some sort.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> They can also have keywords—tags—that group them into related sets of ideas. A full Zettelkasten also usually includes not just individual notes but also organizational notes. These serve as pointers and structure for whole other sets of notes—summaries of sets of knowledge you’ve built up over time.</p>
<p>Using this strategy transforms a <em>collection</em> of notes into a <em>web</em> of notes. If you build up that web carefully, you can follow the connections between notes in novel directions over time. This is great for memory, because it helps you cement those relationships in your own mind. Even more importantly, though, working with your notes as a network can produce brand new questions and ideas. Connections that were not immediately apparent can become so as you add more links and structures to the system. The Zettelkasten becomes a tool not merely for recollection but for <em>thought</em>.</p>
<p>The beauty of this approach is its simplicity: A Zettelkasten is just a low-overhead, high-value way of creating, managing, and making use of a system of notes. It can use notecards, or <a href="https://bear.app">any good note-taking app</a>, or any combination of things that lets you easily “link” to and therefore navigate between notes. Its power is not in spite of but precisely because of that simplicity!</p>
<aside>
<p>As it turns out, I’ve tried a lot of different apps for this kind of thing—or <em>especially</em> for research writing in general, of which note-taking is a huge part. Unfortunately, none of the existing apps quite hit the spot for me. So, being a good software developer… I’m building one.</p>
<p>If you’re interested, you can get updates on that project by subscribing to <a href="https://buttondown.email/rewrite">the app newsletter</a>:</p>
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</aside>
<section id="further-reading" class="level2">
<h2>Further Reading</h2>
<p>If you’d like to dig deeper into this, I recommend the posts I have found most helpful:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes">Communicating with Slip Boxes</a> – Luhmann’s own account of working with his Zettelkasten, and the thing I wish I had read <em>first</em>! I particularly found this thought helpful as I have begun building my own set of notes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Usually it is more fruitful to look for formulations of problems that relate heterogeneous things with each other.</p>
</blockquote></li>
<li><p><a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/my-zettelkasten/">my Zettelkasten</a> – Alan Jacobs, with the piece that introduced me to the concept at all, and with an interesting twist on the idea that works particularly well for him (it would not, I think, for me… but there is some overlap with his needs and what I’m doing with the aforementioned project!).</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://zettelkasten.de">Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing</a> – from Zettelkasten.de, tracing out similar themes to what I do here. I have found the site to be a pretty good resource in general.</p></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I first learned about the idea <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/my-zettelkasten/">from Alan Jacobs</a>, and then more from <a href="https://zettelkasten.de">a dedicated site</a>—but while Jacobs’ post gives a reasonably good summary, as does <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/">this post</a> on that dedicated site, neither has much search prominence.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’ve chosen to organize my own Zettelkasten by date, because <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.html">I find</a> that seeing what I was thinking at a particular time can be very helpful and very interesting, and it’s also often a <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/add-identity/">helpful way of remembering things</a>.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Being an Amateur Again2019-04-05T20:00:00-04:002019-04-05T20:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-04-05:/2019/being-an-amateur-again.htmlI am (very slowly) starting the process of building some native iOS and macOS apps. It is a strange feeling to be so out of my depth again!
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> Just about anyone… but I do assume a bit of familiarity with programming.</i></p>
<p>Just a little note here, nothing long or fancy tonight.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I’ve just started working in earnest on my long-dreamt-of applications for research writing. This means I’m trying to figure out how to build some applications with native toolkits: UIKit and AppKit, specifically. And, for the first time in most of a decade, I have <em>no idea</em> what I’m doing.</p>
<p>I started doing web development in college, over a decade ago. I used a free Dreamweaver clone to build a simple portfolio website for my music when I was a sophomore. I was hacking on <abbr>XML</abbr> templates for my old Blogger site as a junior. In the year after I finished college, I was building websites for friends, family, and my old church. I built multiple responsive web designs within months of Ethan Marcotte’s <a href="https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design">original article on the idea</a>. I was writing loads of jQuery by mid-2011. I built my first single-page app in 2014 (and it’s still running!).</p>
<p>All of that is not to brag but to say: I am <em>deeply</em> comfortable (and relatively expert) with web development. It is in many ways “old hat” to me. Pretty much any tool or framework that sits in that space, I can pick up very quickly, simply because I have deep experience in the space at this point.</p>
<p>And now: I am starting over in many ways. Native app development has a lot in common with web UI development in some ways… but in others, it could not be more foreign. While some of the patterns are the same, and if some of the terminology is curiously familiar<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> the actual details are all <em>wildly</em> different.</p>
<p>The net of it all is discomfort.</p>
<p>I am used to this feeling, so it does not bother me: I have made a point to be <em>learning</em> constantly throughout my career. I will admit, though, that trying to dive in here is intimidating. I want to build apps that are distinguished in no small part by their quality and ease of use… and I am in over my head even to build things that work at <em>all</em> on these platforms.</p>
<p>It helps that I have a five-year horizon for this project.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> But it’s still strange to be diving into the deep end <em>without</em> the comfort of all that existing knowledge. Every time I picked up a new thing in web development, I could layer it onto the things I already knew. Here, that is much less true. Yes, I have a reasonably good sense for how UIs work in many ways, and I have a great deal of general programming knowledge. But with iOS and macOS, at the end of the day, I’m still just a newb.</p>
<p>It’s both a bit intimidating and a little exhilarating. So: here we go!</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’ve successfully been <em>not blogging</em>, though not for exactly the reasons I hoped. One of the ways <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout">the burnout</a> lingers is that my bandwidth is lower than I might have hoped. Doing both <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> and my <a href="https://emberconf.com/speakers.html#chris-krycho">EmberConf workshop</a> was more than enough to keep me full for the first couple months of the year.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Reading docs for UIKit and Swift is a lot like reading a weird mirror-universe version of Ember and TypeScript—you can still see Ember’s <a href="https://sproutcore.com">SproutCore</a> roots, and if you were reading the Ember docs back in the 1.x days, well… there’s a lot to recognize.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>Being in your 30s has some advantages, it turns out! Comfort with longer time-scales is one of them.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Seeing Things Through2019-03-02T20:10:00-05:002019-03-02T20:10:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-03-02:/2019/seeing-things-through.htmlSome thoughts on actually finishing things I care about, inspired by starting up “serious” running again.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> Just about anyone. But especially people interested in ideas of “productivity” or accomplishing the things we set out to do.</i></p>
<p>I have on my mind this week starting things, and finishing things.</p>
<p>I picked up a chest strap heart-rate monitor again a week ago, and took a run with it. It felt like starting (<em>again</em>, in this case!) with running. I am training for a couple of half marathons and a long couple days’ of road cycling in the Rocky Mountains in between them. As I wrote in a <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/serious-running-and-my-heart-rate-monitor.html">blog post earlier this week</a>, putting that chest strap on flipped the little switch in my brain that said “This is serious running again.” It helps to have registered for those races and committed to that event. I have <em>always</em> done better at running when I have had a concrete goal in view. It has helped me with <em>finishing</em>. Though I have had to skip out on a few races I have registered for by way of illness or (in one case) moving across the country, I have only failed to train up sufficiently for a race I had registered for <em>once</em> (and that, too, was a function of illness, though it wasn’t initially clear to me).</p>
<p>Over the past four months I decided it was time to start working seriously on some things I have been thinking about for a long time now. One is developing an app (really: a family of them) that I have been nooding on for almost four years now. Another is learning how to build programming languages. Still another is writing some long-form essays, the subjects of which I have been mulling on in some way or another for as long as five years. My challenge in these kinds of projects is twofold: in many cases, the projects themselves are large enough as to seem daunting to me. In others, though I start them, I find the finishing difficult when I am already tired with the many other things on my plate. Having specific and concrete goals would, it seems to me, <em>help</em>—just as in running.</p>
<p>I have, several times now, started open source software projects and never finished them. I have started a (genuinely interesting!) novel/novella/short story (the format is hard to nail down for this idea!) three or four times, and never seen it through. I have a handful of <em>very good</em> essays sitting in my drafts folder that I began either for this site or for Mere Orthodoxy during my seminary years; some of them are 90% done and had I taken just another half an hour they would have been ready to go.</p>
<p>Strange though it might seem to people who see only what looks like very high productivity from me, I have a surprisingly hard time <em>finishing</em> things. Starting them is easy. But sitting down, week in and week out, to get them across the line—it is <em>hard</em>. The more amorphous the task, the less clear-cut “done” is, the harder I find it.</p>
<p>One of my goals for the rest of my thirties is to get better at this: at picking specific projects and leaning into them until I finish them. Even if that means setting aside other good and important projects along the way. There are only so many hours in the day, and there are many few of them available for side projects when one aims to be a good husband and father. I am still getting a handle on this; more reports from the field as I hopefully improve at it!</p>
“Serious” Running and My Heart Rate Monitor2019-02-24T20:12:00-05:002019-02-24T20:12:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-02-24:/2019/serious-running-and-my-heart-rate-monitor.htmlSome amused thoughts on the effects of habit, prompted by my first day putting back on a chest strap heart-rate monitor in a few years.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> People interested in habits, fitness, or emotions, or especially how they intersect</i></p>
<p>Today I took the second “long” run of my training season for <a href="http://www.runcolfax.org">the first</a> of two half marathons I’m running this year (in May; <a href="https://www.enduranceraceseries.com/palmer-lake">the other</a> is in September). As I was showering afterward, I kept feeling that something was <em>right</em> in my world again—that I was actually <em>seriously</em> training for a half marathon again.</p>
<p>Two things about that thought caught my attention.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> The first: it is telling of how deeply a part of my life running in general and half marathons in particular have become over the last 8 years. I could say much more about that, and perhaps I will in some future post. For <em>this</em> post, though, I want to focus on the second: <em>why</em> it felt right to me. After all: this is <em>not</em> the first time I’ve been training seriously for a half marathon in a few years. The last time I successfully completed a half marathon was 2015, but I have <em>trained</em> for one every year since then—failing to run them only because of a mix of sickness (in 2016 and 2018) and moving across the country instead (in 2017).</p>
<p>Why, then, did I feel today like I was seriously training for the first time in years? I laughed out loud when I realized: this was the first time I put on my chest strap heart rate monitor since mid-2017. I picked up an Apple Watch Series 2 that April, and decided its wrist-based heart-rate monitoring was good <em>enough</em> for my purposes and stuck with it for the last couple years.</p>
<p>I really like the Apple Watch in a lot ways. I’ve increasingly been frustrated by its limitations, though—from the lack of reliable feedback on heart rate zones; to the annoying little wrist flick I have to do to see my current stats, since the screen is not constantly on; to the fact that it <em>has</em> to be attached directly to my wrist, no matter how cold it is and therefore how inconvenient that is; to the ways it just loses my heart-rate signal at times, especially when cycling. So, today, I strapped back on my my Garmin with its ANT+ chest strap-style heart-rate monitor and took <a href="https://www.strava.com/activities/2173404125">a run</a> with it.</p>
<p><em>That</em> was the difference: putting on a chest strap and a <abbr>GPS</abbr> watch. Now, that probably seems weird to you. It seems a little weird to me! What I realized, though, is that I had been wearing a chest strap heart rate monitor since I started training for my first half marathon, all the way back in January 2011. The particular strap and the particular associated watch have varied over the years, but all the time until mid-2017, there was a watch on my wrist and a strap around my chest. Somewhere along the way I (wholly subconsciously!) learned to associated those physical cues with training seriously. So when I put a chest strap heart rate monitor again today, it flipped that switch in my brain, and things felt right again.</p>
<p>Sometimes it is easy for us to forget just how thoroughly our physicality matters. The deep reality is that we are <em>embodied minds</em>—the two undivorceable.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> Things like chest straps end up mattering to us. It seems strange that such a little thing would affect me so much, but affect me deeply it does. All the little ways I have trained my body matter. Though I could train it differently… I probably won’t, in this case. More on that, and on Apple Watch, sometime in the future.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Yes, I was thinking about what I was thinking. This is normal for me.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Yes, modulo qualifications about divine activity in the time between our death and our resurrection. There are many mysteries about that state; I will be content with “mystery” as the description for it. The point in any case is that we are destined for resurrection (one way or another): body and mind united again forever (to joy or to damnation).<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
On Burnout and My Recent Job Change2019-02-02T13:00:00-05:002019-02-02T13:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-02-02:/2019/on-burnout-and-my-recent-job-change.htmlHow the experience of burnout did—and did not!—contribute to my leaving Olo for LinkedIn.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> People who have followed or are interested in my experiences with <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout/">burnout</a>, or are curious about my new job change.</i></p>
<p>I <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/a-new-job.html">posted</a> a week ago about my (then-impending, now-quite-actual!) transition from <a href="https://www.olo.com">Olo</a> to <a href="https://linkedin.com">LinkedIn</a>. My friend <a href="https://stephencarradini.com">Stephen</a> pointed out that, especially for long-time readers of this blog, it seemed a bit odd to write about a job change without so much as mentioning my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/burnout-symptoms.html">rather painful experience</a> of <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/dealing-with-burnout-in-public.html">job-triggered burnout</a> in 2018. He was right!</p>
<p>I chose not to talk about the relationship between this job change and burnout in that particular post because it’s rather complicated. I did not move to fix the burnout. As a number of things from my writing over the last few months likely indicated to attentive readers,<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I have been slowly but steadily <em>recovering</em> since mid-October.</p>
<p>Mid-October was when I hit rock bottom. On October 15th, I had a panic attack. Thankfully, it was brief and I was at home. (It was just a few hours after I wrote <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/neither-being-dumb-nor-giving-in.html">this post</a>, actually.) As is often the case with panic attacks (from what I have read), the specific trigger was not itself that big of a deal; but it was more stress than I could handle. My body responded to one more little stressor by <strong><em>freaking out</em></strong>.</p>
<p>At that point, I pinged my manager at Olo and said, “Hey, I just had a panic attack; we need to change something.” I immediately handed over some high-urgency projects I was working on and took the rest of the week off. It helped. And it helped among other things because it gave me time to get some clarity on why the stressors I was experiencing at Olo were affecting me the ways they were, and what kinds of changes would need to happen for them <em>not</em> to have that kind of affect on me.</p>
<p>I worked with my manager at Olo to make a bunch of changes there which made Olo much better for me. I remain very grateful for those. And I am also grateful that I was able to have a lot of very productive conversations with not just him but others at Olo, including in engineering leadership, which helped me further clarify whether Olo was going to be a good long-term fit for me or not. That I ultimately concluded <i>not</i> is a credit to the openness of Olo’s leadership to having those conversations with me and their desire to see their people succeed. I was not exaggerating <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/a-new-job.html">when I wrote</a> that Olo was the best place I had ever worked.</p>
<p>But I should also note that I was looking around and starting the ball rolling on interviews as far back as September—precisely because of my experience with burnout, and specifically the values mismatch that it had so thoroughly exposed. Note that when I say “values” I don’t mean in the sense of the ethics with which Olo conducts its business—I found Olo consistently exemplary in that regard, in fact. Instead, I mean that Olo is operating in ways that most people agree make sense for a late-stage startup tracking toward some kind of exit event.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> Unfortunately this left me misaligned with Olo in a very important way <em>besides</em> the scale questions I hit on in <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/a-new-job.html">my announcement post last week</a>.</p>
<p>That phase of a company built in the way Olo has been—by way of venture capital, with the requisite <em>need</em> for an exit—just necessarily <em>is</em> high on acquiring market share and low on the kind of slow, steady work <a href="https://winningslowly.org">I so highly value</a>. This means that I constantly found myself at odds with company decisions—not because those decisions were morally wrong themselves, but because I’m increasingly at odds with the entire system of venture capital-driven business development! But every time the company made one of those decisions—however much sense it made for the company—I grew more frustrated. And that frustration was a major factor in my burnout.</p>
<p>(Attentive readers will note that I didn’t go into details about this during the worst of it. This was for two reasons: First, I didn’t trust myself to be able to write <em>well</em> about it given my emotional state at the time. The couple times I started to I found that I could not correctly convey that I <em>both</em> continued to respect and care about my colleagues at Olo <em>and</em> was deeply frustrated by the state of affairs there. Second, and closely related to the first, I wanted to avoid burdening my colleagues with my own doubts and frustrations as much as possible. We were in the middle of a pretty intense deadline push, the stresses of which were enough <em>without</em> watching a colleague melt down because of how this particular crunch loudly surfaced his deep conflicts with venture capitalism. Better, I concluded, to gesture in the general direction of the sources of my burnout and leave this for a later time. And, should any of my former colleagues be reading this now: yes, I disagreed with our taking on that particular project; but you all did a really amazing job executing on it and have my lasting respect and admiration.)</p>
<p>The net of all of that was that changing jobs was an important part of helping me avoid getting burnt out <em>again</em>. The things Olo <em>will</em> be doing at this point in the business’ lifecycle would simply continue to frustrate me, and it could not afford me the opportunities I want professionally. That mismatch is simply too much when stacked on on top of all the other emotional weights of the last several years—some of which I have written about publicly, some of which I may write about publicly in the future, and some of which will never be for general public consumption (though of course I talk about them with dear friends). And, more, a new job with less of that mismatch is the lever I could pull most easily and effectively—a way I could give myself the space I need to deal with everything else which contributed to my burnout.</p>
<p>That analysis carries with it the important corollary that changing jobs is only one part of avoiding further burnout, though. Avoiding overcommitment, keeping what commitments I do make well-aligned with my priorities, taking time to rest, taking time to <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/time-does-not-heal.html">grieve deep pains</a>: <em>all</em> of these are necessary components of avoiding falling back into burnout once again.</p>
<p>More on this—and, hopefully, some of the promised <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/dealing-with-burnout-in-public.html">theological reflection</a> on the subject—as I am able, while not overdoing it!</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>the decrease in frequency of posts on the subject, a post explicitly about <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/stewarding-my-reserves.html">recovering from burnout</a>, past tense language when I <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/some-closing-thoughts.html">did</a> talk about it…<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>whether that be an <abbr title="initial public offering">IPO</abbr>, an acquisition, or something else—I am obviously not privy to any information about that; Olo’s CEO Noah Glass has made public statements pointing to exit event in the last month.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Announcing “Across the Sundering Seas”2019-01-26T15:30:00-05:002019-01-26T15:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-01-26:/2019/announcing-across-the-sundering-seas.htmlI’ve just launched a newsletter, “Across the Sundering Seas” (buttondown.email/chriskrycho)—expect roughly weekly posts with a mix of commentary on links and some longer reflections on things I’m thinking about.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people interested in reading <em>yet more</em> things I write.</i></p>
<p>So I hopped onto the bandwagon that everyone else is in 2019—with the excuse that I’ve been <em>thinking</em> about it since late 2017!—and started an email newsletter: <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho">Across the Sundering Seas</a></p>
<p>One reason I’m interested in the email newsletter as a medium is because I think it can <em>help</em> with <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">the assumed audience problem</a>. A blog is written into the void, and has a certain kind of atemporality and acontextuality to it. Some readers follow along devotedly in their <abbr>RSS</abbr> readers; but equally someone may stumble on something I wrote half a decade ago. That is the beauty and wonder of blogs, and also their great challenge.</p>
<p>An email is a letter to an audience. Like a letter, you can respond, just by hitting the <b>Reply</b> button in your email client! But both of those benefits without the horrible-ness that is public comment threads, and with a much more direct kind of conversation. I can know you’re reading because you <em>want</em> to be, and I can write accordingly.</p>
<p>So here’s to seeing how this goes. I am excited to see how both this and my supporters-only podcast develop over the course of the year. You can <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho/archive/d3ffffa2-8509-4c6b-9dc5-4033171423bf">read the first issue</a>, <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho">subscribe</a>, or just ignore this if newsletters aren’t your thing!</p>
A New Job!2019-01-24T21:15:00-05:002019-01-24T21:15:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-01-24:/2019/a-new-job.htmlA post in two parts: on why I’m changing jobs and on the strange experience of change as an adult.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> People interested in my career shifts—whether out of personal interest or technical interest.</i></p>
<p>Big news: Yesterday was my last day working for <a href="https://www.olo.com">Olo</a>, and on Monday I start working on front-end infrastructure for <a href="https://linkedin.com">LinkedIn</a>!</p>
<p>This is a huge change for me: I’ve been at Olo for almost exactly three years now<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> and it has been the best job of my career. The people I’m leaving behind are fantastic, and I’m going to miss working with them day in and day out. This is the best team, and the best culture, of anywhere I’ve been so far. Granted a small sample size—Olo is only my third full-time job since I graduated college—I’m still comfortable saying that it’s unlikely to be topped in <em>that</em> sense any time soon.</p>
<p>With such a significant change comes a big blog post, in two parts:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="#i.-on-moving-from-olo-to-linkedin">I. On Moving From Olo to LinkedIn</a>: the part to read if you’re just curious about what prompted me to move on from a company I have spoken so well of.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="#ii.-on-the-experience-of-change-as-an-adult">II. On The Experience of Change as An Adult</a>: the part to read if you don’t care about the details of my career as a programmer, but are curious about my thoughts on these kinds of changes as we <em>all</em> experience them.</p></li>
</ul>
<section id="i.-on-moving-from-olo-to-linkedin" class="level2">
<h2>I. On Moving From Olo to LinkedIn</h2>
<p>So: if Olo’s people are so great and I’ve enjoyed working there so much… why am I moving on? The short version is that the opportunity at LinkedIn is a better fit for my current ambitions. The long version… well:</p>
<p>When I came to Olo, I just wanted to be working in front-end web development and <abbr>UI</abbr>/<abbr>UX</abbr> full time. I had spent the preceding six and a half years writing C, C++, Fortran, and Python in my full-time roles. As much as I enjoyed many things about that work (and as grateful as I am for <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/career-trajectory.html">what I learned</a> on those projects), I was ready to be working full-time on the kinds of things I actually <em>enjoyed</em>: namely, front-end web development! My goal in late 2015 was simply to get a job doing <em>that</em>. When a good friend said, “Hey, Olo is hiring and you’d be a great fit,” I passed along my résumé and gladly took the job when it was offered—and I have never regretted it. There have been bumps and frustrations along the way, to be sure, some of them large—as there will be with any job—but my overall feelings on Olo remain extremely positive.</p>
<p>For the last three years, I worked full time on one project: Olo’s first <a href="https://emberjs.com">Ember</a> application. I deeply enjoyed a lot of that work, for a long time. It was only the third time I had ever worked on a greenfield project in my entire career—and the first time working on something at this scale. Building <abbr>UI</abbr> was indeed a <em>lot</em> better than the kind of work I had been doing previously. Over the course of that project, I grew from just working on the code as others decided it to its technical lead—and I enjoyed that, too.</p>
<p>More, over the course of those three years I got over a deeply internalized sense that my job was to <i>shut up and build what I was told</i>. Previous job experience had beaten me down pretty thoroughly in various ways. I had come to expect that my opinion would neither be asked for nor appreciated if offered. Olo expected the opposite of me: to think about a problem hard and to argue strongly for what I thought was the best solution (if also to listen well to what others thought). If something seemed like a bad idea, or it seemed like there was a better way forward, I was not only allowed but <em>expected</em> to offer that input. It took the first half of my tenure at Olo for that to sink in, but it finally did—and I’m profoundly grateful for the change.</p>
<p>Something else happened over those three years as well, though, and this is why I’m moving on now. Within my first few months at Olo, I had started contributing little bits here and there in the Ember open source community. By the end of that first year, I was experimenting with first <a href="https://flow.org/en/">Flow</a> and then <a href="http://www.typescriptlang.org">TypeScript</a>, looking for ways to improve our development flow and decrease our bug rates—and found that there was a huge void of leadership in that space. So, a little over a year in, I was leading <a href="https://github.com/typed-ember">the effort to make TypeScript <em>good</em> in Ember</a>. By the end of 2017, my friend <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/bmakuh">Ben Makuh</a> and I had built <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/true-myth">True Myth</a>, a TypeScript-native library for (in our humble opinions!) better handling for <code>null</code> and <code>undefined</code> and errors. And over the course of 2017 and 2018, through the combination of writing, teaching, and collaborating on code, I helped make TypeScript <em>much</em> more mainstream in Ember.</p>
<p>Those efforts, and the small—but real—impact they have had on the broader ecosystem, are far and away the things that have brought me the most satisfaction in my tenure at Olo. And so, over the last three years, my ambitions have slowly but steadily shifted: from <i>write front-end web software</i> to <i>find ways to move the whole industry forward</i>. To be clear: it’s not that ecosystem work is <em>better</em> than the work of product development, and in fact the best ecosystem work is deeply informed by the experience of product development—but they are very <em>different</em>.</p>
<p>The result has been increasing misalignment between what I want to be doing—what I find most energizing and motivating—and what Olo <em>needs</em> at this phase of the business’ life. And not through any fault of Olo’s or mine! Olo is still a relatively small organization; it does not yet have the room to support engineers working at the ecosystem level full time, or the <em>need</em> for that kind of investment. Some work in that direction is welcomed within the organization: certainly no one ever complained about the work I was doing …but mostly Olo needs product built and improved, and yesterday! Over the course of the last many months, I had a frank dialog with my manager and others at Olo: <i>can we find a place where my aims and Olo’s overlap?</i> Ultimately, we concluded that the answer was <i>no</i>.</p>
<p>By contrast, LinkedIn <em>is</em> at the scale where it makes sense to have engineers investing in ecosystem-level work. Going there lets me align my passion for that kind of work with what the business needs. So here I go, and I’m excited to see what I can accomplish with the rest of the folks at LinkedIn! But not without some some melancholy: as I noted at the top, I’m leaving the best job and the best team I’ve ever had. It’s a strange mix.</p>
</section>
<section id="ii.-on-the-experience-of-change-as-an-adult" class="level2">
<h2>II. On The Experience of Change as An Adult</h2>
<p>That strange mix of emotions is the topic of the second half of this post. Life changes like this are simultaneously momentous and strangely quiet. When I was younger, I expected large shifts in life to have some sense of their importance: a “big bang” feeling to them, and a feeling of finality. It would seem that days like yesterday—as I wrapped up everything that was on my plate and even had a little (all-remote!) hang-out to say goodbye—would lend themselves to just such a sense of import and finality. Instead, it was mostly a day like any other, and at the end of it I was left only with a lingering melancholy.</p>
<p>I recall feeling much the same at every major event in my life since I graduated high school—save three: my wedding, and the birth of each of my first two daughters. Graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree, starting my first job, quitting that job and starting my second job, moving across the country to start seminary, quitting my second job and starting my third (at Olo!), graduating from seminary, moving back across country to live nearer family, and now quitting my third job to start my fourth: each of these seems like a major moment in life. In many ways they <em>were</em> major moments. I can mark important shifts in my own history with them. None of them quite <em>felt</em> like I expected, though.</p>
<p>Much of adulthood is like this, I think: where stories train us to think that life is experienced <em>as stories</em>, with rising action and climax and denouement and clarity about which is which, life as we actually experience it is more self-contiguous than that.</p>
<p>When I was younger, I found the end of <cite>The Lord of the Rings</cite> rather curious in many ways: Sam’s response made sense to me, and Frodo’s… didn’t, exactly. A truly momentous thing has happened in the world, with his efforts at the center of it. Yet he returns home and finds things not as he expected: the world has changed, and he has changed, and he enjoys his life and goes on living it for quite some time, but with a deep and lasting sense of melancholy. I wonder now, having lived through nothing so momentous as the War of the Ring—or Tolkien’s own experience of the first World War, which was itself an event deserving of the word “momentous”—if part of what Tolkien was painting there was his own sense of life as it simply went on and he found that both he and the world had changed. Though the events we experience do inevitably mark us, they mark us in slower and subtler ways than we imagine as children.</p>
<p>More: the marks they make come not at the moment so much as in all the moments afterward, when many things are just as they were before but so many others are different (and even those, often in ways so small we don’t notice them all that much at first).</p>
<p>I have at times found this actively disorienting. When we moved across the country to be nearer family in late 2017, I kept expecting to feel… <em>something</em>: to have some heightened experience of difference. That wave of emotion never came. My days went on just as they had before, just with a different local time for the meetings courtesy of changing time zones. That there was no obvious half-empty page at the turn to a new chapter left me feeling off: <i>shouldn’t there be?</i></p>
<p>Yet a year and some months in, my life in North Carolina feels a lifetime away. My friendships are different. My rhythms and routines have all shifted in little ways, pushed on by everything from differences in my family’s schedule to the differences in the weather. I feel the difference the more keenly (if still in that melancholic way) now than I did when I expected to most. It comes out and <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/time-does-not-heal.html">batters me with grief</a> in surprising ways and at surprising times; and it comes out in little joys at times as well.</p>
<p>I am sure the same will be true of this transition in jobs. These relationships I have built up over the last three years will shift and change. Some of them will fade; others (perhaps surprising ones!) will endure and change but for the stronger. My daily routine will be subtly different, and the particular sources of frustration and joy will shift in kind with the differences in task and the differences in my company culture and all the myriad small things that will be different—and I will not <em>really</em> be able to feel any of those, I think, for quite some time.</p>
<p>This is, I find, much of what it <em>is</em> to be an adult. Life is full not so much of the big moments we expect (and even, to some extent, experience) as children; but rather the slow accumulations of change, the long melancholia, the slow-built joys. Life is sediment, slowly forming something deep. The mighty eruptions that are a marriage or a child’s birth are few; and thankfully so are the earthquakes that are a loved one’s death or other such griefs.</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>The 18th was my 3-year anniversary, so it’ll be just under three years and one week!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Don’t Forget Your Notebook2019-01-03T17:40:00-05:002019-01-03T17:40:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-01-03:/2019/dont-forget-your-notebook.htmlAn observation on Zettelkasten and the continuing value of physical media.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people interested in research, note-taking, memory, and the like.</i></p>
<p>I’m sitting at a coffee shop enjoying a tasty drink and working on an app idea I’ve been slowly fleshing out over the last 3½ years… in a paper notebook.</p>
<p>I’ve been <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten/" title="#zettelkasten on chriskrycho.com">writing a bit</a> here over the last month or so about my experiment in building a <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/extend-your-mind-and-memory-with-a-zettelkasten/" title="Extend Your Mind and Memory With a Zettelkasten">Zettelkasten</a>, and so far I’m quite pleased with it. It’s already proven helpful to me, and given my experiences so far I expect it to be much more so over the (hopefully many!) years ahead. I’ve <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/starting-to-build-a-zettelkasten.html" title="Starting to Build a Zettelkasten">noted</a> that <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/zettelkasten-update-all-in-on-bear.html" title="Zettelkasten Update: All in on Bear">I’m putting all of my notes</a> in <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a>, as it’s a handy tool that <em>mostly</em> maps to the way I think about note-taking.</p>
<p>As I’m sitting working on this app design, though, it strikes me how valuable I find a physical notebook to be. Plain old pen and paper remain my favorite tool for <em>thinking</em>.</p>
<p>I’m not alone in this, <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/use-real-notebook/" title="Use a Real Notebook">even among the proponents of a Zettelkasten approach</a>. Nor does this surprise me. I’ve long observed that I write—and, more importantly—<em>think</em> differently with pen and paper than I do with keyboard and computer.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> That is true <em>especially</em> true of poetry, but it’s still a factor even for something like app design—and not only, but certainly, as a factor of the tactility of it and for the sheer analogicity (if you’ll pardon the neologism) of it. Pen scratching on paper, with <em>genuinely</em> immediate feedback, is different even than the best experience of stylus and laptop.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> Even for something like sketching out a particular <abbr title="user interface">UI</abbr> flow, a notebook affords different things than a tablet does. Perhaps doubly so because of the very analog nature of pen and paper: I am not tempted to make sure my lines are <i>just so</i> on paper as I am on an iPad, where “undo” is a constant temptation, the very expression of the perfect being the enemy of the good.</p>
<p>The net of this is simple: even if you’re adopting something like <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a> for your way of storing and searching your notes, it’s valuable to have paper and pen-or-pencil near to hand. You may spend a little more time copying and elaborating notes as you transfer them from your notebook than you would if you simply did everything digitally from the start, but you will also think different—and, at least in my experience, <em>better</em>—thoughts using pen and paper than not.</p>
<p>It’s a truism in software development that we ought to use the right tool fo the job. The same goes for <em>learning</em>, and we ought not facilely dismiss the old tools simply because the newer ones have their own strengths.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I include iPads here, because the difference <em>seems</em> to be typing into a screen. There are also real differences I perceive between writing with an iPad and keyboard than with a traditional computer, but those pale in comparison to the difference between computer and analog.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I have an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. The responsiveness is astounding and outstanding; but it is not paper and pen.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
I Have a Patreon!2019-01-01T10:23:00-05:002019-01-01T10:23:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-01-01:/2019/i-have-a-patreon.htmlIf you like what you get from reading this site, you can support my writing.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people who <em>really</em> like this website and like patronage or crowd-funding.</i></p>
<p>Happy 2019, readers! As I move into 2019, I wanted to publicize something that has <em>existed</em> for most of the last year, but which I have not yet made much noise about: <a href="https://patreon.com/chriskrycho">my Patreon</a>!</p>
<p>In this space, I write blog posts and essays on technology, theology, and art. I write about the process of building open-source software. I sometimes even write poetry and compose music and share those here! <em>I do all of those things no matter what.</em> But if you wanted to support my various efforts in this space by helping me stay well-supplied with delicious coffee, I’d really appreciate it!</p>
<p>The benefits for patrons, as I’m publicly launching it:</p>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col style="width: 14%" />
<col style="width: 49%" />
<col style="width: 36%" />
</colgroup>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th>$1/month</th>
<th>$5/month</th>
<th>$25/month</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td>A shoutout on Twitter!</td>
<td>⃪ plus access to a private podcast about what I’m thinking about and working!</td>
<td>⃪ plus commentary and ancillary materials for my essays!</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>I don’t expect this kind of patronage ever to be a massive part of my income. I do think it’s a good thing to support the writers and thinkers whose work impacts us, and so it’s important to <em>let</em> people support us if they’re interested in doing so! So if you’d like to support the work I do on this website, and especially if you’d like to see me do more of the important, careful essays that are the kinds of things I want to be doing, consider supporting me!</p>
<p>(Note that posts about this will not be a regular occurrence on the blog. I will probably integrate a link to the Patreon account into my RSS feed, but otherwise I will not mention it on the site more than once a year.)</p>
<p>Regardless of whether you support my work on this site financially, thank you for reading!</p>
iZotope RX is Amazing2018-12-31T19:45:00-05:002018-12-31T19:45:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-31:/2018/izotope-rx-is-amazing.htmliZotope RX is an expensive tool for audio post-production, and it's an amazing tool for podcasting if you have the budget for it.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience:</a></b> people interested in audio post-production for podcasts.</i></p>
<p>For the last I’ve been using <a href="https://www.izotope.com/en/products/repair-and-edit/rx.html">iZotope RX</a><a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> to post-process the audio for <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/podcasts">the various podcasts</a> I produce. It is an absolutely astounding piece of software, and if you’re at the point in your podcasting work where it makes sense—and if you have the budget for it!—I very, very highly recommend it.</p>
<p>First, let’s me say something really important, though: for most podcasters, this is not where you should be spending your time or money. You will see far more improvement by investing first of all in your microphone <em>technique</em>, secondly in your microphone itself, and third in your recording environment.</p>
<aside>
<p>Feel free to skip this aside if you’re already in the know about these basics!</p>
<ul>
<li><p><b>You microphone technique:</b> consistently staying at an appropriate distance from your microphone will make far more difference than all the post-processing in the world in terms of the quality and consistency of your sound.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p></li>
<li><p><b>Your microphone itself:</b> you probably don’t need to spend $600 on a microphone for podcasting, and if you’re just starting out, you <em>definitely</em> shouldn’t. However, picking up something <em>decent</em>—like the <a href="https://www.audio-technica.com/cms/wired_mics/b8dd84773f83092c/index.html">Audio Technica ATR2100-USB</a>—and combining that with good technique will make a massive difference over recording into your earbuds or your</p></li>
<li><p><b>Your recording environment:</b> changing the sound dynamics of your space is often easier and certainly <a href="https://www.homedepot.com/b/Lumber-Composites-Paneling-Acoustic-Wall-Paneling/N-5yc1vZcbqd">cheaper</a> than investing post-processing software—and, just as importantly, it will dramatically reduce the <em>need</em> for post-processing software.</p></li>
</ul>
</aside>
<p>All of those things being true, there are still times when post-processing software is useful! If you’re recording interviews<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> in particular, you can have the best control over your own sound in the world and still need post-production software. You may have limitations on how much you can change your recording environment. (I was living in seminary housing when I picked up iZotope: I literally didn’t have <em>room</em> for sound treatments on the walls in my recording area!) You may have times when there are unexpected noise inputs. And for all of those, iZotope RX is just astoundingly good.</p>
<p>Many people interested in basic audio post-production have likely experimented with the denoising functionality in Audacity, or even used a better tool like the one in Adobe Audition. I’ve used those, and they were <em>okay</em> for certain kinds of noise, but I ultimately found them wanting and never much used them. iZotope’s Spectral De-noise tool is not like those. It consistently removes <em>all</em> the noise matching the profiles you give it, and—more impressively, if you’ve used Audacity or even Audition—it does it without destroying the quality of the actual audio!</p>
<p><a href="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/izotope-denoise.png"><img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/izotope-denoise-thumb.png" alt="Spectral Denoise in iZotope RX 6" /></a></p>
<p>Other tools require a bit more finesse to use than the spectral denoise, but are equally powerful: De-ess and De-plosive to cut down harsh “s” sounds and loud “p” or “b” sounds,<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a> Mouth De-click to deal with overly aggressive smacking and clicking noises; Breath Control to cut down the volume of those sharp intakes of breath that can sound odd in a discussion… there’s a lot here, and they all work <em>extremely</em> well if you deploy them judiciously and use them when you need them.</p>
<p>The thing that actually prompted me to write this up, though, was my discovery a little while ago that these are all standard <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Units">Audio Unit</a> plugins—which means that you can use them in <em>other</em> tools on macOS. And the secret sauce here for me was combining them with <a href="https://rogueamoeba.com/">Rogue Amoeba</a>’s <a href="https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/">Audio Hijack</a> software and an <a href="http://www.icecast.org">Icecast</a> server. I took my local audio, punched up the volume, and then ran the Spectral De-noise plugin against that audio just before streaming it.</p>
<p><a href="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/audio-hijack-izotope-denoise.png"><img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/audio-hijack-izotope-denoise-thumb.png" alt="Audio Hijack with iZotope Denoise" /></a></p>
<p>It turns out that even with my not-at-all-cheap recording setup<a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5" role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a>, I end up with some low-level (but quite audible! background hum when I punch up the volume like that. I use iZotope to kill that, so that the listening experience for any live listeners to the show when recording get something <em>nearly</em> as nice as the final product, at least in terms of sound quality.</p>
<p>The net of all of this is: if you’re making any reasonable amount of money from your podcasting, and you’ve already invested in your technique, equipment, and environment… you should buy iZotope. It’s amazing.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’m using version 6; version 7 is relatively recently released.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I gave my <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> cohost <a href="http://stephencarradini.com">Stephen Carradini</a> a hard time about this for a while: he is one of those people who just cannot stop moving, <em>especially</em> when he is talking. Being the good sport that he is, he improved dramatically over the course of <a href="https://winningslowly.org/season-6.html">Season 6</a>.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>or big <a href="https://www.theincomparable.com">panel shows</a>, but most of us are not <cite>The Incomparable</cite>!<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>again: start with your microphone technique and getting a cheap pop shield!<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn5" role="doc-endnote"><p>a <a href="https://tascam.com/us/product/us-2x2/top">Tascam USB 2x2 interface</a> and a <a href="https://www.shure.com/americas/products/microphones/beta/beta-87A-vocal-microphone">Shure Beta 87A microphone</a><a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
My Top Five Posts of 20182018-12-27T08:50:00-05:002018-12-27T08:50:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-27:/2018/my-top-five-posts-of-2018.htmlThe best of my writing this year, ranked exactly and only by my opinion (I don’t have analytics to use even if I wanted to, and I don’t want to).
<p>This time of year I see “most popular on my blog this year” posts flying around. I can’t share those because I stopped doing any kind of analytics half a decade ago and haven’t looked back. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever for my writing, and I commend it to you. In lieu of a “most read” posts (which you’re just reinforcing by doing that anyway!)</p>
<p>Instead, here are the top five <em>best</em> or <em>most important</em> posts I wrote this year, in my opinion.</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/tweet-less-blog-more.html">Tweet Less, Blog More: An uncomplicated game plan for writing this year.</a> (January 2, ~500 words)</p>
<p>Writing tweet storms can be immediately gratifying, but blogging is way better long-term. I hope you’ll consider it for 2019!</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/stop-saying-what-capitalism-does.html">Stop Saying “What Capitalism Does”</a> (March 9, ~1,000 words)</p>
<p>Written after reading the influential essay “The Californian Ideology,” because the phrase “what __ does” makes such a mess of the complicated relationship between people and systems.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/building-things.html">Building Things: A meander on leadership roles and the kinds of contributions we make.</a> (August 6, ~1,000 words)</p>
<p>I had cause to reflect a <em>lot</em> this year on the shape of leadership in technical contexts; here I tried to thread some needles.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/dealing-with-burnout-in-public.html">Dealing With Burnout In Public: Because if I’m going to go through this, it might as well be a help to others.</a> (August 20, ~850 words)</p>
<p>My attempt to provide a Christian frame for my approach to burnout—and why I blogged about it at such length.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audiences: ‘The Internet’ is far too broad an audience for, well, basically any post I write.</a> (October 18, ~700 words)</p>
<p>A new practice for myself, and an attempt to incept it into the world-at-large—because global audiences break everything.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>And, as a bonus, a number of other things I think are interesting:</p>
<ul>
<li>all my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten/">Zettelkasten posts</a></li>
<li>all my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout/">burnout posts</a></li>
<li><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/scales-of-feedback-time-in-software-development.html">Scales of Feedback Time in Software Development</a>—my most important technical post this year</li>
<li><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/free-speech.html">Free Speech</a>—on outsourcing all of our public discourse to social media</li>
<li><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/how-i-write-a-talk.html">How I Write a Talk</a></li>
</ul>
Trying a New Book-Reading Strategy2018-12-26T09:10:00-05:002018-12-26T09:10:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-26:/2018/trying-a-new-book-reading-strategy.htmlImproving my approach to deep reading with better notes and my Zettelkasten.<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience:</a></b> people broadly interested in reading, writing, learning, and research systems.</i></p>
<p>Today I started trying a new(-to-me!) approach to deeply reading books, with some relatively light reading (so that I can get the practice).<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I’m hoping to be able to grow this skill and use it effectively for learning deeply in 2019. The strategy is pretty simple:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p>Use very quick, light marks in the margins: <code>✓</code> for agreement, <code>x</code> for disagreement, <code>~</code> for something that’s worth noting as halfway right but worth clarifying, and <code>*</code> for key arguments. This is basically the tack I’ve taken for a long time, but I’ve dropped all underlining or bracketing from the process: they’re slow, and I’m not really persuaded they’re more helpful than just adding a quick mark, as the really helpful bits come later in my experience.</p></li>
<li><p>On finishing reading each chapter (or major section):</p>
<ul>
<li>Pull in the quotes I want to keep from it. Interact with them as makes sense.</li>
<li>Create a note with a short summary of the argument of the chapter. Link from it to the quotes.</li>
</ul>
<p>The goal here is to have a quick view into the contents of the chapter, including the various quotes that were particularly salient from it.</p></li>
<li><p>On finishing the book, summarize the argument of the book by using the quotes and summaries of the chapters along the way to guide me in formulating my own interpretation of the author’s arguments. Add in some explicit interaction with the argument-in-sum.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Along the way, I’ll also write up other thoughts and interactions with the text, linking them to the other notes as makes sense.</p>
<p>Once I have these kinds of notes, I will have a lot of material available to put to whatever use. Most importantly, I will have done a lot more active thinking about the ideas I encountered, and will have quick access to those thoughts to build on later. But I will also be able to use both those quick references to the book and to my own thoughts as prompted by the book to generate writing prompts for blog posts, book reviews, teaching notes, and so on.</p>
<p>You’ll notice that this is quite similar in a number of ways to <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/just-write-down-what-you-do.html">my approach to logging my work</a>; that’s intentional. I have found that an extremely fruitful way to be able to quickly grasp what I have <em>done</em> over a given span. It seems likely that this variant on it will be equally useful for quickly grasping what I have <em>read</em> over a given span.</p>
<p>One other note: I will definitely not be doing this for <em>everything</em> I read. That would be laborious indeed! I plan to do this for books which I find to be of particularly high value this way. Many books simply do not warrant it, and indeed warrant little more than a quick skim (or to be put aside entirely). I wrote a couple days ago about my intent to use my time more carefully in 2019; one part of that is carefully distinguishing in <em>how</em> I read as well as <em>what</em> I read.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’m reading <cite>The Shepherd Leader: Achieving Effective Shepherding in Your Church</cite>, by Timothy Z. Witmer, as part of the elder training work at my church, as I have been nominated to and expect to stand for the office of elder in mid-2019. That might not seem like light reading to you, but I’ve read an awful lot of academic theology over the last decade and no few books in this same vein during my M. Div. work.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
2018: Some Closing Thoughts2018-12-23T14:35:00-05:002018-12-23T14:35:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-23:/2018/some-closing-thoughts.htmlThis was not the year I expected, and it had more than its share of difficulties. But it is done, and God is still gracious and good.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience:</a></b> mostly my future self!—but you’re welcome to read along and see my thoughts on how 2018 went for me and what I hope 2019 will look like.</i></p>
<p>As has long been my tradition<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I’m wrapping up the year by looking back at what happened in it and thinking about what I’d like to do in the year ahead. I say little here about family or church, but that should not be taken as an indicator of importance: in fact, my commitments in those two spheres deeply inform everything else!</p>
<section id="section" class="level2">
<h2>2018</h2>
<p>2018 was not the year I hoped or expected it might be. It was difficult in a great many ways, and the more so as the year went on. It was not the single hardest year I’ve had—that title goes without question to 2016—but it’s up there. There’s still a lot of good in the mix, but it was hard.</p>
<section id="podcasting" class="level3">
<h3>Podcasting</h3>
<p>I had intended to publish about twice as many episodes of <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> this year as I was ultimately able to release. My goal was actually to be releasing 3–4 episodes each month, and to cover most of the rest of the language! As it turned out, I was able to release only 1–2 episodes per month. I’m nonetheless very happy with the episodes I <em>did</em> release this year. And <a href="https://newrustacean.com/show_notes/bonus/burnout/">my episode on burnout</a> may end up being one of the most important things to come out of the show, from the email responses I’ve received about it.</p>
<p>We launched a new design of the <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly website</a> and we were able to record and publish about three quarters of the episodes we had planned for Season 6 before the burnout tanked me. There’s a wrap-up episode we recorded and which should be out in a few days (after I edit it!). We also released our 100th episode, which was fun! It was frustrating not to be able to finish everything we had planned, but I remain proud of the work we’ve done there over the last five years, and this season had a couple really important episodes in it. If you didn’t listen to anything else, I’d commend <a href="https://winningslowly.org/6.04/">6.04: Move Slowly and Fix Things</a> and <a href="https://winningslowly.org/6.06/">6.06: A Kind of Blindness</a>. The latter, on “big data” and the difference between information and wisdom, is one of my single favorite episodes of the show.</p>
</section>
<section id="reading-and-writing" class="level3">
<h3>Reading and writing</h3>
<p>I also set out this year to read a lot of books—I had a list of a 14 pieces of nonfiction on the list—and in the end I finished <em>none</em> of them. I participated in a reading group which covered much of <cite>Domain Modeling Made Functional</cite>, and I made it through the first fifth or so of St. Augustine’s <cite>City of God</cite>, but I didn’t even manage to finish a few books I had started <em>last</em> year! The only things I managed to finish were novels:</p>
<ul>
<li>I finished rereading <cite>The Wheel of Time</cite> and enjoyed some new-to-me “popcorn” in the form of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/agent-of-change.html"><cite>Agent of Change</cite></a>.</li>
<li>I devoured Mary Robinette Kowal’s <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/the-calculating-stars.html"><cite>The Calculating Stars</cite></a> and <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/review-the-fated-sky.html"><cite>The Fated Sky</cite></a>.</li>
<li>I read a couple Hugo and Nebula award winners: Larry Niven’s <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/ringworld-review.html"><cite>Ringworld</cite></a> and N.K. Jemisin’s <cite>The Fifth Season</cite>.</li>
</ul>
<p>While those novels were basically the only thing I read, I very much like the habit of writing very short reviews I started with those novels. I expect to keep that habit, and it should be useful as I dig back into nonfiction in the future!</p>
<p>Speaking of writing: for all that this year felt like it was unproductive in some ways, I still ended up blogging to the tune of somewhere around 75,000 words across about 95 posts.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> That’s a solid showing for a year full of burnout (even if burnout itself <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout">ended up being the subject of no few of those</a>: about 6,000 words).<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> But one of my goals for the year was to publish a few longer-form essays, possibly even getting paid for them. That certainly did not happen; I did not manage to publish even a single essay at Mere Orthodoxy.</p>
</section>
<section id="health" class="level3">
<h3>Health</h3>
<p>I ran a fair bit, and am slowly adjusting to living at roughly 7,000 feet above sea level instead of about 400 feet above sea level. But for the third year in a row, I did <em>not</em> manage to run a race. I can still feel, and the more so at this altitude, the lingering effects of the mild case of walking pneumonia I came down with in the summer of 2016. The one thing I did manage in terms of exercise and health was a <em>lot</em> of cycling. Despite my dad’s being in the midst of ongoing monthly chemo treatments for a brain tumor, he and I rode 80 miles in two days together for the <a href="http://www.childrenscoloradofoundation.org/courage-classic">Courage Classic</a>.</p>
</section>
<section id="work" class="level3">
<h3>Work</h3>
<p>Work has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, I accomplished a lot this year. Despite a number of large roadblocks that were entirely outside my control, I led a very important effort to hit several meaningful milestones. I also kept pushing the state of our tooling forward, including some important open-source work, and at the end of November gave a “tech talk” on technical costs which seems to have made a real (if, so far, still small!) impact on the entire organization.</p>
<p>On the other hand, work directly triggered the burnout I experienced. To be sure, I had plenty of existing stressors from moving across and walking through my dad’s fight with cancer with the rest of my family. But the things that pushed me over the edge from <i>tired and worn down</i> to <i>burnout</i> were challenges at work. There were the aforementioned roadblocks. There were some high-stress projects. But most of all, there is a lack of alignment between my engineering and business philosophies and those in play at Olo. Those aren’t <em>moral</em>, but prudential and strategic, kinds of differences—but that does not make them unimportant! More on this below.</p>
</section>
<section id="in-sum" class="level3">
<h3>In sum</h3>
<p>In spite of the burnout, and notwithstanding all the things I did not get done, I’m grateful for this year. My dad has so far not only survived his battle with a brain tumor but is thriving overall. I managed to come through my experience of burnout mostly okay. Our new church has been a great blessing to us, and we’ve been able to step into serving in many ways already.</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="section-1" class="level2">
<h2>2019</h2>
<p>So looking forward into 2019, my hopes (I dare not call them plans anymore):</p>
<section id="podcasting-1" class="level3">
<h3>Podcasting</h3>
<p>I want to publish the dozen more episodes of <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> that I had planned for 2018! At my current rate of about two a month, that’ll take me the first six months or so of the year. Once I’m through that list, I’ll have covered the entirety of the language and quite a few of the most important crates in the ecosystem. But there are always new things happening, so I’ll have some interesting decisions to make about where to take the show.</p>
<p>I’m also going to keep producing <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> with Stephen Carradini. We have not yet nailed down what Season 7 will focus on or look like yet, but we’re far from done. The issue is not finding something to talk about, but narrowing it down to which specific things we want to zoom in on! We also have an interview lined up in January (which will come out as an inter-season standalone episode) which we’re <em>very</em> excited about. It’ll be quite different from the other interviews we’ve done, and represents an important step forward for the show.</p>
</section>
<section id="reading-and-writing-1" class="level3">
<h3>Reading and Writing</h3>
<p>My reading and writing goals for the year ahead are intentionally modest. I’ve consistently failed to achieve my more ambitious goals over the past few years, and I’m rather chastened by that. I also have to remind myself fairly often that I will, Lord willing, have many decades of life when I <em>don’t</em> have my kids around. That means both that there is plenty of time to spend on reading and writing later and that there is <em>not</em> very much time to spend with my daughters later. Insofar as I want to continue reading and writing in important ways—and I do!—I need to make my reading and writing time count by approaching them in more focused and targeted ways.</p>
<p>I have people ask me quite regularly for recommendations on various topics, and I simply can’t give them! That needs to change, so I want to read at least four popular level books on theology or culture—about one a quarter. My plan is to review them in this space, but also (more importantly!) to be able to point people in my church toward or away from them. In the long-term, I would love to take up a role (official or not) as a custodian of our church’s library.</p>
<p>I also want to keep my mind sharp and growing on theology, culture, politics, art, etc. I’ve very much felt the lack of engagement on that over the last few years (and have said so here more than once). In that connection, I aim to work through two academic works on theology, and two on some other aspect of culture. I have yet to decide what those will be. Most likely I’ll start by finishing the volumes I already started, but I also expect to spend a bit of time on Patristic Christology, as I’m teaching a class on the person and nature of Jesus in August for our church.</p>
<p>Writing-wise, I know that I’ll continue blogging here. However, I actually hope to blog <em>less</em> overall. The time I spent writing 70,000 words this year was time well-spent, but as I note <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/intentional-cyclicality.html" title="Intentional Cyclicality (March)">time</a> and <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/writing-plans-for-the-rest-of-2018.html" title="Writing Plans for the Rest of 2018 (May)">again</a>, I have a hard time <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/cant-stop-wont-stop.html" title="Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop (September)"><em>not</em> blogging</a>. I plan to work on that in a couple ways.</p>
<p>First, I’m going to try to evaluate, with each idea I have, whether it should be a blog post or just go in my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten/">Zettelkasten</a>. So much of my writing over the last decade has been a kind of <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.html">public thinking-out-loud</a>. That’s good, but I also feel much more need to polish something if I’m going to publish it than if it’s a private note. The way I polish a blog post is nothing like the way I polish essays, of course, but I do spend some time clarifying and adding nuance. Even when <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">specifying an assumed audience</a>, I need to be more careful if I am writing for others than if I am working something out by writing about it for myself. As a result, I expect a lot of things which might have ended up on the blog in the past to just go in <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a>.</p>
<p>Second, I plan (and we’ll see how this goes), I’m going to try <em>very</em> hard to write fewer blog posts in favor of more well-developed essays. About a month ago, I started drafting an essay which seems like it might be legitimately important. Unfortunately, even though it is certainly more worth my time than the things I <em>have</em> written since then (<a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/internal-and-external-parameter-names-in-javascript-and-typescript.html">1</a>, <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/starting-to-build-a-zettelkasten.html">2</a>, <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/zettelkasten-update-all-in-on-bear.html">3</a>, <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/stewarding-my-reserves.html">4</a>, <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/hey-siri-record-a-zettel.html">5</a>, <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/javascript-is-c.html">6</a>), I have not made progress since the day I started it. It’s not that my notes on research and note-taking are worthless. Rather, it’s that there is a cost to spending my limited time on writing those instead of more important writing efforts.<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a> At a minimum, I intend to do even <em>less</em> polish on those posts than I have to date, when I let myself write them.</p>
</section>
<section id="health-1" class="level3">
<h3>Health</h3>
<p>I have a handful of goals for this year in terms of physical health:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>I want to lose about 10 pounds. I’m at a healthy weight currently, but I felt and performed at my best a few years ago when I was down in my target weight range. This is going to require tweaking the <em>content</em>, rather than the <em>quantity</em>, of what I eat, and introduce more variation into the kinds of exercise I’m doing. I can tell both that my metabolism has shifted as I’ve hit my 30’s, and that I’ve acclimated to the workout load that I’ve more-or-less consistently held over the last eight years. It’s annoying, honestly!</p></li>
<li><p>I plan to participate in the <a href="http://www.childrenscoloradofoundation.org/courage-classic">Courage Classic</a> again with my dad, and I’d like to do the 80-mile route at least one of the days. Maybe both days, if he and I are both trained for it! Unfortunately, this probably means investing in a new bike. The one I have currently is almost twenty years old, and it’s a good bike… but it’s increasingly going to need parts replaced. So: CraigsList here I come.</p></li>
<li><p>I’d like to complete another half marathon, probably in May. I don’t particularly care what my pace ends up being: I just want to get back in the rhythm and routine of training and completing the event. I went through a similar push after we moved to North Carolina, and 30 months later I ran the best race of my life. Now, I know that <a href="https://runkeeper.com/user/chriskrycho/activity/684713960">the sub-1:25 time I ran back in 2015</a> is not something I’m apt to see again, especially at altitude, but I’d like to get back to that kind of consistency and discipline (and I’ll see where it gets me!).</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Given that I’m currently planning two events in late spring and summer, I also need to find something to do in the fall and winter next year, just to keep up my fitness level <em>for</em> something. Previous years, I had the same issue for the spring, and the year I was in my very best shape, I played Ultimate in the spring and fall <em>and</em> did a super sprint triathlon in the summer. So: something like that again, perhaps.</p>
</section>
<section id="work-1" class="level3">
<h3>Work</h3>
<p>As I close in on the end of the first decade of my career, I’m <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/career-trajectory.html">thinking a lot</a> about what I want the next decade of my career to look like. I don’t expect to be able to figure it all out ahead of time, of course. At the same time, I’m resolved to find opportunities that align more with my values and the general aims for my career I’ve started developing. As I suggested above, I’ve found that I’m not on the same page as, well, <em>most</em> businesses about how to approach a great many questions. There is no short-term fix for this; but in the longer-term I want to have enough independence to do things more in line with my <a href="https://winningslowly.org">“winning slowly”</a> view of the world.</p>
<p>One part of that is that I intend to push forward on a few things I’ve been plotting for a few years now. I started learning Rust back in the summer of 2015 for a <em>reason</em>, and I’m coming back to that reason this year. I don’t in the least regret the detour that I’ve gone on in the meantime: New Rustacean remains one of my favorite things I’ve done, and is certainly a more important contribution than any code I could have written in that time. But the project that got this all started has my attention again, and I will be spending some of my personal time on it this year.<a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5" role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a> It’s the kind of thing that I rather hope <em>is</em> my career a few years down the line—but there’s a boatload of work to do to get there.</p>
<p>Another part is looking at a much longer horizon even. Over the past three years, I’ve become increasingly interested in programming language theory and practice. I have some ideas and insights I think are genuinely valuable and <em>relatively</em> unique (at a minimum they’re not currently in use in industry anywhere, and I’ve yet to find any papers touching on them) and I would like to see them land at some point. Getting there is a long game; I am not exaggerating when I say that if I ever really make this happen, I expect it to be in my 40s. Probably my <em>late</em> 40s. But that gives me time to learn in the meantime: to build small languages and see what that process is like, to find ways to collaborate on existing language projects, to learn a wide array of existing languages in more detail, and so on. If the ideas I have are ever to come to fruition, all of those things are necessary precursors for my efforts.</p>
<p>Here in late 2018, I have <em>just</em> started on much of that: I am reading a book on programming language development and taking an awful lots of notes along the way. I will be completing the exercises in the book, and I will also be trying to learn enough to build my own little toy languages along the way. I am getting some practice in the pragmatics of it by collaborating with Dave Herman on <a href="https://github.com/tc39/proposal-do-expressions">the <code>do</code> expressions JavaScript proposal</a>, which we hope to make substantial progress on in 2019. These kinds of programming language ideas will <em>not</em> be the emphasis in 2019, but they will be a piece, in the interest of laying the foundations I will need later.</p>
</section>
<section id="in-sum-1" class="level3">
<h3>In sum</h3>
<p>I hope 2019 is a less difficult year than 2018 was. I am also aiming to be more effective in accomplishing the things I care about, in part by setting more modest goals for myself. Keep podcasting. Read a few books of a few specific sorts. Write some essays, at the expense of some blog posts. Start on some new projects, but not in a hurry or a rush. Love my family and love my church.</p>
</section>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’ve been doing this since 2007, but I’m not linking you to the blog post I wrote that year. There’s nothing quite like reading things I wrote halfway through college to make me cringe. There is some good stuff there, but also: 20-year-old Chris Krycho was, uhh… <em>very</em> emotional. And the way I approach my faith has shifted a lot since then.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Running <code>wc -w</code> on the posts I wrote in 2018 reports 80,911 words, but that number includes all the post metadata. Assuming an average of 65 words of metadata per post, across the 96 posts I wrote, that comes out to around 6,250 words. So: very roughly 75,000, for an average of about 780 words per post. Not too shabby!<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>Meta note: that includes this post. So the final count depends on how long I make the previous footnote. And this one. Such recursion!<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>So: what of this kind of year-end review, which is itself not exactly one of those more important writing projects? Good point. I find his exercise helpful, though, and I’d almost certainly be doing it privately in nearly identical terms. I have found this practice helpful over the years, despite never coming near accomplishing the specific goals I’ve set myself, so I expect to keep up this habit.<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn5" role="doc-endnote"><p>This is another reason for the emphasis on focusing my writing time on high-value projects. Time I spend writing random blog posts is time I am <em>not</em> spending on these programming efforts.<a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Hey Siri, Record a Zettel2018-12-14T22:15:00-05:002018-12-14T22:15:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-14:/2018/hey-siri-record-a-zettel.htmlMaking some small Siri shortcuts for adding to my Zettelkasten on the fly.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience:</a></b> people interested in reading, writing, learning, and research systems—particularly on iOS, and particularly with automation in view.</i></p>
<p>A few evenings ago, I spent a little while building out some Siri Shortcuts to make the process of building out notes in <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten">my Zettelkasten</a> on the fly easier. Building them in Bear is easy <em>enough</em>, but it’s even nicer to just be able to tap a button and have things like the date auto-generated for the note title in exactly the format I want: <code>YYYY.MM.DD.HHMM</code>, like <code>2018.12.14.2205</code> for a note created on December 14, 2018, at 10:05 pm.</p>
<p>This timestamp format means I can always find notes by when they were written, and it’s easy to sort them by when I created them, which in turn seems the kind of thing that will prove helpful in the long-term, given how much our memories are <em>associative</em>. (This insight is <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/no-categories/">not original</a> by any means, but it’s something I’ve long valued in my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/just-write-down-what-you-do.html">work</a>.)</p>
<p>So having a little tool that handles that part automatically is <em>great</em>. The other thing that’s nice about using shortcuts is that I can use them in a hands-free context. I can now just say, “Hey Siri, record a new Zettel” and (since Shortcut configurations are shared across my iCloud account), I can do the whole process without typing a thing. Tagging is a bit harder here, but I can do well enough (it helps that I enunciate <em>extremely</em> clearly).</p>
<p>One thing I wish is that iOS had support for doing these kinds of things when in do-not-disturb mode when driving. That’s the time when my “record a new Zettel” Siri Shortcut would be <em>most</em> handy, and it’s not available. I’d be perfectly fine with having to come back and do a bit of cleanup later to get it <em>just right</em>, as long as I could get the thought down somewhere I could come back to it later. You can do things like say “Hey Siri, in Bear, add a note,” and Siri will prompt you for its content—so clearly the functionality is there. SiriKit just needs to better support it.</p>
<p>As for these particular shortcuts: I’m still working out the kinks, but for what it’s worth, here are the shortcuts I’ve built so far:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/c2406245de5846bebbda93d798034e25">Record a New Zettel</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/ae956fdd00454f0d824dd47ea69cecd2">Write a New Zettel</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/45a7c484309344c9a59e2f3e48a68083">Quote → Zettel</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I’m also thinking I’ll end up using the built-in hook Bear has to download a web page, but I haven’t worked that into my flow just yet.</p>
Stewarding My Reserves2018-12-09T18:15:00-05:002018-12-09T21:20:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-09:/2018/stewarding-my-reserves.htmlI seem to be through the worst of this burnout. But stewarding my recovery is its own challenge.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience:</a></b> anyone and everyone, but <em>especially</em> people who have followed along as <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout/">I have written about my experience of burnout</a>.</i></p>
<p>I’ve slowly but surely been coming out of this burnout over the last seven weeks or so. I pulled <em>hard</em> on some levers at work and got some changes there, which gave me the space to start recovering. I have also been working aggressively at identifying what steps I need to take to deal with my mental health more generally—including dealing with a bunch of griefs that have mounted up over many, many years, and which I have (for various reasons, many of them good) simply set aside to deal with later. Do that too long, and later becomes <em>now</em>, whether you want it to or not.</p>
<p>I find that this recovery phase has its own dangers, subtler but no less real than being in the thick of the burnout was. Now, I’m tempted to dive back into the deep end—to forget just how rough a spot I was in not that many weeks ago, and pick up too much, and… land myself back in that mess. As one of my pastors put it to me last week (putting to words things I’d been thinking), it’s easy to forget that just because we’re through the burnout doesn’t mean we have any reserves.</p>
<p>Spoiler: he was right. I don’t have any reserves.</p>
<p>I felt, this week, a bit of a slide toward the same malaise and cynicism and deep fatigue that characterized me for a good long chunk of the year—and it’s no surprise why. We’ve been going nonstop since before Thanksgiving. I drove away from my house for a quick personal trip only twelve hours after we got back from visiting Jaimie’s family in Texas over that holiday. I gave one of the best (and probably one of the most important) tech talks I’ve ever given at Olo the day after I got back from that trip. I helped finish getting <a href="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/11/29/a-new-look-for-rust-lang-org.html">the Rust website redesign</a> out the door in time for the <a href="https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/12/06/Rust-1.31-and-rust-2018.html">Rust 2018 Edition launch</a> this week.</p>
<p>And it is very obvious to me that this has been <em>too much</em>. I need to steward my recovery carefully, so that it proves to be a genuine recovery and not merely a little upswing before dipping back into burnout. I need to go ahead and deal with those unprocessed griefs. I need to say no to more things outside my family and work, no matter how good or appealing those things are. In the medium term, I need to build better patterns of life around all these things, so that I don’t end up again where I was in early October.</p>
Zettelkasten Update: All in on Bear2018-12-08T09:55:00-05:002018-12-08T09:55:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-08:/2018/zettelkasten-update-all-in-on-bear.htmlI wrote earlier this week about adopting a Zettelkasten approach for research, and moving writing prompts and ideas from Bear into Ulysses as part of that. I’m already reversing course. Here’s why.
<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience:</a></b> people broadly interested in reading, writing, learning, and research systems.</i></p>
<p>I wrote <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/starting-to-build-a-zettelkasten.html">earlier this week</a> about adopting a Zettelkasten approach for research, and moving writing prompts and ideas from <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a> into <a href="https://ulysses.app">Ulysses</a> as part of that. I’m already reversing course, though, and pushing <em>ideas</em> from Ulysses back over into Bear. (Don’t worry, this isn’t the typical “obsessing over tools <em>instead</em> of doing work” problem. It’s a change that flows out of doing the work.)</p>
<p>The reason is simple: Ulysses is fantastic for organizing writing projects. However, it has a pair of very important (for me) limitations for the ideation and research phase.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>It does <em>not</em> support the kind of easy cross-linking between notes that Bear does. But I find that super handy for saying “these two might belong together in a post.”</p></li>
<li><p>While Ulysses does have keywords (which could in principle work as a kind of tagging system), there is no easy way to navigate around between them. This is even handier than cross-linking for noting that two ideas might go together.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>What’s more, I realized this week that I actually find it <em>quite</em> useful to have my writing ideas in the same place as all my other notes, because it’s much easier to see the other things that might be useful for reference that way.</p>
<p>For the moment, then, my solution is: Ulysses for the actual content of writing projects (talks, essays, blog posts, etc.), but Bear for all the research (notes, quotes, links, etc.).</p>
<p>More on all of this as I work it out for myself!</p>
Starting to Build a Zettelkasten2018-12-05T08:30:00-05:002018-12-05T08:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-05:/2018/starting-to-build-a-zettelkasten.htmlAn update on my work-in-progress research system, using Bear.app as a tool for the Zettelkasten system—with some comments on how I’m doing this, and why.<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience:</a></b> people broadly interested in reading, writing, learning, and research systems.</i></p>
<p>As I’ve been slowly mulling on a number of things over the last few weeks, it became increasingly clear to me that I needed to invest a bit more in my research system. I’ve <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/how-do-you-manage-your-research-notes.html">asked before</a> how people manage their own research, and I’ve noted how <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.html">I use my blog as a note-taking tool of sorts</a>. As I’ve started digging into a couple larger problems—one of which is likely going to take me a decade of work—I’ve come back to this question, and I find that I still don’t have great answers.</p>
<p>Something like the <a href="https://zettelkasten.de">Zettelkasten approach</a> seems like it probably does what I need it to. So this week I’ve started organizing notes in <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a> that way. I’m <em>not</em> taking the tack sometimes advocated of intentionally having no hierarchy whatsoever for my notes, though I’m eschewing any particularly deep hierarchies. I consistently find that I need some kind of project or “notebook” level of organization when I’m digging deep on something, and it’s always nice to hear that I’m not alone in that. <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/my-zettelkasten/">Alan Jacobs, on the same topic:</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well, I thought, why not have a collection of Zettel that is based not on a lifetime of research but on a single project? So I tried that. And it worked wonderfully.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unlike Jacobs, the notecard system doesn’t work for me. I enjoy writing notes by hand, but in a lot of cases I’m writing down code snippets, which is very hard to do on notecards unless the code snippets are <em>very</em> brief. Instead, I’m so far making heavy use of Bear’s ability to <a href="https://bear.app/faq/Tags%20&%20Linking/How%20to%20link%20notes%20together/">link between notes</a>, and even heavier use of Bear’s <a href="https://bear.app/faq/Tags%20&%20Linking/Nested%20Tags/">tagging system</a> for adding keywords to notes.</p>
<p>In line with my comment about hierarchy, though, I’m only allowing myself one level of hierarchy: the “project” or “notebook.” Everything in that “notebook” is a single keyword/tag deep, structured like <code><notebook>/<keyword></code>—never <code><notebook>/<keyword>/<another keyword.</code>. I am also freely including tags across these “notebooks”: something might be in <code>A/q</code> and also <code>C/z</code>. That gives me the best of both worlds: project-level organization, but also the ability to see associations that play out beyond an individual project.</p>
<p>We’ll see how this plays out, but so far I’m liking it a lot.</p>
<p>Amusingly, it’s forcing me to clean up my existing set of notes in Bear: things tagged “writing/ideas” are now getting pushed over into a corresponding bucket in <a href="https://ulysses.app">Ulysses</a>, which is my preferred application for actually <em>writing</em>. Miscellaneous/non-project notes are currently going in a top level “notebook”—a top level tag in Bear—called <code>z</code> (for Zettelkasten). Under it I have things like <code>z/pedagogy</code>, but once again, I’m intentionally allowing myself only one level of nesting here. I am still <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/just-write-down-what-you-do.html">logging my work</a> in a work tag. And I also have notebooks for things like food, gift ideas, etc., since Bear is currently my go-to notes app. (This is part of what forced me to the project/notebook mentality in the first place: having dozens of top-level tags in that sidebar was just going to break my brain.) But hopefully having all these notes around and in a just-structured-<em>enough</em> form will be useful as I work on these larger projects.</p>
<p>I’ll report more as I keep going with this!</p>
Just Write Down What You Do2018-11-13T19:50:00-05:002018-11-13T19:50:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-11-13:/2018/just-write-down-what-you-do.htmlCareer tip: for every day, week, and month, summarize the things you accomplished.
<p><i class=editorial><b>Assumed audience:</b> people already persuaded of the value—at least to some extent—of “getting things done” strategies and having an idea of what you accomplished over the course of the year.</i></p>
<p>For the last few years, I’ve had a habit—not kept perfectly, but done more often than not, courtesy of my daily <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/pomodoro/">pomodoro</a> discipline—of writing down what I do each day. Then, every week, I take a look at what I did each day, and turn that into a summary for the week. And every month, I look over my notes for weeks that made up that month, and write down what I did that month.</p>
<p>This has been <em>fantastic</em> for me professionally. For one thing, it gives me a quick and easy way to see what I’ve done over the past however-long-between-performance-evaluations. The inevitable “What did you accomplish this year?” question has an an easy answer: I can look over my month-level summaries and summarize <em>those</em>. (I’m inevitably frustrated by the months where I slacked off and don’t actually know what I did when do this exercise!)</p>
<p>Writing things down like this is also a helpful tool personally. I can look back at long stretches where I feel like I didn’t get a lot done and realize just many things I <em>did</em> actually do. I have found this a helpful way of staving off the malaise that inevitably comes from months where there are just too many meetings, for example. What did I do? I <i>effected these changes</i> (even if they weren’t in the form of code!).</p>
<p>I use <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a> for this, but you could do it anywhere: a Word document or Google Doc, a notepad on your desk, in Emacs’ <a href="https://orgmode.org">Org Mode</a>, with <a href="https://www.taskpaper.com">TaskPaper</a>, or in <a href="#">Trello</a> (like my friend and colleague Ben Collins <a href="https://benjamincollins.com/blog/using-trello-to-organize-my-daily-work/">does</a>), or, well… whatever gets the job done.</p>
<p>The main thing is: write down what you did! Write it down at each of these scales, because it’s far easier to write down the larger scales if you wrote down the smaller scales. Once you start doing this regularly, you’ll probably find yourself frustrated at the times you failed to do it. (If you’re like me, those times will exist. It’s okay. Just start back up.) And again: make it fit you. But it’s one of the best tools I know of for personal and professional development, so I commend it to you!</p>
<hr />
<section id="bonus-my-bear-templates" class="level2">
<h2>Bonus: My Bear Templates</h2>
<p>In case you’re curious or want to copy my approach, here are the templates I use in Bear for each of my logs.</p>
<section id="daily-log" class="level3">
<h3>Daily Log</h3>
<p>The daily log is the core of my entire productivity approach system, as well as the foundation of this specific logging strategy. These entries each includes:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The date, which I format <code>YYYY.MM.DD</code>—today would be <code>2018.11.13</code>. A numeric year/month/day makes correctly sorting the notes easy. I use a period for the separator mostly because it looks nice in the font I use in Bear.</p></li>
<li><p>A link to the parent week for the day, to make it easy to jump back and forth between individual day logs and a weekly log (as you’ll see below).<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p></li>
<li><p>A set of goals. I set the goals either at the beginning of the day, at the end of the preceding work day, or a combination of the two. I usually limit myself to 3 goals, unless I <em>know</em> I have a bunch of very small tasks.</p></li>
<li><p>A list of pomodoro sessions. The pomodoro technique is <em>most</em> effective for getting things done—both in my experience and as others describe it—when each block has both a discrete goal and what you actually got done. This helps me keep my focus during that session rather than getting sidetracked. I further break these down with <strong>Session 1</strong>, <strong>Break</strong>, <strong>Session 2</strong>, etc. subheads—not because this makes me productive, but just because I like it.</p></li>
<li><p>A summary of the day as a whole. At the end of the day, I look back over the sessions and my goals, and write a sentence or two about what I did. This is also often a good time for me to write up the next day’s overarching goals and first session goal: I have a much better idea what I should be doing next when I’m wrapping things up for the day than I will the next morning!</p></li>
<li><p>A set of checkboxes for me to track whether I succeed in breaking my day into 15 discrete pomodoro sessions,<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> and in standing at least 5 hours out of the day every day.</p></li>
</ul>
<pre class="md"><code># <YYYY.MM.DD>
**Week:** [[]]
## Goals
- [ ] ::TODO::
---
## Details
### Session 1
1. **Goal:** ::TODO:: **Actual:** ::TODO::
---
## Summary
::TODO::
---
## Rhythm
### Pomodoro
- [ ] 1
- [ ] 2
- [ ] 3
- [ ] 4
- [ ] 5
- [ ] 6
- [ ] 7
- [ ] 8
- [ ] 9
- [ ] 10
- [ ] 11
- [ ] 12
- [ ] 13
- [ ] 14
- [ ] 15
### Stand
- [ ] 1
- [ ] 2
- [ ] 3
- [ ] 4
- [ ] 5
- [ ] 6
- [ ] 7
- [ ] 8
- [ ] 9
- [ ] 10</code></pre>
</section>
<section id="weekly-log" class="level3">
<h3>Weekly log</h3>
<p>The weekly log is just a place for me to be able to easily capture the results of my daily efforts. It links to the monthly log at the top just like the daily logs link to the month: for easy jumping back and forth. Each of the bullet points under <strong>Details</strong> gets linked to a daily log entry, and the <code>::TODO::</code> items get replaced with the <strong>Summary</strong> from the daily log. At the end of the week, I write a summary of the whole week.</p>
<p>The <strong>Goals</strong> heading here is new, something I only just started doing in the last couple of weeks, but so far it has proven helpful for me as I orient myself to what I want to get done on any given day.</p>
<pre class="md"><code># <YYYY.MM.DD> – <YYYY.MM.DD>
**Month:** [[]]
## Goals
- [ ] ::TODO::
## Details
- [[]]: ::TODO::
- [[]]: ::TODO::
- [[]]: ::TODO::
- [[]]: ::TODO::
- [[]]: ::TODO::
## Summary
::TODO::</code></pre>
</section>
<section id="monthly-log" class="level3">
<h3>Monthly log</h3>
<p>The monthly log is exactly like the weekly log, but one level higher. It links back to individual weeks for easy jumping back and forth between the two views, and it newly has month-level goals. (As with weeks, I’m still experimenting with those!) The <strong>Details</strong> bullets get filled in with links to weeks and the summary of each week copied over. At the end of the month, I take a few minutes to summarize those weeks. Unlike the lower-level summaries, I let that month-level summary expand out to a paragraph if need be. A lot tends to happen in a month!</p>
<pre class="md"><code># <YYYY.MM>
## Goals
- [ ] ::TODO::
## Details
- [[]]: ::TODO::
- [[]]: ::TODO::
- [[]]: ::TODO::
- [[]]: ::TODO::
## Summary
::TODO::</code></pre>
</section>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p><code>[[<some text>]]</code> is Bear’s way of doing internal links to a note named <code><some text></code>.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>15, not 16, because of the slop that ends up in most days. Most days, more than one session ends up being 35 minutes instead of 25. Over the course of the day, those come out to being the remaining half hour in the full 8 hours I make sure I give my employer. I know that from measuring consistently when I was working as a consultant: my <a href="https://toggl.com">Toggl</a> logs told the story clearly.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Assumed Audiences2018-10-18T19:00:00-04:002018-10-19T10:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-10-18:/2018/assumed-audiences.html“The Internet” is far too broad an audience for, well, basically <em>any</em> post I write. My current best solution: “Assumed Audience” headings on posts.
<p><i class=editorial><strong>Assumed audience:</strong> everyone on the internet.</i></p>
<p>I am working on a post about something I think is interesting in programming, and shared it with a friend last night to get some feedback on what I had written so far. His response made me realize that the post left me open to wild and massive misinterpretation of my intent. (The specific details aren’t really that interesting for my broader point here.)</p>
<p>I was thinking about how to clarify that, and it took me back to a Winning Slowly episode we recorded back in 2015, with the wonderful title <a href="https://winningslowly.org/2.02/">Basketballs ≠ Pumpkins</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In which we talk about… the general phenomenon of things you say on the internet going viral (often when you least expect them to). How do you deal with the reality that your audience is never limited but may universalize at any moment? What is the audience’s responsibility, and what are creators’ responsibilities? How do we deal charitably with authors writing “in-house” on controversial topics?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The basic problem here is that a blog post is open to everyone on the internet to read… but <em>everyone on the internet</em> is far too broad an audience for, well, basically <em>any</em> post I write. (Or indeed any post anyone writes.)</p>
<p>What’s more, for any given post I write, there is an <em>implicit</em> audience. You as reader just have no way of knowing who I have in mind. Maybe I <em>am</em> thinking of “the whole internet,” but that certainly isn’t the case for <em>most</em> posts. So what if I just made my intended audience explicit?</p>
<p>My current best solution for handling this phenomenon is an “assumed audience” heading on the top of a post. It won’t head off <em>all</em> the nonsense, of course. But it at least gives people a frame of reference. A few examples that leap to mind:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Assumed audience:</strong> other theologically conservative Christians in the <abbr title="Presbyterian Church in America">PCA</abbr></li>
<li><strong>Assumed audience:</strong> people curious about functional programming</li>
<li><strong>Assumed audience:</strong> experienced Rust developers</li>
<li><strong>Assumed audience:</strong> people outright hostile to religious belief</li>
</ul>
<p>Each of those are people I might actually address on this blog—and there are plenty of others, of course. What’s potentially useful about this kind of thing is that good-faith readers know how to approach the content. Bad-faith readers will of course do with any text what they will. I cannot stop someone from hate-reading me. All I can do is put up sign-posts for people who are <em>interested</em> in good faith readings.</p>
<p>For example, if you’re a die-hard devotee of dynamic programming languages, a note that the assumed audience is people interested in advanced static types tells you that my point isn’t persuading <em>you</em>, but persuading someone else entirely. You can adjust your read accordingly.</p>
<p>Likewise, if I’m writing on Christian ethics with an assumed audience of secular progressives, and you’re a fundamentalist Christian, you can read with the understanding that I will frame things differently for someone who disagrees with me about everything (down to and including the nature of reality itself!) than if we were having an “in-house” conversation! You can adjust your read accordingly.</p>
<p>I’m increasingly convinced something like this is important. <em>Very</em> important, even.</p>
<p>It’s worthwhile to blog and write publicly—some of the best feedback I get on things I write is from total strangers!—but it’s also very difficult to write effectively when everything must be couched in forty-eight layers of nuance and qualification just in case someone from a different tribe happens along.</p>
<p>Maybe I’ll just be this weird guy over here marking my posts this way, or maybe it’ll catch on with other weird people and a few corners of the internet will be a little less open to misunderstanding. Maybe people will completely ignore them and engage in full on flame wars on Twitter and Hacker News. (That seems more likely than not.) I think it’s worth a shot anyway. Let’s try it and find out!</p>
<p><strong>Edit, October 19, 2018:</strong> Thanks to <a href="https://stephencarradini.com">Stephen Carradini</a> for reminding me to include a shout-out to Sarah Constantin’s blog <a href="https://srconstantin.wordpress.com">Otium</a>, which introduces posts with a similar heading, “Epistemic status,” to indicate how confident the author is or isn’t about the contents of the given post. I meant to include a shout-out to Otium in the original writeup and just spaced it!</p>
Neither Being Dumb Nor Giving In2018-10-15T09:20:00-04:002018-10-15T09:20:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-10-15:/2018/neither-being-dumb-nor-giving-in.htmlWith burnout, getting out on a run (for example), can feel impossible—but it’s essential. We can neither ignore experiences like burnout, nor let them dominate our mental lives: both approaches make things significantly worse.
<p>One of the ways I respond to my experience of burnout is <em>refusing</em> to let the fact that I’m experiencing burnout set the terms of my life. I cannot ignore the fact that I’m burnt out unless I want to make things worse. But I also recognize that with experiences like burnout, letting them dominate our mental lives can make things significantly worse, too.</p>
<p>There is a fine little dance here: acknowledging the reality of the hard things we experience, while not narrowing our lives to <em>merely</em> those hard things.</p>
<p>An example of the way I try to walk this line in my own life: I am not holding myself to some of the exercise goals I set for myself before the worst of the burnout set in… but I am still exercising every day. That half marathon I wanted to run at the end of this month? I’m not running it. On too many runs in the last few weeks my body has simply shut down a few miles into a run. Two miles in, six miles in, three miles in… none of them are anything like 13.1 miles. So while I’ve managed a 14-mile run this training season, in the weeks since I did I have gotten loud, clear signals that continuing to push myself toward the race was a bad idea.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop running, though. It means I’m going to be careful and wise about it. I’m going to listen to my body even more carefully when I’m out on a run than I normally do (and I’m not one of those people who keeps running when they shouldn’t anyway!). I’m going to switch some days over to doing Pilates with my wife instead of running. But also, on days like this past Saturday, when I felt <em>terrible</em> emotionally and wanted nothing more than to lay in bed… I got up and went for a 4-mile run. It helped.</p>
<p>Again: I won’t be dumb about my response to my burnout and pretend it doesn’t exist. But I also refuse to let especially the emotional experience of burnout be wholly determinative of what I do.</p>
<p>An aside, and a thing I will come back to in the future: you may have noticed that I have avoided writing of burnout as something external to me. This is intentional. Too often in our discussions of burnout, depression, or the like, we externalize them—a way of distancing ourselves from them, usually aimed at the same kinds of things I’ve gestured at in this little post. For reasons I’ll come back to, I don’t think that’s quite the right solution: burnout is not a foe outside myself to vanquish, but a set of emotional, physical, and spiritual things <em>about</em> myself. Again: more on that in the future.</p>
Burnout Symptoms2018-10-11T20:20:00-04:002018-10-11T20:20:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-10-11:/2018/burnout-symptoms.htmlJust a list of weird things that have happened to me while dealing with this.
<p>Some of the symptoms I’ve had while experiencing burnout, all of which are exceedingly unusual in life for me normally:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>aches and pains:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>headaches: from low-level and relatively minor, to shooting pain in the temples or behind the eyes</li>
<li>backaches and neckaches: unrelieved (and unrelievable, no matter the Pilates routine) sensations of muscle tension, including everything from the lower back to the base of my skull—likely a partial cause of the low-level headaches</li>
<li>stomachaches: so far, only when feeling exceptionally stressed, but regularly and often when feeling particularly stressed</li>
<li>occasional pains in my limbs unrelated to exercise I’ve done</li>
</ul></li>
<li><p><strong>fatigue:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>I only sleep 7–7½ hours of sleep a night but now am needing 8½–9 hours to feel even somewhat rested</li>
<li>decreased ability while exercising: though I have kept exercising anyway, my general athletic performance is much degraded and on a semi-regular basis I’m unable to complete workouts normally</li>
</ul></li>
<li><p><strong>cynicism</strong>: finding it difficult to think the best of decisions others make, even when I can explain them in rational and reasonable ways</p></li>
<li><p><strong>severe demotivation:</strong> having difficulty getting to work and through work; and having a hard time doing any of my normal side projects. The only hobby which has felt <em>doable</em> for most of the last few months has been <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/making-things-helps.html" title="Making Things Helps">writing on and working on this website</a>.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>crying, of all sorts:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>streams of silent tears: not in the “I have something in my eye” sense but in the “I have tears streaming down my face” sense—but with no trigger</li>
<li>quietly sobbing, with or without any trigger—but never triggers that would ordinarily prompt much of a reaction at all, much less crying</li>
<li>outright weeping, to date only with a trigger—but again, with triggers of the sort that would normally just make me roll my eyes</li>
</ul></li>
<li><p><strong>anger:</strong> seething frustration boiling over into white-hot rage or cold furies—not things I am prone to, and often over the smallest provocations from work. (Never from family! This is one of the clearest signals that I’m dealing with <em>burnout</em>.) I carefully contain these, effectively practicing various ways of calming myself—especially prayer, recitation of Scripture, and singing hymns—and I <em>never</em> allow myself to lash out at the people around me. It is nonetheless strange and disconcerting to have minor nuisances provoke such deep anger.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>cravings:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>for sugary foods: occasionally sated with a good chocolate chip cookie, but more usually with a good piece of fruit</li>
<li>for alcohol: <em>always</em> set aside when I feel a “need” for it, lest it become a crutch or a means of self-medication</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>Burnout is <em>strange</em>. Our bodies and minds tell us the story of the stresses we experience, whether we want to hear the story or not. (I’m listening clearly, and making lots of moves to deal with it. More on that in the weeks ahead.)</p>
Making Things Helps2018-09-28T20:45:00-04:002018-09-28T20:45:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-09-28:/2018/making-things-helps.htmlAt least for me, doing “non-stressful” things as part of burnout sometimes means doing things other people would find stressful. That’s okay.
<p>As a small bit of follow-up to my recent post on <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/cant-stop-wont-stop.html" title="Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop">blogging as part of what helps with my burnout</a>, I thought it worth noting that this principle is a bit broader than just <em>blogging</em> for me. Writing (currently mostly expressed in the form of blogging) is deep in me, and so blogging remains a helpful outlet.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> But so a fair number of other things which might look like <em>work</em> to other people.</p>
<p>Tonight I started putting together some thoughts on what some extensions to an open source software library I maintain might look like.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> This after what has to be a record-setting week: the kind in which I reviewed and merged 60 pull requests for a ridiculous crunch of a project I’m on at work. I’m exhausted. I had another one of those moments this evening where I started crying a bit as I was sitting down to eat dinner and praying beforehand. Why? Just because I’m <em>that</em> emotionally wrung out: nothing was wrong in the particular moment at all, and probably the “trigger” was actually the small bit of relief of being <em>away</em> from the particular (very weird) stressors of this project at work for a while.</p>
<p>So why in the world did I start writing up thoughts about an open-source library after that? And why have I been spending my evenings reading all about a particularly nerdy bit of computer science this week?<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> Because, as I suggested at the beginning, these things are what end up feeling restful or re-energizing to me. (That might make me weird. I’m okay with that. I’ve been weird for a long time.)</p>
<p>Much of the advice around burnout emphasizes “not working.” There’s good reason for that, but it’s important to understand the underlying reasons for that advice. Burnout <em>usually</em> stems from work-related stress, for an appropriately broad definition of “work.”<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a> Besides the stressors themselves, many of us—whether we admit it or not!—put far too much of our self-worth into our work. Putting it aside leaves us feeling worthless or useless. If your burnout is coming from the combo of stress and having invested your self-worth in your work, then you’re not likely to get better until you disengage from that work <em>entirely</em> for large stretches of time: that is, until you are <em>forced</em> to divest your self-worth from your work.</p>
<p>But there are other ways burnout comes to pass. For me, it’s a combination of particular work stressors with the stress my family has undergone over the last year: a cross-country move, building a house, and most of all my father’s (so far blessedly successful) fight with a brain tumor. The work stressors are largely not related to the work <em>load</em>, though; and I have by God’s grace kept my personal sense of meaning and value detached from my job. Insofar as my work is involved, the burnout is much more about frustrations and stymied aims and boredom with certain parts of the job than it is about overwork! The net of that is that doing some open-source brainstorming in the evenings is not a way of reinforcing the things that have caused this (though it very well <em>could</em> become that). Rather, left in the same kinds of space as my blogging (“not on a schedule, not on a deadline, but whenever I feel like it”), it ends up being a <em>counter</em> to burnout.</p>
<p>All of which is a long way of saying: if you’re experiencing burnout, you need to figure out <em>why</em> if you want to have a chance of getting through it. Otherwise good advice will actually mislead you otherwise. If your problem is that you’ve dumped all your self-worth into your open-source work, <em>stop doing open-source work</em>. On the other hand, if the cause of your burnout is that you’re deeply invested in caretaking for someone in your family, it might well be that doing something that looks like <em>work</em> to someone else—even writing a novel or something similarly massive in scale—might be a genuine relief and outlet for you.</p>
<p>For me, <em>genuine rest</em> often includes writing and learning and thinking and creating—not by themselves, but as part of a healthy mix that includes many other good things: a healthy dose of exercise and building LEGO contraptions with my daughters and watching <cite>The Expanse</cite> with my wife, and enjoying the company of good friends over good food and good drinks.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’ve actually been blogging longer than I’ve been writing software in any meaningful way. I did tiny bits of Visual Basic and C++ in middle school and high school, and I started picking up <abbr>HTML</abbr> and <abbr>CSS</abbr> for the sake of my website and blog in college. I didn’t pick up programming in a more general sense until I learned Fortran for my senior capstone project in physics!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’m thinking about <code>Future</code> and/or <code>Task</code> extensions to <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/true-myth">True Myth</a>, for those of you interested in the details. I’ll have a GitHub issue up sometime soon-ish, and might blog about it here as well.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type"><abbr title="Conflict-free Replicated Data Type">CRDT</abbr>s</a>, for my fellow software nerds out there. <a href="http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/" title="Data Laced With History">This introduction</a> is absolutely outstanding, as are a number of the pieces it links to. Among other things, I actually <em>understand</em> a few concepts in set theory I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around in the past, because the explanations here are so good.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>As I talked about in my <a href="https://newrustacean.com/show_notes/bonus/burnout/">New Rustacean episode about burnout</a>, lots of things which <em>aren’t</em> “work” in the “what I do to pay the bills” sense can also be triggers.<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop2018-09-26T20:15:00-04:002018-09-26T20:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-09-26:/2018/cant-stop-wont-stop.htmlSome people have a hard time keeping their blogging resolutions. I… have the opposite problem.
<p>A couple things have had me thinking about blogging today. I happened to end up reading <a href="http://christineyen.com/2014/01/in-2014-reflection-consistency-and-balls/">this post by Christine Yen from 2014</a> just a few hours after listening to <a href="https://craigmod.com/onmargins/005/">Craig Mod’s interview with Jason Kottke</a>. They have two very different takes on blogging. Yen’s piece has the sense so often echoed online: “I want to be blogging more.” Mod’s interview with Kottke notes how remarkable a 20-year-old website with daily blog-like entries throughout is, and Kottke emphasizes how he loves the work (and it is work!) that he does to keep it up.</p>
<p>My relationship with blogging is somewhere nearer Kottke than Yen on that spectrum. While I have <em>occasionally</em> resolved to blog more—and occasionally to <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/writing-plans-for-the-rest-of-2018.html">blog <em>less</em></a>!—I find that mostly my problem is that I cannot stop blogging even if I want to.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>One of the things that’s strange about <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout">burnout</a> is that what constitutes <em>rest</em> from the stressors will vary from person to person. Writing, for may people, might be a source of tension or stress. The perceived <em>obligation</em> to generate content can be stressful.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> But far more often, writing is restful for me. It is a way of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.html">organizing my mental life</a>—publicly, but (at least) as much for my own benefit as for that of potential readers—and organizing my mental life is somehow a good form of stress relief.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> So it turns out that blogging—not on a schedule, not on a deadline, but whenever I feel like it (and that is obviously a lot)—is good for me in the midst of this. It seems to go in the same basic bucket as running.</p>
<p>So: my aim back in May, just before I realized what exactly I’m dealing with in burnout, to blog less in the interest of getting <em>other</em> projects done? When I said this?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t think I could stop myself from blogging that way from time to time if I <em>wanted</em> to. But it won’t be the focus, and if things are relatively quiet around here for much of the rest of the year, don’t worry… you know why!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, at this point I’ve let that go. Subconsciously at first. Now consciously. I wasn’t wrong when I said couldn’t stop myself from writing <em>entirely</em>. Now I just know that I also <em>mostly shouldn’t.</em> There may be points on other writing projects in the future, times when I’m not dealing with not-so-mild-anymore burnout, when I can and should. But not now.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>In truth, as this blog post suggests, I cannot even stop blogging about blogging! I’ve been metablogging for over a decade now; don’t expect it to stop anytime soon!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>More than one thoughtful listener to my <a href="https://newrustacean.com/show_notes/bonus/burnout/">most recent New Rustacean episode</a> responded along these very lines; and it’s a point I haven’t made here before, so: consider it raised.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>Interpret that as you will. I have given it no small amount of thought myself. As I noted on the aforementioned latest New Rustacean episode: I am hypermetacognitive, and my incessant metacogitating is a source of alternating bemusement and frustration for my poor wife.</p>
<p>Yes. I said “incessant metacogitating.” This is what poor Jaimie has to put up with.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Burnout (New Rustacean)2018-09-22T21:30:00-04:002018-09-22T21:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-09-22:/2018/burnout-new-rustacean.htmlIn which I talk for about 25 minutes about my experience of burnout.
<p>Insofar as I have a platform and a voice on this blog and <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/podcasts.html">my podcasts</a>, I hope to use it to help <em>others</em> who experience burnout as well. So, the only episode I’ve managed to release of New Rustacean so far in September is <a href="https://newrustacean.com/show_notes/bonus/burnout/">this one, on burnout</a>.</p>
Your Job Is Not Your Community2018-09-15T09:10:00-04:002018-09-15T09:10:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-09-15:/2018/your-job-is-not-your-community.htmlThoughts on third spaces, remote jobs, misplaced flirtation, and the thread that ties them together: the way we have offloaded so much of our social existence to our employeers.
<p>Skimming through Twitter this morning, two threads caught my attention.</p>
<p><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/kyleshevlin/status/1040674991392452608">The first</a>, by Kyle Shevlin, pushes back on the idea that people should be expected to just pick up and move across the country for a job—never mind the personal and communal costs to them. This stands at the crux of the point he’s making (but the whole thread is good; I encouraged him to turn it into a blog post):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We don’t even pay attention to this [i.e. the lack of communal ties and third spaces in our lives]. The pastor/philosopher in me gets frustrated with the lack of concern over the loss of community. Instead, we have tried to replace our relationship to other people with the relationship to our work and work place.<br />
—<a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/kyleshevlin/status/1040674981468758016">@kyleshevlin </a></p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/sehurlburt/status/1040778111057444866">The second</a>, by Stephanie Hurlburt, gently but firmly tells guys to stop trying to <em>flirt</em> with the women they meet at professional meetups.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am noticing a trend in women age 18-22 I’m mentoring— they try to network and get mentoring and go to meetups and literally every guy they try to talk with gets flirty</p>
<p>They’re <em>blocked</em> from this professional advancement because so many guys jump straight into trying to date<br />
—<a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/sehurlburt/status/1040778111057444866">@sehurlburt</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I agree with Stephanie’s point here, but it was the juxtaposition with Kyle’s point that particularly caught my attention.</p>
<p>Without excusing the young men who turn from professional networking to flirting immediately on encountering an attractive woman at a tech meetup—again, don’t do that!—it’s also worth addressing the structural reasons why move is so tempting. (As usual, these kinds of things are worth addressing <a href="https://winningslowly.org/season-5">both individually and structurally</a>, and in fact <em>have</em> to be addressed both ways to see real change.) One of the structural issues which leads to “see an attractive woman at a JavaScript meetup, decide to flirt with her” is the thing Kyle is pointing at. Namely: we’ve offloaded the vast majority of our social existence to work.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> Given that many of these young men have no other social contexts… where exactly <em>are</em> they going to flirt?</p>
<p>It’s good and right to do as Stephanie does here and say, “This isn’t the right place for this, guys.” But—and this is no critique of Stephanie’s point; not every blog post or every tweet is responsible to cover every angle on a topic!—we also need to substantially reorient our understanding of the place of professional contexts in our lives. Leaders need to stop framing their companies as “a family”<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> and, even more, need to recognize that companies are not <em>and cannot be</em> the solution to this problem. To the contrary. When a company responds to their employees’ felt need for more community by trying to become that community, it reinforces the actual problem. Counterintuitive though it might seem, the best thing company leaders can do for their employees is make sure that their company is <em>just a job</em>. (If you want to do more than this, find healthy local community spaces and support <em>those</em>—financially, by promoting them, etc.)</p>
<p>Neighborhood book clubs, churches, recreational sports, local art-making of all sorts, topical discussion groups, political activism, community service… these are the actual kinds of activities and institutions we need more of. Not more of company-as-community, professional-as-identity. If we work hard to build those thicker, healthier kinds of spaces, then professionally-focused spaces actually can remain professional. They won’t have to do work they aren’t meant to do, and ultimately can’t do well without compromising their primary work.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>and social media, but that’s a different blog post—it exacerbates these issues as well, to be sure<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>something my own employer has been guilty of, and on which I have prodded them!<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Give Me Chronological Archives or Go Away2018-08-25T12:15:00-04:002018-08-25T12:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-08-25:/2018/give-me-chronological-archives-or-go-away.htmlAlgorithmically-sorted archives for blogs are hyper-user-hostile and I hate them. Looking at you, Medium.
<p>I was looking at the (really excellent) content in Vaidehi Joshi’s <a href="https://medium.com/basecs">basecs</a> series, and it crystallized something for me: Algorithmically-sorted archives for blogs are hyper-user-hostile and I <em>hate</em> them.</p>
<p>Trying to just work through that series in chronological order of publication is <em>nearly</em>—not quite <em>actually</em>, but <em>nearly</em>—impossible. Never mind that the series is a <em>series</em>, and that most posts build on earlier posts, Medium wants to <em>foster engagement</em> and tell you what other people have read most.</p>
<p>It keeps up this nonsense even when you pull the the Archive view: it displays the top 10 posts from 2017, sorted by which ones people read most. There’s no view of <em>all</em> the posts in the series, simply sorted by date, period. You can sort those top 10 posts by date, but to get to the series in chronological sequence, you have to click into each month… and then click the button <em>again</em> to sort by date <em>for every single month</em>.</p>
<p>This absurd focus on algorithmic sorting is an abomination—a desecration of all that is good and noble and beautiful about the format of the blog. It should die an ignominious death, unmourned by anyone but Silicon Valley venture capitalists thinking to make a quick buck on other people’s publishing efforts.</p>
Blog as Note-Taking Tool2018-07-16T07:00:00-04:002018-07-16T07:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-07-16:/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.htmlPretty regularly, I go back and reread my own blog posts—and not for vanity. It’s an illuminating experience, a lot like reading through old notes.
<p>I have a habit that might not make sense to you. I reread my own blog posts fairly regularly. It’s not vanity—not some weird obsession with my own awesomeness in the form of my own writing or some such nonsense. It’s that in my blog posts over the last decade, I have a pretty serious backlog of <em>what I was thinking about at any given point in time.</em></p>
<p>It’s not exhaustive, by a long shot. It only includes things I actually decided to publish.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> There are, sadly, not many short thoughts in the mix. Nor is it well-tagged or organized in any internally-consistent way—even in any single version of the site, much less across versions. But nonetheless the history is still there, and I <em>can</em> traverse the various lines through it, such as they are. (Sometimes, even, the changes in organization and structure are illuminating about how I was thinking about things at the time!) In any case, my habit of linking to previous references to ideas has proven invaluable for the times when I want to trawl back through old posts and consider those old thoughts again.</p>
<p>Reading old blog posts is a strange experience, of course. The person who wrote these things was recognizably myself; but I am not who I then I was, and I sometimes disagree with myself on the substance and often on the style. (I occasionally find an old gem and wonder how I ever managed to write so well.) That very strangeness, it turns out, is why I do this every so often, though. Thinking well is often a matter of forging connections between ideas that were previously not connected for us. We cannot consciously hold in our minds even a fraction of all the things we have thought about or even written something about over the years. We can, however, jog our memories, and let new connections form. And rereading one’s own blog post is a great way to do that.</p>
<p>I’d not heard specifically of the <a href="https://zettelkasten.de">Zettelkasten method</a> until Alan Jacobs linked it a while back, but it fits this model pretty perfectly, and maps as well to ways I’ve been <em>trying</em> to structure my note-taking and thinking for the past few years. (I’m going to be consciously doing more of this in <a href="http://www.bear-writer.com">Bear</a>, my current notes app of choice. I’ll probably write up my experience that way once I’ve actually had some experience!) But this also ties into some of the things Jacobs has been <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/the-blog-garden/" title="The Blog Garden">musing out loud</a> about in his own blog over the last week. It’s not just that a blog can serve as a place to do some of the fleshing-out of ideas. It’s not just that a blog can be a record of the development of ideas. It can also serve to jog new ideas if you read yourself again, displaced (both literally and temporally) from the original writing of the thing. A blog is kind of like a public notebook, and while it <em>may</em> be useful for others to browse through it, is <em>is</em> useful for me to browse back through it.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Though: if you look at the archives, especially including those on my <a href="http://blog.chriskrycho.com" title="Thoughts; A Flame">first real blog</a> and <a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com">the previous iteration of this site</a>, you’ll notice that I published a lot of posts about a lot of subjects, whether my thoughts were especially well-formed or not.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Some Mild Burnout2018-07-15T17:15:00-04:002018-07-15T17:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-07-15:/2018/some-mild-burnout.htmlI find that I am experiencing a mild case of burnout. It is far from as bad as it could be, and I am doing the things I should to mitigate it. But it is real, and dangerous, and I hope this post might help others keep their eyes open for it.
<p>I came to terms with reality a bit last week. It wasn’t fun. I concluded something attentive folks around me have likely known for a bit: I am dealing with low-level <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/burnout/art-20046642" title="The Mayo Clinic’s summary of burnout">burnout</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Have you become cynical or critical at work?</li>
<li>Do you drag yourself to work and have trouble getting started once you arrive?</li>
<li>Have you become irritable or impatient with co-workers, customers or clients?</li>
<li>Do you lack the energy to be consistently productive?</li>
<li>Do you lack satisfaction from your achievements?</li>
<li>Do you feel disillusioned about your job?</li>
<li>Are you using food, drugs or alcohol to feel better or to simply not feel?</li>
<li>Have your sleep habits or appetite changed?</li>
<li>Are you troubled by unexplained headaches, backaches or other physical complaints?</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>The Mayo Clinic (the source for that list) notes that if you’re suffering from any <em>one</em> of those, you may be experiencing burnout. By my count, I am experiencing <em>six</em>. If you’re looking at the list and wondering: the first six. No changes to sleep, no abuse of food or drugs or alcohol, and I haven’t started having physical problems yet, which is why I classify what I’m experiencing as low-level or mild. But burnout is tricky. I’ve know a number of people who’ve had more serious cases—cases which led into significant physical problems that took them years to recover from.</p>
<p>In my experience, when people think about burnout, they tend to think of the kind that comes from <em>overwork</em> or from a lack of rest. You certainly can (indeed: certainly will) burn out by pulling 80-hour weeks for years on end. But those are not the only way you can burn out. You can also do it by ending up in a spot where you have too much responsibility, or deep and lasting conflict within your working environment, or sharp ethical disagreements with your leadership, or even just—“just” being the wrong word here—lasting mismatches between your tasks and the things you care about.</p>
<p>The particular reasons for my mild case of burnout aren’t the stereotypical kind. I get plenty of sleep, I enjoy my hobbies, I exercise and eat well, and I very carefully maintain a limit on the hours I work every week. I’m not <em>overworked</em>. It’s a mix of other factors I won’t go into. The details aren’t actually that important here, and in any case my (genuinely excellent) manager knows them well and we are working on them together.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>What is important is trying to figure out how to keep the burnout from getting worse. And acknowledging that it can happen to anyone. And that you may not see it coming, may deny you’re experiencing till something finally makes it click for you.</p>
<p>What made this all finally click for me? It was <a href="http://www.alliancenet.org/mos/postcards-from-palookaville/six-years-on#.W0vQM4pMFvI" title="Six Years On">this post by Carl Trueman</a>, reflecting on his own <em>very</em> different vocation—specifically, his bivocational work as both a pastor and a professor:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A few months into my pastorate, an academic friend who had done the same thing for nine years wrote me a letter and urged me to be careful – as soon as I ceased to enjoy the hobbies and casual pleasures of life, he warned, I would be close to burn-out and would need to step down. I was glad of the warning – every minister I have ever know who has burned out has told me that there was no obvious warning: one day everything seemed fine, the next they were barely able to get out of bed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That started me thinking on my own experience, and if I’m not quite there, I can see warning signs. The biggest danger sign, for me, is an utter lack of motivation around some of my hobbies. I generally relax, as my wife can attest, in <em>weird</em> ways—by writing, by building an open-source library, by reading hard-and-interesting books. For the last several months, I have had almost no interest in doing any of that. So I’ve a mild case at the moment, and I’m doing everything I can to keep it from getting worse.</p>
<p>Burnout like I have right now is not the end of the world, to be clear. It <em>is</em> manageable. Many people—including people in my own family—carry much more significant burdens in terms of physical and mental health. But it is real, and it’s dangerous in no small part because it can cascade into really serious mental and physical health problems if you let it spiral out of control.</p>
<p>So, two things:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p>If I’m a bit slower on open-source projects for a while, you know why.</p></li>
<li><p>I’d like to be that blog post for someone else. If you’re experiencing the things on that list, figure out how to change <em>something</em>.</p></li>
</ol>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>You can assume that it’s not sharp conflict over ethical issues, because nothing in the world would make me jet from a job faster than that would<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
The Value of a Good Habit2018-07-10T22:10:00-04:002018-07-10T22:10:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-07-10:/2018/the-value-of-a-good-habit.htmlI now have seven months of regular writing every morning under my belt. The habit has been productive. Time to start building another new habit (even while I maintain this one)!
<p>Since December, I’ve been working on <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html" title="Knowing Your Rhythms--Or: why I'm marking out all the time before 7am as mine.">writing every day before I start work</a>. I am content to admit that I certainly haven’t done it every single day along the way–but I’m content with that admission in no small part because I <em>have</em> done it <em>most</em> days along the way. And it has been genuinely wonderful.</p>
<p>The things I have written along the way have come in many forms:</p>
<ul>
<li>I’ve published around 50,000 words on this site already this year (even if ‘word count’ here is a loose metric: it includes lots of code samples and in some cases those code samples are repeated for effect)</li>
<li>I’ve put together a workshop and a couple of short talks on <a href="https://www.emberjs.com">Ember</a> and <a href="https://www.typescriptlang.org">TypeScript</a>.</li>
<li>I’ve written a talk on the future of our front-end development practices at Olo.</li>
<li>I’ve written and published 11 episodes of New Rustacean (totaling about 25,000 more words!).</li>
</ul>
<p>And very little of that could have or would have happened without the time I’ve dedicated nearly every weekday morning to writing.</p>
<p>It’s not so much that I’m hyper-productive on any one day. To the contrary: many days along the way I struggled just to get out a few hundred words of one of the projects I was working on, and those projects (however much I love them) have sometimes ended up being something of a slog. It’s okay: that’s the point of building the habit in.</p>
<p>I’ve made the analogy before–as have many others, I’m sure!–of writing to running. There are many days when going for a run doesn’t actually seem all that appealing, but I go anyway, because I’ve long since developed the habit of just getting out whether I feel like it or not. Some of those days I very much do not enjoy the actual run, either: I find myself somewhere out along the way and end up feeling sick or simply having to work much harder than I could wish. But even if it’s a short and unpleasant run in the end, I come away having gone for a run.</p>
<p>Writing (or any other valuable habit) seems to be much the same. There are days I do not feel like doing it. There are days when the doing of it is hard, when I feel like I have to drag the words out of myself. There have been days even just in the last few weeks where I realized that words I’d written on previous days simply had to be thrown away–content for New Rustacean that ranged from ill-worded to actually-wrong, for example.</p>
<p>But I have been able to say, nearly every workday when I wasn’t sick or traveling, that I did in fact write <em>something</em>. And that’s enough, in truth. As I noted <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/momentum.html" title="Momentum--Two weeks of daily writing, and how "productivity" happens.">when I began building this habit</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[The] early morning is the best time for me to be writing, and I get a lot of mileage out of taking anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes to get at it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I recognized six months ago, even when an individual day here or there slips, doing the work to make writing habitual means that the <em>other</em> days don’t. The result is that, delightfully, I’ve been able to get a lot of writing done, even through times when I <em>really</em> didn’t feel like writing.</p>
<p>So, next up: do the same thing with reading nonfiction books. I’ve read an absurd amount of fiction in the last year–and I allowed myself that intentionally as a kind of letdown after finishing seminary. But as I’ve noted in this space before, I don’t want to stay in that letdown mode forever. I want to build once again the habit of reading hard books carefully. The way to do it, of course, is… just to do it. Day by day, just <em>reading</em>. Hopefully in six months I’ll have a report complementary to this one, where I can say that I <em>kept writing</em> but also <em>started reading hard things again</em>.</p>
Continuing to Reflect on My Internet Presence2018-06-25T06:15:00-04:002018-06-25T06:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-06-25:/2018/continuing-to-reflect-on-my-internet-presence.htmlStill using Pinboard for what it is good at, but also thinking about this blog itself. Yes, again. You aren’t surprised by this, are you? So yes: more thoughts on link-blogging, commentary, and the blog software I want to exist. (No, neither WordPress nor Ghost fit the bill for me.)
<p><i class="editorial">A quick note: I drafted this back in June, but forgot to actually publish it!</i></p>
<p>I find that I’m always reflecting on the shape I want my internet presence to take. Over the last month, in particular, I’ve been thinking about the kind of “link-blogging” and commentary-on-articles-I’ve-read that I’ve experimented with pushing into Pinboard for the last <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/pick-the-right-tool-for-the-job.html">year and some change</a>.</p>
<p>On the one hand, I’ve found that Pinboard is <em>great</em> for two things:</p>
<ul>
<li>having an easy place to look up articles I’ve read but can’t necessarily remember the name of off the top of my head</li>
<li>being <em>a</em> place with its own <abbr>RSS</abbr> feed of that content, which is social-network-like in some ways but using open web tech like <abbr>RSS</abbr></li>
</ul>
<p>But what it isn’t is <em>integrated with my own site</em>, or particularly easily discoverable <em>from</em> my site. Adding a link to my public Pinboard feed would help, perhaps, but you wouldn’t know what I use it <em>for</em> from seeing that link.</p>
<p>The thing is, I want this material here on this site. There remain two blockers to me there:</p>
<ul>
<li>ease of publishing</li>
<li>site design and structure</li>
</ul>
<p>For the most part, I am happy enough with a static site generator setup. However, for this specific kind of use, I wish for a web front-end to my website (or, honestly, an easy way to integrate <a href="https://www.ulyssesapp.com">Ulysses</a> with it). The options which exist in that general space—WordPress and Ghost—both have their upsides, but also a great many downsides, and I find that I have no interest in using either.</p>
<hr />
<p>You might find that an odd commitment; here’s an aside on why.</p>
<p>Our <a href="https://krycho.com">family blog</a> is a Ghost install, and the previous iteration of this site ran on WordPress. Ghost is <em>fine</em>, and for many setups it’s actually really good. For my fairly complex set of publishing requirements, it unfortunately doesn’t really do the trick. Some of those requirements (like integration with citation-management tooling) are <em>currently</em> less pressing, but I don’t count on that being the case in the long term.</p>
<p>That said, one possible alternative here is simply to cross that bridge if or when I come to it and lean on the somewhat simpler tools that <em>do</em> meet my needs for today. If I did that, it would certainly be with Ghost, because WordPress feels to me the same way Windows feels to me: technically very competent, but impossibly frustrating to use. (That’s not insulting either of the two; it’s a statement of my very—overly, perhaps!—specific aesthetic tastes and my corresponding—admittedly irrational!—response to the experience of using Windows or WordPress. Maybe it’s just the ‘W’s that start the names?)</p>
<p>This is one reason I’ve seriously considered figuring out how to make my <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">long-on-hold site generator</a> actually be a hybrid: never dynamically generating content, but with an <abbr>API</abbr> to enable programmatic access, so that I <em>can</em> put a web or app front end on it. (Existing solutions in that space, like <a href="https://www.netlifycms.org">Netlify CMS</a> or <a href="https://forestry.io/">forestry.io</a>, are really good, but don’t quite support everything I have historically committed to needing. They also don’t have anything like an iOS share sheet!)</p>
<p>The problem, of course, is that I’m not yet ready to spend my limited time building out my long-planned and long-delayed personal website generator tool. In short, I’m caught in a catch-22 of my own making.</p>
<hr />
<p>In any case, I want to figure out a flow for sharing those kinds of notes-on-articles that works better for getting it onto my blog, rather than caught in the mostly-invisible space that is my Pinboard. I need a refreshed site design to support it effectively. I need different <em>tools</em> to support that flow effectively. Which means I’m not going to end up doing it tomorrow or anything.</p>
<p>I’ll get to it eventually. Maybe. Hopefully. And in the meantime I’ll do one extra step when I see something worth linking, and copy it into a Ulysses document that I can publish shortly thereafter.</p>
<p>This is where every nerd ends up with their blogging software, I think: in a pit of good-enough-to-get-by but not-actually-satisfying. (But I’m not helping myself with how persnickety I am about these things.)</p>
Good Arguments2018-06-04T10:30:00-04:002018-06-04T10:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-06-04:/2018/good-arguments.htmlI’m reading Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues—agreeing with a lot, disagreeing with a lot, and learning as much from the disagreements as the agreement. Good arguments are invaluable for clear thinking and the pursuit of truth.
<p>I’m working my way slowly and carefully through Shannon Vallor’s <cite>Technology and the Virtues</cite> and as I put it to my friend and partner-in-<a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> Stephen Carradini: I find that I <em>very often</em> agree with Vallor on her conclusions while <em>equally often</em> disagreeing with her on how she gets there. It makes for very interesting reading, certainly; and so far, at least, I can pretty heartily commend the book despite my disagreements.</p>
<p>And the reason why I can so heartily recommend it is what I’m more interested in at the moment. Vallor is a really excellent <em>conversation partner</em>. Not all writers are. But <cite>Technology and the Virtues</cite> is the kind of book that is sufficiently well-written and well-argued<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> that the very act of disagreeing with it—if you take the time, anyway—produces light rather than merely heat.</p>
<p>A good conversation partner prompts you to think hard about the differences between her position and your own. She pushes you to articulate <em>why</em> you disagree, and whether your disagreements are well-founded, and if not to see if you <em>can</em> provide a good foundation for them. Vallor has this and in spades. I have pages of notes both agreeing with many of her points and also articulating why—as a <em>Christian</em> interested in virtue ethics—I differ sharply with her in certain areas.</p>
<p>What makes all of this valuable is that these are <em>illuminating</em> differences. I have a better sense of some of the gaps at least in my own education in Christian ethical systems.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> I have a better sense of the space in which Stephen and I are playing with Winning Slowly <a href="https://winningslowly.org/season-6.html" title="Rejecting the Inevitable Future">Season 6</a>. I have clarified my own view of the relationship of virtue and wisdom and law in meaningful ways in just the short time I’ve been working through this book—and I can feel the gears turning still in the background; there is a lot more sharpening to come from this.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<p>When people talk about the benefits of reading those you disagree with, this is what they mean. The best interlocutors are those who push you like this—whether you agree or disagree, they make you work harder and think more sharply. Good arguments are invaluable for clear thinking and the pursuit of truth.</p>
<p>One other thing this points at is that good thinking often begets good thinking. I actively <em>want</em> to think well about these things, but I also am unable to do as well in a vacuum as I can with the help of others who are thinking hard and well about them—even, and sometimes <em>especially</em>, when we disagree.</p>
<p>One of the reasons I blog is as an attempt to think well out loud. I cannot make others think well no matter how well I think; and I certainly do not presume that my own thinking <em>is</em> always thinking well. But the act of writing, and writing publicly, is an attempt to do the kind of work (on however small a scale) that I see people like Vallor and <a href="http://blog.ayjay.org" title="Snakes and Ladders">Alan Jacobs</a> and <a href="https://stratechery.com">Ben Thompson</a> doing in their own spaces. If I can do even a fraction so well as they are in my own space, perhaps I too can help others think well. At the least, I know I am learning to think better along the way, and that is no small thing.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>These are different! Complementary, but different.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>See <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/the-chinese-room-argument.html#fn2">footnote 2 on an earlier blog post</a> for a comment on why I assume the problem is likely with <em>me</em>. It’s probable that there <em>is</em> quite a bit of specifically Christian reflection on many of these ideas; I simply haven’t encountered it. This may also say some things about the specifics of my theological education; I think it does and may return to that in a later post, but that’s neither here nor there.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>A preview:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Vallor sees virtue ethics as incommensurable with deontological accounts of ethics; I think the two are meant to complement one another. The structure of Biblical ethics is both deontological and virtuous. In particular, my read of the Wisdom literature (as well as the New Testament account of righteous life which builds upon it) is that the Biblical account sees virtue (or righteousness) and wisdom as the fruit—and I choose that word intentionally—of life lived under God’s enduring law. The moral precepts do not change; their specific applications are plurifold, and the shape of Biblical ethical reflection itself is likewise wide-ranging. Put more simply: life lived under God’s law in his power <em>yields</em> wisdom. This is not so different from Vallor’s picture of the virtue ethics of Aristotle, Confucius, or Buddha—save that wisdom in the Biblical account does not <em>supercede</em> God’s law; it comes to rightly apprehend <em>how</em> God’s ways are rightly applied in every circumstance.</p></li>
<li><p>Vallor rejects the notion of any singular account of a human <em>telos</em> or specific nature (other than what we have been given by evolution) that is capable of grounding the pursuit of virtue across all cultures. She aims for a kind of ethical pluralism that can account for the various cultural notions of human nature and <em>telos</em> without falling into ethical relativism or absolutism. I don’t think her account can actually support this weight, though. By contrast, I think Christianity <em>does</em> have the resources to support the kind of pluralism she rightly recognizes as necessary because its account of human naature and <em>telos</em> are rich enough to embrace the goods of many cultures and contexts and wisdom traditions. (That Christianity has not perfectly or even very much at all lived up to this potential is, as Vallor herself notes of her own account of virtue ethics, by no means a defeater for the claim.)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>There is much, <em>much</em> more to say here, and I will—later!<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Strategies for Maintaining Motivation2018-06-03T11:00:00-04:002018-06-03T11:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-06-03:/2018/strategies-for-maintaining-motivation.htmlA thing I’ve been thinking about a bit over the last few weeks is how to sustain motivation as you come into the "this no longer holds any intrinsic interest for me" phase of a project. Here I’m jotting down a couple of the strategies I’ve been taking so far; I’ll probably have another post like this in roughly six months when these particular projects are wrapped up.
<p>A thing I’ve been thinking about a bit over the last few weeks is how to sustain motivation as you come into the “this no longer holds any intrinsic interest for me” phase of a project. I have a couple of these on my plate right now, but I also want to <a href="http://esv.to/col3.23" title="Colossians 3:23">do my work well</a>. Here I’m jotting down a couple of the strategies I’ve been taking so far; I’ll probably have another post like this in roughly six months when these particular projects are wrapped up.</p>
<section id="section" class="level2">
<h2>– 1. –</h2>
<p><strong>Find related problems you can solve that support the effort or the team, which <em>are</em> intrinsically interesting.</strong></p>
<p>If you keep your eyes open, you can sometimes find problems which don’t <em>directly</em> advance the project you’re working on, but which both <em>indirectly</em> advance the project and also give you something to work on when you need a break. In my context, this looks like small but broadly-useful pieces of developer tooling.</p>
<p>For example: we’re in a spot where we’re spinning up a number of new applications in a given framework and stack. After getting through everything else on my plate this last Friday, I took a couple hours and started putting together a little tool that will make the major part of that process a single command-line invocation. This doesn’t directly advance the project I’m working on. But it <em>will</em> be useful for our whole team over the next six months.</p>
<p>Another example here for me is identifying technical initiatives we need, and taking the time to think through how we can accomplish them. These are real problems that we really need to solve, and even if we don’t need them solved <em>today</em> (because we’re prioritizing other things), there is a lot of value in figuring out we’ll solve them when we <em>do</em> get to them in a few months.</p>
<p>Both of those kinds of things can help by giving a sense of accomplishment while simultaneously doing something <em>besides</em> the main task, but they don’t require huge blocks of time or keep you from getting the main project done. And they <em>do</em> advance your team or your project in some sense.</p>
</section>
<section id="section-1" class="level2">
<h2>– 2. –</h2>
<p><strong>Find tasks which are <em>totally unrelated</em> and <em>instrincically interesting</em>, but which do not keep you from getting your main job done.</strong></p>
<p>This is kind of like the previous task except that it may or may not even be related to what you’re working on. I have a couple pieces of technology work that I variously have started and will be starting that are totally unrelated to my main projects. But they’re things that I can go after a bit here and a bit there – the last half hour of a day when my brain is shot, or over lunch, or for a few hours when I’ve finished everything else on my plate.</p>
<p>These kinds of things help me by serving as a <em>reward</em> for getting through the stuff I need to get through. They thus provide a kind of extrinsic motivation where my intrinsic motivation has flagged. They also have enough intrinsic interest of their own that I can feel some of that very helpful sense of accomplishing something I care about when I make progress on them.</p>
<p>It’s important that these things fit the profile I described, though: easy to move forward in small chunks of time, and okay to take a long while to finish. The danger with these–even more than with the first kind of small tasks I suggested–is that they <em>are</em> so interesting, and you have to make sure you <em>do</em> still get your regular work done.</p>
</section>
<section id="section-2" class="level2">
<h2>– 3. –</h2>
<p><strong>Find ways to gain a sense of <em>momentum.</em></strong></p>
<p>This one is in some ways the hardest of these, because it’s just digging in deeper on the slog of the project in question–but it’s also the one that most directly gets you closer to the end of the project. The trick is to find a rhythm where you actually move meaningfully closer to the goal of <em>finishing the project</em> all the time, while not ending up bogged down in nothing but slogs along the way.</p>
<p>A big part of this is figuring out how to break up the project into smaller and more tractable pieces, and then alternating the various elements of it in such a way that you can continually feel the satisfaction of finishing things. Over the last two weeks at work, despite some pretty significant frustrations which made it really hard to do this, I came out with more of a sense of momentum than I had even before those frustrations came up–precisely because I actually knocked out the things we aimed to get done in that specific span of time. And we’re in a spot where we’re actually about to go live with the first meaningful chunk of what we’ve been building.</p>
<p>Keeping that sense of momentum is really important. Even when you’re looking at a 6-month stretch of not-that-interesting a set of work ahead of you, it helps to see yourself chipping away at it and making real progress.</p>
</section>
<section id="section-3" class="level2">
<h2>– 4. –</h2>
<p><strong>Just watch <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sl9pTDK8PAk">this sequence from Doctor Who Series 9</a> over and over again.</strong> Or better yet, the whole episode.</p>
<iframe title="Breaking the Wall (Doctor Who Series 9 Episode 11)" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sl9pTDK8PAk?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen>
</iframe>
<blockquote>
<p>Personally, I think that’s a hell of a bird.</p>
</blockquote>
</section>
Going Dark For a Week2018-06-02T20:45:00-04:002018-06-02T20:45:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-06-02:/2018/going-dark-for-a-week.htmlJust a quick note: I’m signing out of all social media until June 11. You can email me if you need something urgently. Mental silence is needful!
<p>Just a quick note: I’m signing out of all social media until June 11. I’m on vacation from work for a week, and I’m taking the opportunity to enjoy the mental silence of not being on Twitter, <em>any</em> Slack instance, etc. (I may or may not be posting here along the way, but my feeling right now is that I <em>won’t</em>.)</p>
<p>Feel free to <a href="mailto:hello@chriskrycho.com">send me an email</a> if you have something come up that needs my attention with any urgency; otherwise, I’ll be back in a week and a half.</p>
Delivering Talks a Bit More Accessibly2018-05-22T07:50:00-04:002018-05-22T07:50:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-05-22:/2018/delivering-talks-a-bit-more-accessibly.htmlHow well could someone who cannot see at all follow along with your talk? How can you improve your answer to that question?
<p>One thing I try to take into account when I’m <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/how-i-write-a-talk.html" title="How I Write a Talk">writing a talk</a> is how the talk will work for people who cannot see well or at all. It’s easy, when you have good vision, to simply assume that everyone else does, too. But there are lots of ways that assumption falls over—everything from protanopia (the most common form of color-blindness) to total blindness.</p>
<p>There’s a question here that you <em>must</em> keep in mind when it comes to slides: Is my talk comprehensible without the slides? Because the reality is that some people simply cannot see them. At all.</p>
<p>Here’s a helpful way of thinking about it: however you actually go about building and rehearsing your talk, think about its content like a podcast episode. If someone can’t rip the audio out of the video stream, upload it to their podcast player, and follow along without any issue whatsoever… you’re leaning too hard on your slides.</p>
<p>I was reminded of this quite sharply by two things in the last week:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p>I <em>did</em> rip the audio from a couple talks and upload it to my podcast player and listen to them while walking and running.</p></li>
<li><p>I gave a talk at a meetup that involved some live-demoing/coding and I was thinking afterward: had anyone in the room been hard of sight or unsighted, they could not have followed much of what I said at all. No one was (to my knowledge!) but it had me thinking about how I would solve for that were it otherwise.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>So: think hard about making sure people in the audience who can’t see your slides can still follow your talk.</p>
Vacation as Recharging2018-05-19T11:15:00-04:002018-05-19T11:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-05-19:/2018/vacation-as-recharging.htmlRest is good, and needful; and resting well improves your work; but you cannot rest merely for the sake of your work.
<p>I know, I know: I <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/writing-plans-for-the-rest-of-2018.html"><em>just</em> said</a> you wouldn’t be seeing many blog posts here. But I also said I wouldn’t be able to resist. And it’s Saturday! And I have <em>thoughts</em>. So.</p>
<p>As I noted last week, <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/vacation-as-helpful-reminder.html">taking a vacation</a> can provide helpful reminds to us. Not just, as I noted there, about our own role in our teams. Also about the importance and goodness of rest, and the way that we are better able to accomplish the good of <em>work</em> when we also rightly pursue the good of <em>rest</em>.</p>
<p>I took four half days. That was it. Not an extremely long or even a total vacation. But the difference it made… This week, I <em>more</em> than made up for those half days in productivity, both at work and in my side projects.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>Rest is <em>essential</em> for us.</p>
<p>Now, what I’ve just written could be taken as a way of instrumentalizing rest: “Rest is good <em>because</em> it makes us better at working.” That’s not it. It’s rather that when we rest appropriately because rest is a good and necessary element of the design of human beings, we also find that we flourish in the other aspects of our lives. <em>Most</em> goods in our lives are simultaneously interrelated; and you cannot pursue one of those goods merely <em>for the sake</em> of another, failing to recognize it as a good in its own right, or usually you will end up getting <em>neither</em>.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Good grief, just look at how many words I posted yesterday.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Writing Plans for the Rest of 20182018-05-18T21:30:00-04:002018-05-18T21:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-05-18:/2018/writing-plans-for-the-rest-of-2018.htmlDon’t worry if it gets quiet around here: I’m just busy knocking out a lot of other things.
<p>A quick note on what you can expect here over the next few months: mostly, not much that isn’t technical, and not <em>very</em> much of that. I suggested <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/intentional-cyclicality.html" title="Intentional Cyclicality (March 6, 2018)">a couple months ago</a> that it’s worth intentionally carving out different phases for different things, and I’m intentionally carving out a phase that’s lighter on blogging.</p>
<p>I have mapped out a pretty aggressive schedule for <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> to hit some (mostly but not entirely self-imposed) goals and deadlines—on which I’m <em>quite</em> behind.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> As such, <em>most</em> of my writing time needs to be dedicated to that through roughly September.</p>
<p>And it’s not going to change <em>much</em> even after that, because I have a <em>different</em> writing project I’ll be starting work on in October.</p>
<p>It’s not that you won’t get occasional blog posts on ethics and theology and so on. I don’t think I could stop myself from blogging that way from time to time if I <em>wanted</em> to. But it won’t be the focus, and if things are relatively quiet around here for much of the rest of the year, don’t worry… you know why!</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>As I’ve mentioned here <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/on-steam-specifically-running-out-of-it.html" title="On Steam (Specifically, Running Out of It)">before</a>: building a workshop for EmberConf proved to be even <em>more</em> work than I expected going into it, and I followed that up by giving talks at our engineering all-hands and Austin ATX a month later, and a talk at the Denver/Boulder Rust meetup just this week.</p>
<p>Besides a lightning talk I’m giving at Denver Ember in June, I think I’m done giving talks of any sort for quite some time. Because seriously.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Vacation as Helpful Reminder2018-05-09T21:00:00-04:002018-05-09T21:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-05-09:/2018/vacation-as-helpful-reminder.html<p>One very helpful reminder provided by taking time off: I am not <em>indispensable</em> to my team; I am <em>valuable</em> to my team. Those are not the same thing.</p>
<p>One very helpful reminder provided by taking time off: I am not <em>indispensable</em> to my team; I am <em>valuable</em> to my team. Those are not the same thing.</p>
On Tweeting (Instead of Writing)2018-05-03T07:30:00-04:002018-05-03T07:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-05-03:/2018/on-tweeting-instead-of-writing.htmlI spent half an hour on Twitter this morning, and tried to engage in some “conversations” there. I wish I hadn’t.
<p>I ended up spending about half an hour on Twitter this morning, a fair bit of it writing out tweets in response to things I’d bumped into. This is not a thing I do often, especially anymore. (There was a time, back in the days of App.net, when I spent a <em>lot</em> of time conversing in a Twitter-like context.) And as I was thinking on it afterwards, I realized why I don’t often do it anymore: I come away from it dissatisfied. I’d have been <em>far</em> happier working on the blog post I had started before opening Twitter (for something related to that post).</p>
<p>Twitter is an interesting medium, but I consistently find that if I attempt to have conversations on Twitter—especially about important topics—I come away frustrated with my inability to say clearly what I mean, and concerned by the very real possibility of being misunderstood by someone who has too little of the context.</p>
<p>Because Twitter is like standing in the middle of the largest party on earth and <span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">shouting at the top of your lungs</span> to the person next to you. What you’re saying might make total sense in the context of that specific conversation, and if you could explain the context would make sense to the other people in the room, and yet be open to wild and massive misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Worse, because you are <span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">shouting at the top of your lungs</span> (not to mention limited in the weirdest way to 280-character blurbs strung together into something only vaguely resembling coherence), it’s difficult to communicate well even to the person you’re talking to.</p>
<p>I wrote early this year that we should all <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/tweet-less-blog-more.html">tweet less and blog more</a> and I was reminded forcefully of that. Tweetstorms are worse than blog posts. The fact that more people are apt to interact with them is a <em>downside</em>, not an <em>upside</em>, because people are apt to interact with your least articulate, least coherent, least contextualized version of an idea, and they’re encouraged by the medium to respond to it with snappy comebacks.</p>
<p>I’m not quite at the point where I want to just get off of Twitter entirely—but I’m not far from it either. I have no longer any desire to <em>converse</em> there, and find decreasing profit in reading anything there but links to interesting essays or blog posts. I’m seriously considering using it as a write-only medium and just piping the users with the highest signal of interesting links <a href="https://feedbin.com/blog/2018/01/11/feedbin-is-the-best-way-to-read-twitter/" title="“Feedbin is the Best Way to Read Twitter”">right into my <abbr>RSS</abbr> feed</a> and having done with it.</p>
Career Trajectory2018-05-02T07:00:00-04:002018-05-02T07:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-05-02:/2018/career-trajectory.htmlI've been thinking a bit, for the last year or so, about my career trajectory. Where do I want to go, and what do I want to do, over the next 5–10 years?<p>I’ve been thinking a bit, for the last year or so, about my <em>career trajectory</em>. Where do I want to go, and what do I want to do, over the next 5–10 years?</p>
<p>For the first seven years or so of my working life, I was just learning everything I could in software, following my interests but without much of a conscious plan, and making sure I put food on the table for my family. And I think that was absolutely the right tack to take! I <em>did</em> learn a ton, across a relatively wide swath of the industry. I have worked:</p>
<ul>
<li>as a cog in megacorporation with over 100,000 employees, writing C targeting a real-time operating system;</li>
<li>as the sole dedicated software developer in a company where I was the 12th employee, maintaining decades-old Fortran and C and C++ and writing a fair bit of Python in a scientific computing and physics modeling context;</li>
<li>as a subcontractor for a small consultancy doing PHP and jQuery and (both My- and Postgre)SQL;</li>
<li>as a solo consultant on projects ranging from WordPress setups to building a small but non-trivial application front-to-back in JavaScript;</li>
<li>and, most lately, at a VC-funded startup in the very-tricky scale-up phase, writing JavaScript, TypeScript, and a smidge of C<sup>♯</sup>.</li>
</ul>
<p>As a result, I’ve seen nearly every part of the stack to some degree—from writing a lex/yacc parser spike for a one-off assembly language to building rich browser client applications—and I’ve seen a lot of the kinds of companies that exist in our industry. I’ve also seen (and created!) a pretty remarkable amount of tech debt.</p>
<p>All of which means that, at 30 (almost 31!) and about a year from the end of my first decade in this industry, I’m starting to have a pretty good sense of the things I like, the things I don’t, and some of the directions I might like to go in the future.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> It actually feels a little odd, precisely <em>because</em> I just went where my interests and reasonably good opportunities appeared.</p>
<p>But it’s also important. I know better now than I did a decade ago the things that bring me joy and the places where I’m best equipped to contribute effectively to a team. (I am of course also far better equipped to contribute effectively to a team than I was when I started!) I find that I care enormously about what to build as well as how to build it—my instincts and interests seem to be roughly 25% product person, 25% mentor and teacher, and 50% individual contributor, with a particular interest in building enabling tools for others.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> I have no idea where that will take me in the future, and I’m working closely with my (really excellent) manager at Olo to find ways to both use and develop those effectively where I am.</p>
<p>There are two upshots to all of this:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p>If you’re a young developer (or, <em>probably</em>, early on in almost any field), getting as varied—but not shallow!—experience you can in the early years is incredibly valuable. That goes double if you’re coming in from a “non-traditional” background as I did, because it’s a great way to get exposed practically to a lot of the different parts of software and to computer science ideas you won’t if you stay in just one spot. That’s obviously a hard luxury to come by in some ways, but if you <em>can</em> manage it, it pays huge dividends.</p></li>
<li><p>I’m happy to be starting to have a sense of <em>direction</em> and <em>trajectory</em>. I’m in the early stages of that, though; I’m curious to see what I sort out in conversation with Jaimie and my church community and others I trust, as well as my leadership at Olo, over the next year.</p></li>
</ol>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>To be clear to any fellow <a href="https://www.olo.com">Olo</a>-ers who might read this: I’m not planning to go anywhere soon. This isn’t <em>that</em> kind of post.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Hello, <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> and <a href="https://github.com/typed-ember/ember-cli-typescript">ember-cli-typescript</a>…<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
The Cost of Google as Memory Prosthesis2018-04-30T07:00:00-04:002018-04-30T07:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-04-30:/2018/the-cost-of-google-as-memory-prosthesis.htmlI’ve had a bunch of thoughts about thinking and memory on my mind over the last decade, and have never really spent a lot of time writing them down. Jaimie has gotten to hear most of them, for good or ill. But Sacasas covers a *lot* of the most important pieces of it in the pieces linked in this post!
<p>This is less a blog post in the normal sense and more a bunch of links to old posts by L. M. Sacasas. (If you’re not subscribed to his blog, <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com">The Frailest Thing</a>, you should be. <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/feed/">Here’s the RSS feed</a>; you can just copy and paste that link into your feed reader. You do <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2017/02/a-further-word-of-exhortation-rss.html" title="Alan Jacobs – a further word of exhortation: RSS">use RSS, right?</a>)</p>
<p>I’ve had a bunch of thoughts about thinking and memory on my mind over the last decade, and have never really spent a lot of time writing them down. Jaimie has gotten to hear most of them, for good or ill. But Sacasas covers a <em>lot</em> of the most important pieces of it in <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2011/09/15/dont-offload-your-memory-quite-yet-cognitive-science-memory-and-education/">this post</a> and others linked below.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The problem is that we tend to conceive of thinking analogously to how we imagine a computer works and we abstract processes from data. We treat “critical thinking” as a process that can be taught independently of any specific data or information. On the contrary, according to Willingham, the findings of cognitive science suggest that “[c]ritical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge” and “we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge parallel with practicing critical thinking skills.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One of the chief ways I feel the bitter sting of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/" title="Nick Carr: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”">“the shallows”</a> is in precisely this: that I <em>have</em> too often let Google do the work my memory should. But memory and connection and those startling leaps of insight that come from them are not substitutable by a search engine. Thinking happens as much in the background of the rest of our lives as it does on demand; and <em>good</em> answers to questions come as we put questions <em>to ourselves</em>, rather than to a database, even one powered by sophisticated sets of derivatives (a.k.a. “machine learning”).</p>
<p>Databases are potentially very useful tools. But their utility is specific, and we should circumscribe our uses of them, and especially our reliance on them, accordingly.</p>
<p>So… read Sacasas on memory!</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2011/09/15/dont-offload-your-memory-quite-yet-cognitive-science-memory-and-education/"> Don’t Offload Your Memory Quite Yet: Cognitive Science, Memory, and Education </a> (the post quoted above)</li>
<li><a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2011/07/15/offloaded-memory-and-its-discontents-or-why-life-isnt-a-game-of-jeopardy/">Offloaded Memory and Its Discontents (or, Why Life Isn’t a Game of Jeopardy)</a></li>
<li><a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2011/03/04/the-connecting-is-the-thinking-memory-and-creativity/">‘The Connecting Is the Thinking’: Memory and Creativity</a></li>
<li><a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2011/01/04/order-memory-and-history/">Order, Memory, and History</a></li>
</ul>
<p>And if it doesn’t go without saying… follow the links in those; there’s a lot of good material there.</p>
Disciplining2018-04-18T06:35:00-04:002018-04-18T06:35:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-04-18:/2018/disciplining.htmlI’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we discipline our children. Nothing new, just working hard at practicing what we already think. We’ve been “in the trenches” with our three-year-old a bit, because, well… she’s three! Being three is hard! You have an absurd amount you’re learning, and sometimes it breaks your brain! And so being the parent of a three-year-old is also hard.
<p>I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we discipline our children. Nothing <em>new</em>, just working hard at practicing what we already think. We’ve been “in the trenches” with our three-year-old a bit, because, well… she’s three! Being three is hard! You have an absurd amount you’re learning, and sometimes it breaks your brain! And so being the parent of a three-year-old is <em>also</em> hard.</p>
<p>For the last several days, I’ve been working very hard to help Kate listen and obey. That way of putting it is intentional and important.</p>
<p>In my observation, the default tendency in conservative Christian circles is to respond to disobedience and willfulness with direct consequences, <em>stat</em>. There is usually a good motivation behind this, too. We recognize that learning to listen and obey is good and necessary! We don’t want to make the mistake of letting our kids go un-disciplined and so untrained in things they need to be trained in. That said, the extremely common notion that our kids should be immediately given a <em>consequence</em> of some sort if they don’t “obey the first time, right away, with a happy heart” seems to me profoundly misguided—more than that, profoundly out of step with the way God “parents” his people in Scripture.</p>
<p>I’ve often remarked to Jaimie as we’ve considered parenting that if we actually look closely at God’s treatment of his people as our model, it doesn’t look <em>anything</em> like the “obey immediately or receive a consequence” model. To the contrary.</p>
<p>Let’s review: God saves Israel from slavery and makes a covenant with them. The terms of that covenant are such that if they violate it, God is within his rights in the terms of the covenant to send them into exile—to remove them from the land he gave them. And in the <em>first generation</em>, they flagrantly disobey and violate the terms of the covenant. So, game over, right? Off to exile you go! Well… no. God warns, and then disciplines (in the context of national-level consequences!) mildly, and quickly restores when his people cry for help. Over and over again, for 500–700 years, or somewhere between 15 and 25 generations. And many parts of his law they seem <em>never</em> to have kept—the Jubilees, for example. God’s patience is astounding. He is, as Exodus 34 puts it, <em>slow to anger and abounding in covenant love</em>. This isn’t a lack of discipline. But it is extraordinary patience and grace, amazing time devoted to teaching the people how to walk with him even as they got it wrong again and again.</p>
<p>If I’m going to parent in a way that points my kids toward God, that helps them genuinely trust Christ, then my parenting ought to be shaped by all of that. I ought to be slow to anger and abounding in love. I ought to be patient and gracious. I ought to aim not merely to either get the desired behavior or immediately mete out a consequence, but to teach my kids <em>how</em> to do what they should.</p>
<p>So, for the past few days, I have been working (again! This is not new; we just forget) to help our three-year-old listen and obey. When she does not listen, I get her attention again and remind her that she needs to listen and obey—not least because it’s sometimes very important that she do so! (If we’re outside and near a street and she starts to wander into the road…) And if she still does not listen and obey, I will get down on my knees right in front of her, and look her right in the eyes on her own level, and make her repeat after me exactly what I’ve said. And if she <em>still</em> doesn’t listen, yes, I will give her a consequence for that, to help her learn: that sin has consequences, and so that listening and obeying <em>feel</em> important to her. But when she does listen—even if it takes all that repetition!—we celebrate with her and give her a high five or a hug or both. Again: so that she learns that doing well is <em>good</em> and that there is a reward for doing well.</p>
<p>That act of getting down on my knees and helping her obey is good for me, too. It’s a concrete action that reminds me: this is a little <em>person</em>, made in the image of God, who is struggling to keep his commands. She is just like me. More: I can be in that moment a little picture to her, to myself, and to my family of God the Son, who came down to <em>our</em> level in a way that far outstrips a father getting down on his knees. I cannot save my three-year-old from her sin and her death; I can only point her to the one who does. But that I <em>can</em> do. I can remind her, not only with my words (important though they are!) but also with what I do with my body, of the one who loved us enough to bear with us along the way and to bear in himself the cost of our failings.</p>
On Steam (Specifically, Running Out of It)2018-04-05T07:00:00-04:002018-10-11T08:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-04-05:/2018/on-steam-specifically-running-out-of-it.htmlI find myself this morning almost unable to write at all, and quite unable to write what I was planning to be writing today. I’m all out of steam.
<p>I find myself this morning almost unable to write at all, and quite unable to write what I was <em>planning</em> to be writing today. (I’ve been steadily pushing forward on <a href="https://github.com/typed-ember/ember-typings/issues/14">a big “quest”-style issue for an open source software project I help maintain</a>, and that’s how I planned to spend my writing time today.) But I’m feeling quite keenly the need of some time away from that project and indeed from a lot of the things that have had me burning the candle at both ends.</p>
<p>I’ve noted before that I <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/intentional-cyclicality.html">go in cycles</a>; one thing that I’ve also started to notice is that those cycles, unsurprisingly, include points where I’m just <em>done</em>. I’m all out of steam. And I seem to have hit one of those just this week.</p>
<p>It makes sense: since last October, as a family we’ve moved across the country; lived with my parents for three months, during which time we learned that my dad had brain cancer and helped him and my mom through the surgery, recovery, and early parts of chemo and radiation); then moved into a new house; and joined a new church.</p>
<p>On top of that I’ve personally continued working on <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> and <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a>, helped ship the most important release of <a href="https://github.com/typed-ember/ember-cli-typescript">ember-cli-typescript</a> in the project’s history, taught a workshop on TypeScript at EmberConf, and helped kick off one of the most important front-end development projects in Olo’s history.</p>
<p>Of <em>course</em> I’m tired. Of <em>course</em> I feel like I’m just out of steam.</p>
<p>The trick, for the moment, is that there are some things I really feel I should carry to some specific points <em>before</em> I take a week or two off. Getting that quest issue that I was going to be writing this morning done, and a related <a href="https://github.com/emberjs/rfcs">Ember.js RFC</a> on the relationship of TypeScript and Ember.js, and getting the first of our beta releases for this project at Olo out the door… all of those are things that really just <em>need</em> to happen before I take that time off. After I get through those, though, I think I’m taking a week or so off. Maybe time it with Memorial Day to make it a full 10 days or something.</p>
<p>And in the meantime, I do things like write little blog posts thinking about “running out of steam” not because it’s all that important for the world to know, but because it’s a way of keeping <em>some</em> degree of forward momentum, continuing to maintain my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/momentum.html">daily writing habit</a>, and generally doing all the little things that make it possible for me to actually get across the finish line on those projects.</p>
<p>Because—weird though it may seem in some ways—even when I’m tired like it, I know through long experience that the way I actually get across those finish lines is by keeping up my forward motion. It’s very much like the feeling in the last 5k of a half marathon. (A half marathon is two five-milers and a 5k, and thinking about it that way is the way to run it effectively.)</p>
<p>Everything hurts. You don’t feel like you have anything left. But in fact, if you’ve done the right things up to that point, you <em>do</em> have enough left. The way to finish well is not only to keep putting one foot in front of the other, but also to push a little harder, and a little harder, and a little harder, until you hit the finish line. You have to watch out, of course, and not hurt yourself. That’s the trick with mental fatigue, too. Burnout is a real thing. But, as with running, if you’ve built up your mental muscles well and built up the reserves of <em>experience</em> that you need, you know the difference. You know when you need to stop early for a day and go read a novel. You know when to push through. You know when to take a day off of the quest issue and write a quirky, and not-all-that-coherent, blog post about the experience of fatigue and thinking about pushing on. And you know that you still need to finish.</p>
<p><strong>Edit (October 11, 2018):</strong> I’ve added my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout/">#burnout</a> tag to this post retroactively because I now recognize much of what I wrote here as some of the earlier symptoms of what I didn’t concretely identify until <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/some-mild-burnout.html">a bit later</a>.</p>
How I Write a Talk2018-03-16T20:00:00-04:002018-03-16T20:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-03-16:/2018/how-i-write-a-talk.htmlGiving a good talk is mostly a matter of writing a good talk and crafting a coherent presentation of that material (with or without slides or other helpers). In this post, I’m going to briefly walk through how *I* prepare talks. This process may not work for you at all; sometimes I read other people’s talk preparation strategies and laugh because they’re so wildly different from mine. But this way there’s one more strategy documented out there.
<p>Giving a good talk is mostly a matter of <em>writing</em> a good talk and crafting a coherent presentation of that material (with or without slides or other helpers). In this post, I’m going to briefly walk through how <em>I</em> prepare talks. This process may not work for you at <em>all</em>; sometimes I read <a href="https://css-tricks.com/talk-writing-process/">other people’s talk preparation strategies</a> and laugh because they’re so wildly different from mine. But this way there’s one more strategy documented out there.</p>
<p>The strategy is the one I’ve developed over the past few years as I’ve given a couple conference talks and a bunch more weekly tech talks at Olo.</p>
<p>While my own approach here has a couple details that are technical, the vast majority of it is applicable to any kind of talk. In fact, a <em>lot</em> of this is essentially identical to certain phases of my preparation for preaching a sermon or teaching a theology class at church.</p>
<section id="brainstorm-on-paper." class="level2">
<h2>1. Brainstorm on paper.</h2>
<p>I start by writing out a bunch of different approaches I might want to use for the talk with pen and paper. Usually I grab the <a href="https://us.moleskine.com/en/">Moleskine</a> I dedicate to writing ideas<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> and <a href="https://www.jetpens.com/Pilot-Juice-Up-Gel-Pen-0.4-mm-Blue-Black/pd/18166">my favorite pen</a> and put away everything electronic. Here I’m not worried about structure or organization at all. I just jot down the things I want to cover, what the motivating idea and main takeaway is, and any secondary points I want the audience of the talk to come away with.</p>
<p>Sometimes this is broadly obvious because I already know how to come at the talk. Sometimes it takes multiple passes to get right. And when I skip this step, things go wrong regardless. I almost gave a <em>really</em> terrible version of an important internal tech talk at Olo a month ago because I hadn’t take the time to do this, and ultimately had to push back when I delivered it by a bunch as a result!</p>
</section>
<section id="write-a-high-level-outline-and-map-out-the-overall-timing." class="level2">
<h2>2. Write a high-level outline and map out the overall timing.</h2>
<p>Once I have a good idea the way I want to tackle the subject, I write an outline—again, in my Moleskin with a pen. Once I map out the overall sections of the talk, one or two or <em>very</em> rarely three layers deep, I go through and write out how long I think each section should be. This is often the first point I have to start cutting material, because I can look at a list of eight sub-bullet points allocated to a 10-minute block and realize: <em>no, I’m probably not actually going to get through that.</em></p>
<figure>
<img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/emberconf-notes.jpg" title="EmberConf notes" alt="Planning and transferring notes for EmberConf" /><figcaption>Planning and transferring notes for EmberConf</figcaption>
</figure>
</section>
<section id="draft-the-talk-writing-it-out-long-form." class="level2">
<h2>3. Draft the talk, writing it out long-form.</h2>
<p>This is the longest part of the process, but it works wonders for me.</p>
<p>I start by copying the outline from my paper notebook into a <a href="https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">Markdown</a>-friendly writing environment.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> I turn each bullet point in the original outline into a heading. Then I expand the outline dramatically, from those high-level sections to slide-level sections: one sub-heading per slide. At this point I also add “breaks” between all the headings, which is how <a href="https://revealjs.com/">the web-based slides tool I use</a>.</p>
<p>Next up I script the talk in detail. I know some people just throw down bullet points here; that’s not how I work. I write out a word-by-word script for what to say. Each of those headings/slides gets anything from a sentence to a few paragraphs. As I’m doing this, I keep an eye on the word count: courtesy of having done a fair number of talks this way, and having done a <em>lot</em> of <a href="http://www.newrustacean.com">podcasting</a> this way, I have a pretty good feel for what a given number of words will come out to in terms of talk time.</p>
<p>This is also the phase where I extract bullet points, notes about images to insert, code samples, etc. Sometimes I’ll pause to write out an example in detail while working on the script; other times I’ll just leave myself a note that looks like <code>TODO: add Doctor Who "Oh yes!" GIF here</code>. <a href="http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/507/438/eeb.gif">For reference: <em>this</em> GIF.</a> The script goes behind a simple textual marker (customizable in the tool I use; usually just <code>Note:</code>) so that it doesn’t show up on the slide and instead is displayed as speaker notes.</p>
<p>The important thing for me is that writing out the talk this way lets me know what materials actually go on what slides, and it also cements the content into my mind. Once it’s written, I don’t actually try to memorize it, and I don’t read from it while delivering the talk. The act of creating it this way makes the flow of the slides flow coherently. I end up with a map to what I actually intend to say in the form of the slides themselves—so they guide me and the audience together through the content in a coherent way.</p>
<p>Once I have this full script written out, I’ll go back over it as a revision pass.</p>
</section>
<section id="do-a-dry-run-and-edit-the-talk." class="level2">
<h2>4. Do a dry-run and edit the talk.</h2>
<p>I now do at least one dry run for every conference-type talk—by myself in front of the computer if necessary, but preferably in front of at least a small audience. A dry run has two big upsides:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>I figure out whether I’m going to hit your time or not. I take this really seriously, because I think it’s incredibly rude to both the audience and (if you’re not going last) the next speaker to go over. So if I need to trim, I figure that out by doing a dry run (and probably not any other way). Even with all my practice prepping spoken materials, I still have to tweak and trim for length quite regularly.</p></li>
<li><p>I get to have a feedback cycle with the actual process of presenting the material—from yourself if nothing else, but possibly also from the audience if I have one.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>I’ve only gotten to do a dry run with an audience twice (for my Rust Belt Rust talk and for the EmberConf workshop I just gave), but it has been incredibly helpful both times. Having people give you feedback on what you’ve just presented can be slightly intimidating, but it’s way better to learn that the flow was off in an important way <em>before</em> you give a talk than <em>during</em> or <em>after</em> the presentation.</p>
<p>I write down the feedback I get in a dry run, or I take notes if I’m doing it by myself, and then I use those to update the script and slides I prepared in step 3 to resolve any issues I ran into. That often means cutting material; in the case of my EmberConf workshop it also meant completely restructuring part of the talk—moving the order of material around a <em>lot</em>. That was a lot of work, but it was also incredibly important and valuable.</p>
<p>To see this in practice, you can see the whole final content of my EmberConf 2018 workshop <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chriskrycho/emberconf-slides/master/talk.md">here</a>—you can see it’s just plain text and some special markup for certain slide transitions.</p>
</section>
<section id="repeat-step-4-until-im-happy-with-it-or-im-out-of-time." class="level2">
<h2>5. Repeat Step 4 until I’m happy with it or I’m out of time.</h2>
<p>Let’s be honest: it’s usually the latter, and in many ways that’s actually a good thing. A talk can be polished <em>ad infinitum</em> and it’s not actually helpful to polish forever. At some point the return on investment is so small relative to the time cost (which is high!) that you should just stop and give the talk.</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>or occasionally a white, narrow-ruled legal pad<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Right now that’s usually <a href="TODO">Ulysses</a>, but there are things that bother me about every such writing app I’ve ever tried—and yes, before you suggest it, that does include Emacs and Vim, along with VS Code and other programming text editors, as well as the usual plain-text writing environment apps like Ulysses.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Stop Saying “What Capitalism Does”2018-03-09T07:00:00-05:002018-03-09T07:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-03-09:/2018/stop-saying-what-capitalism-does.html“What capitalism does,” or “what liberalism does,” or “what postmodernism does,” or “what fundamentalism does”: the phrase should die an unmourned death. It does us all a great disservice, not for what it says but for what it leaves unsaid and the ways it misleads us.<p>“What capitalism does,” or “what liberalism does,” or “what postmodernism does,” or “what fundamentalism does”: the phrase should die an unmourned death. It does us all a great disservice, not for what it says but for what it leaves unsaid and the ways it misleads us.</p>
<p>I most recently ran into the <em>capitalism</em> variant of the phrase in the influential 1995 essay “The Californian Ideology,” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. The text is littered with the phrase; if you took the essay at face value you would conclude that at least in the minds of Barbrook and Cameron capitalism had transformed from a system and structure into a demon, possessing and directing the culture they dislike.</p>
<p>I am not opposed to <a href="http://blogs.mereorthodoxy.com/matthewloftus/2017/04/27/new-gods-old-demons/" title="Matthew Loftus: “New Gods, Old Demons”">such readings of the world</a> in principle; I think they may even <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2017/04/principalities-powers-and-technical-boy.html" title="Alan Jacobs: “principalities, powers, and the technical boy”">get certain important things right</a> that we too often overlook in our “disenchanted” modernity. If people want to talk of Capitalism and Marxism and Media and Liberalism and Technologism and The Beltway and The Kremlin and so on as capital-P Powers—if people want to think about the ways in which there may be real spiritual realities at work behind some of the things we take for granted—well, as the millennials say, <em>I am so here for that</em>.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>But that is not how Barbrook and Cameron meant it. Nor is it how most people mean the phrase when they toss it around.</p>
<p>What they mean, instead, is something like this: <em>People act differently in different systems and structures; the system and structure of capitalism [or liberalism or fundamentalism or…] leads people to act in [this way that I think is bad].</em> It is, in other words, shorthand for an idea most of us can get behind.</p>
<p>That idea is important, too: people <em>do</em> act differently in different systems and structures. What’s more, when a given structure is pervasive, it can be difficult to resist or reject, or even to consider that it should be resisted or rejected. This idea is so important that <a href="http://stephencarradini.com">Stephen Carradini</a> and I dedicated all of <a href="https://www.winningslowly.org/season-5.html">Winning Slowly Season 5: Structure and Agency</a> to the ins and outs of systems and structures, good and bad alike; the limits of individual action in the face of systemic pressure; and the ways we ought to leverage good systems and dismantle bad systems.</p>
<p>But. As much as this shorthand captures something important, it also <em>obscures</em> something important: it is <em>people</em> who act differently under those different structures, and <em>people</em> who set up systems in the first place and maintain them afterward. This is not to dismiss the tendency of systems to perpetuate themselves, or to ignore the reality of systems which harm everyone in them and go on existing anyway. (Self interest is complicated.) Rather, it is to remind us <em>how</em> systems come to be (people created them because they seemed in some way good to them), <em>what</em> they are made of (people continuing to do what seems in some way good to them), and <em>why</em> they are hard to dismantle (because many people’s self-interest is aligned with maintaining existing institutions).</p>
<p>It is possible to think and act as if individual agency is all that matters, and this is fallacious. People <em>do</em> act differently in different systems and structures, for good and for ill. Capitalism, as a system and structure, serves as an environment in which enormous gains in productivity have been possible; but it also serves an environment where people reduce others (and themselves) to their productivity. “Liberalism,” as a system and structure, serves as an environment where many important gains in human liberties have grown up; but it also serves as an environment where the good of liberty has at times grown cancerous and indeed metastasized until the will of the individual is dangerously (and nonsensically) totalized. Contrast how people live and think and act in capitalist or liberal contexts with feudal or tribal contexts (to pick just two of the many contrasts we could) and you will see very, very different things. Systems matter; we cannot erase their impact on the individual.</p>
<p>But it is also possible to talk and act as if the structure, the system, is <em>all</em>. This is the mistake the shorthand “what capitalism does” leads us to. Flip the emphasis in the previous paragraph: the environments of capitalism and liberalism matter, but <em>people</em> continue to act in those environments. More than that, people continue to transform the structures and systems they inhabit, often in startling ways. Half a century ago, it would have been laughable to suggest that <a href="https://www.apple.com" title="Apple">the most profitable corporation in the world</a> would also be among those most assiduously pursuing environmental responsibility and stewardship. People’s continuous pressure, as well as the ascent to not only economic but also cultural leadership of people who care about this has changed capitalism in a good way. Social pressure on businesses has plenty of downsides, too, in our internet-rage-storm era; and there is much to critique about the ways that business leaders have come to dominate culture.</p>
<p>The point, though, is that systems and structures are more malleable than the shorthand credits them, and so we would do well to remember the limitations of the shorthand and indeed largely to abandon it unless we are often in the habit of qualifying it. It is too sloppy. Throw it out!</p>
<p>Or if not that (shorthands <em>are</em> useful after all) then clarify often. Talk instead about structures, and systems, and people’s ability to change them—indeed to throw them out. Speak less often of “what capitalism does” and more often of what capitalism makes easy and what it makes hard, what avenues living in liberalism opens up and what it blinds us to, what virtues and what vices fundamentalism might inculcate.</p>
<p>(And if you want to have a conversation about Powers, have at it.)</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Yes, I am a millennial by age cohort. I mock these generational divides and characterizations because I think them mostly meaningless blather.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Intentional Cyclicality2018-03-06T07:00:00-05:002019-05-29T16:35:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-03-06:/2018/intentional-cyclicality.htmlThe kinds of cycles I often into naturally are not bad things—but I might be better served by letting my other goals and aims directly inform how much I blog (rather than its being mere incidental fallout).
<p>If you look closely at my written output on this site (and indeed on all the previous incarnations of it), you’ll notice a sort of trend: repeating <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/three-month-cycles.html" title="Three Month Cycles. Or something thereabouts.">cycles</a> of substantial output, usually focused in a particular direction, followed by a period of silence and then, when I start back up, usually a different topic at the fore.</p>
<p>Over the last year, for example, you can see phases of emphasis on TypeScript and on art, phases where I wrote on a mix including productivity and on programming languages and type theory. But you can also see gaps. Nothing at all appeared here between August and November last year.</p>
<p>This morning, I was reading <a href="http://ayjay.org">Alan Jacobs</a> at his <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/">Text Patterns</a> blog (<a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2018/03/rewriting-ancient-history.html" title="Rewriting Ancient History">this post</a>, if you’re curious), and thinking on his <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2018/03/back-in-saddle.html" title="Back in the Saddle">“I’m back!”</a> post from a few days ago. Since I started reading Jacobs a few years ago, I’ve watched him go through a number of cycles: he’ll simply say “I have other things I need to do now; I have no idea if I’ll pick this specific site back up, but if I do it won’t be for a good long while!” and <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2017/09/pinboard.html" title="Redirecting to Pinboard">be on his way</a>. The site will sit dormant for the better part of a year. And then: “I’m back!” (I doubt Jacobs will ever stop blogging; he seems to find it a fruitful medium <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/on-blogging.html">for many of the same reasons I do</a>.)</p>
<p>The thought that caught my attention today is what Jacobs got up to in the meantime. My breaks tend to be forced on me by simply running out of steam or getting distracted by <a href="https://true-myth.js.org/" title="True Myth">other projects</a>. Jacobs… writes whole books ranging from the <a href="https://www.alibris.com/How-to-Think-A-Survival-Guide-for-a-World-at-Odds-Alan-Jacobs/book/38234700?matches=38" title="How to Think: A Guide for the Perplexed">popular (and important!)</a> to the <a href="https://www.alibris.com/The-Year-of-Our-Lord-1943-Christian-Humanism-in-an-Age-of-Crisis-Alan-Jacobs/book/40202620?matches=50" title="The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis">academic (and important!)</a>.</p>
<p>As to why that caught my attention so: I also read <a href="http://stephaniehurlburt.com/">Stephanie Hurlburt</a>, and <a href="http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2018/3/6/what-is-fulfillment" title="What is Fulfillment?">her most recent post</a> had me thinking on plans and goals and hopes.</p>
<p>I’ve been thinking for a while now about how I accomplish both my day-to-day goals and my longer-term aims. Some of the things I want to do are, like Hurlburt’s bigger goals listed near the end of that post, in the 5–10-year category! Accomplishing some of those kinds of things requires focus, discipline, and time. All of which together suggest the importance of recognizing that the kinds of cycles I have fallen into naturally are not bad things, but that I might be better served by letting my other goals and aims <em>directly</em> inform how much I blog (rather than its being mere incidental fallout).</p>
<p>More on this later. For now I have a <a href="https://emberconf.com/speakers.html#chris-krycho" title="EmberConf: TypeScript Up Your Ember.js App!">conference workshop</a> to finish preparing for and three New Rustacean episodes planned for the month.</p>
<hr />
<p>(Yes. I did that on purpose.)</p>
A Forgotten Blog Post Idea2018-02-25T16:00:00-05:002018-02-25T16:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-02-25:/2018/a-forgotten-blog-post-idea.htmlOne of the most frustrating things as a writer is when you have a good idea and then *forget it*. This has happened to me before. So in trade, here are the couple paragraphs of notes (on one particular failing I see among my fellow conservatives) from the last time this happened to me.
<p>One of the most frustrating things as a writer is when you have a good idea and then <em>forget it</em>. I had a thought this morning, and it was solid. But I was not in a spot where I could write it down (whether in a notebook or in <a href="http://www.bear-writer.com">Bear</a>). The frustration I feel at this is hard to express, but here I am trying.</p>
<p>It is such a frustrating experience that I <em>keenly</em> remember the experience happening to me once before—back in 2016, for a post I have not yet finished writing because I continually find it <em>beyond</em> me. And since I cannot remember today’s good idea, and haven’t finished the last good idea, I’ll just share the notes I wrote down back in March 2016 about that idea in hopes that either I will actually run with them sooner rather than later, or that the act of putting it out there in this brief form will be enough to allow me to let it go:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>American conservatives point to previous eras as if our nation were less sinful, less blemished then. It was not. It was wretched in different ways—but no less wicked than now. Centuries of slavery, and of Jim Crow, <em>are not lesser sins than today’s sexual ills.</em></p>
<p>Conservatives have too often elided these essential questions: Whose “better” past? And in what sense “better”? It may have been less sexually perverse, but how is that “better” when it entailed at the same time massive oppression of whole groups of people—especially because that oppression was so often at the hands of people claiming the name of Christ?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is a great deal to unpack there, and I continue to find it more than I am really <em>able</em> to unpack.</p>
Against Doing What Comes Naturally.2018-02-22T07:00:00-05:002018-02-22T07:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-02-22:/2018/against-doing-what-comes-naturally.htmlTwice, recently, I have found myself needing to start over—essentially from scratch—on something I had written. One was a tech talk for work, another my [promised](http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2017-in-review-my-goals.html "2017 In Review: My Goals") post on how we chose a new church after we moved across the country. Both pieces suffered from an overabundance of combativeness. Or: I was kind of a jerk in the first drafts.…
<p>Twice, recently, I have found myself needing to start over—essentially from scratch—on something I had written. One was a tech talk for work, another my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2017-in-review-my-goals.html" title="2017 In Review: My Goals">promised</a> post on how we chose a new church after we moved across the country.</p>
<p>Both pieces suffered from an overabundance of combativeness. Or: I was kind of a jerk in the first drafts.</p>
<p>Thinking about them this morning, I noted that in both cases my tendency was to write in a posture that mixed defensiveness with hostility to an existing structure. In both cases, that hostility might actually be well-deserved—but there are times and places for everything, including polemic, and the more I (separately) chewed on both of these pieces, the more I realized that I didn’t want to have an argument. In these cases, at least, I don’t want to <em>punch</em> the views I disagree with, so much as gently nudge them out of the way while showing a more excellent way.</p>
<p>This runs up against one of my deepest-seated tendencies. I am passionate about teaching, about showing a better way, about correcting and fixing ills in the world. I also find a good argument wonderfully sharpening to the way I think—tracing out differences, finding the weaknesses in my own views and either tightening them up or abandoning them as appropriate, understanding other views more clearly… Those are good passions in many ways, but like all good passions they can go awry very easily. In my case, they can lead me to treat <em>everything</em> like an argument, and to go after everything that seems amiss to me with the same kind of knock-it-down-with-a-battering-ram approach.</p>
<p>In the last fifteen years, I have been learning <em>not</em> to verbally hammer at problems (whether in person or in writing). I have slowly learned to listen carefully and try to understand why someone holds the view they do, even when I still think their view is wrong. I have seen firsthand that people’s surface statements and their deepest-held beliefs alike often derive from experiences that are <em>not</em> obvious on the surface. Their struggles are not necessarily apparent. Their histories certainly are not.</p>
<p>I have also slowly learned that a nudge here and a nudge there can often be both more effective and—more importantly—<em>kinder</em> than trying to shove people where I think they ought to be. Even when I’m right about where they ought to be! And my judgments of such things, I have also too-slowly learned, are far less than perfect—which should temper the vigor with which I sally forth to do battle for those judgments.</p>
<p>Make no mistake: there are times for rebuke. There are times to say, “This view you hold [about software development, or Christianity, or financial practices, or whatever else]? It’s <em>dead wrong</em>.” But not all the time. Even though it’s what’s “natural” for me, even though it’s what feels right sometimes.</p>
<p>Sometimes, we have to fight our strongest instincts. No matter how natural something feels, it can be <em>wrong</em>. That is certainly so for me when I get combative about something I’m passionate about. It’s the right response… <em>occasionally</em>. Nearly all of the time, I need to be quieter, gentler, more patient, more understanding, and less interested in winning a fight.</p>
Good Work Takes Time2018-02-17T18:00:00-05:002018-02-17T18:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-02-17:/2018/good-work-takes-time.htmlIt’s obvious enough when you say it aloud, of course, but it bears reiterating, and often: Good work takes time, and most of the time and effort behind good projects remains forever invisible.
<p>It’s obvious enough when you say it aloud, of course, but it bears reiterating, and often: <em>Good work takes time, and most of the time and effort behind good projects remains forever invisible.</em></p>
<p>One of the things I did in 2017 that I’m most proud of (and which I get <em>enormous</em> utility from every day at work) is building <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/true-myth">True Myth</a>, a library implementing <code>Maybe</code> and <code>Result</code> types in TypeScript.</p>
<aside>
<p>Note: if you’re about to tune out because this sounds technical, don’t. You can understand everything important in this post without understanding a thing about TypeScript or these particular types.</p>
</aside>
<p>There’s nothing <em>particularly</em> special about that library compared to any of the others in the space which already do the same thing. It makes its own <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/true-myth/blob/master/README.md#why-not" title="Comparisons with Folktale and Sanctuary">design tradeoffs</a>, which are slightly <em>different</em> from others, and it has what I think are <a href="https://true-myth.js.org">best-in-class docs</a>, but mostly it’s comparable to the others. Still, it’s <em>good</em>, and it fits that particular niche in terms of design tradeoffs pretty well in my view.</p>
<p>If you just saw the public work on that, you’d have first heard of it <em>at the earliest</em> when I pushed the first commit to GitHub on September 21, 2017. But the roots go much, much further back.</p>
<p>For one thing, I just found a related bit of work dating all the way back to January 10, 2017: an early attempt to see if I could directly reimplement Rust’s Result and Option types in TypeScript, in the early days of my adoption of TypeScript.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> That initial spike didn’t work—and I mean that literally; I didn’t yet have enough of a handle on TypeScript’s type system to get it to actually compile! But it was the first of <em>multiple</em> (mostly very brief) swings I took at it over the course of the year. The culmination of those repeated stabs at the problem was True Myth, with its polish, test coverage, and very considered design tradeoffs.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> But none of that would have happened without the better part of a year of experimenting along the way.</p>
<p>What’s more: even that January spike wasn’t the real start of True Myth. I have code in our codebase (code we’re finally mostly done replacing with True Myth!) that was an early attempt to capture these same basic ideas in plain-old JavaScript—code that dates to March 2016!</p>
<p>So: do not be discouraged when your own work seems to take a long time, or when you see others produce what seem to be fully-formed projects all in a rush. Always, our best work stands on a foundation—of ideas simmering over time, of previous attempts that got partway, of previous outright <em>failures</em>—and all of that is “underground,” out of sight.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Somewhat amusingly to me in retrospect, I’d switched from Flow to TypeScript on our codebase at Olo as my final act of 2016.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I remain convinced that we hit a <em>really</em> sweet spot with the design here: it works well as idiomatic JavaScript <em>and</em> supports nice functional idioms and I think it just feels nice to use <em>in JavaScript</em>—not just as a port of ideas from Haskell, Scala, etc.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
A Meander2018-02-09T07:00:00-05:002018-02-09T07:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-02-09:/2018/a-meander.htmlBecause some days you want to write, but don’t have anything particularly focused or coherent to say. So: open-source software, Twitter and blogging, word vomit, and reading widely and deeply.
<p>This is a meander. I have a bunch of mostly-unformed thoughts, and I want to write, and the two come out here, together, in the next few minutes before I start my workday proper (because I stayed up late last night working on open source software and got up late accordingly, and so have a great deal less of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html" title="“Knowing Your Rhythms”">my normally-allocated writing time</a> available today).</p>
<hr />
<section id="section" class="level2">
<h2>1.</h2>
<p>Open-source software is a very strange place, and the dynamics of it favor those of us who already have well-paying jobs and lots of flexibility in our schedule.</p>
<p>This isn’t <em>necessarily</em> a bad thing. It means that anyone who wants to use open-source contribution as a gauge of someone’s fitness to work is making a pretty foolish decision, though: they’re inherently cutting off a whole sector—dare I say it, a whole <em>class</em>—of people who simply do not (and, barring being given a pretty surprising break, will never) have that kind of stability and flexibility.</p>
</section>
<section id="section-1" class="level2">
<h2>2.</h2>
<p>Twitter is really, <em>really</em> bad for meaningful discussion. I follow both <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/noahpinion">Noah Smith (@noahpinion)</a> and <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/lymanstoneky">Lyman Stone (@lymanstoneky)</a>, and they’re both extremely interesting follows, and they’re both clearly <em>really</em> smart and <em>really</em> well-informed, and in their off-Twitter writing they both do a good job of fairly representing others’ views and interacting with them.</p>
<p>On Twitter, their arguments are a disaster.</p>
<p>This is not specific to Smith and Stone. This is Twitter in one pair of interlocutors.</p>
<p>Seriously: stop tweeting and start blogging again, if you have an <em>argument</em> to make rather than just a pithy, one-off observation or a link to share.</p>
</section>
<section id="section-2" class="level2">
<h2>3.</h2>
<p>You can get a surprising amount of writing done in 5 minutes, if you’re willing to just word-vomit. (This whole post, start to finish, took me 12 minutes.)</p>
</section>
<section id="section-3" class="level2">
<h2>4.</h2>
<p>I need to read more poetry; more rich, good fiction; more rich, good nonfiction. I’ve read a lot of nonfiction in the last five years, but I wouldn’t call most of it <em>rich</em>. Most of it—most of my seminary reading, that is—was <em>just okay</em>; very little of it engaged deeply with thought critical of its own perspective. (Major exceptions: David Koyzis’ really excellent <em>Political Visions and Illusions</em>, Alvin Plantinga’s <em>Where the Conflict Really Lies</em>, and of course St. Athanasius’ <em>On the Incarnation</em>.)</p>
<p>But I find that my own writing is far sharper, clearer, and better when I’m drawing <em>widely</em> and from <em>deep wells</em>. Widely, because I find that too much time in the same spot overly narrows my focus, whether that is apologetics or programming languages. From deep wells because, frankly, there is too much out there which warrants nothing more than a skim <em>at most</em>.</p>
<hr />
<p>And that is all!</p>
</section>
Getting the Right Things Done2018-01-10T19:30:00-05:002018-01-10T19:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-01-10:/2018/getting-the-right-things-done.html“Productivity” as such is not the point. The point is faithfully doing the right things, and doing them for love of God and love of neighbors.<p>Americans overrate <em>productivity</em>. We emphasize it at the expense of nearly everything else. That goes for the most individual evaluations to the structures and decisions of megacorporations. Our goal is to extract every last bit of <em>work</em> from ourselves we can. And this is, in a word, <em>bad</em>. It is bad not because work is bad, but because it is a good thing become the <em>only</em> thing. (This is the usual way humans mess things up: we take good things and make them ultimate, when nothing we make or do can bear that weight.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a>)</p>
<p>So given all of that, why do I <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/productivity/" title="Posts tagged “Productivity”">think and write so much about productivity</a>? Put plainly, because I think the goods of creation and production are still worth pursuing, and I want to steward my time well accordingly. I want to create the things I am passionate about—from blog posts like this to <a href="http://www.newrustacean.com" title="New Rustacean">podcast</a> <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org" title="Winning Slowly">episodes</a> to <a href="https://olo.com" title="Olo – online ordering for restaurants">the web apps I build</a> and <a href="https://github.com/typed-ember/ember-cli-typescript" title="Ember CLI TypeScript">the supporting tools</a> <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/true-myth" title="True Myth">I work on</a>—without that overwhelming the other things in my day. I think about productivity the way I do, in other words, because I want to be productive without productivity becoming an idol.</p>
<p>Put more directly: my efforts on the many projects I care about <em>cannot</em> come at the expense of loving my family well, serving my church, spending meaningful amounts and kinds of time with friends, and so on. There are many goods in this life we are responsible to pursue. That’s not the usual way we think about good things in life either: we tend to think about good things as things we <em>get</em> to pursue, if we have time after our other less-good responsibilities. But I think that’s a misshapen view of the kinds of things I’m talking about here. Worship, family life, work, creative expression, service, teaching: these are all goods we are <em>called to</em> (to various degrees, given the qualifiers of gifting and circumstances).<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
<p>We therefore ought to think of them in terms of faithfulness. Do we do each of them to the best of our abilities, making good use of our time and abilities?</p>
<p>For me, that consideration plays itself out in a variety of ways. One making sure that when I am working, I am working <em>hard</em>—<a href="https://www.esv.org/Colossians+3+23/" title="Colossians 3:23">doing my work well, honoring God in the doing</a>.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/log-all-the-things.html" title="Log All the Things!">Pomodoro</a> is a tool to that end. It, being a tool, can also be put to other, worse ends, of course: it could very well become a means to obsession with work! But my goal with it is simply to steward my time and attention well, in part so that I may have attention to pay—for attention is indeed <a href="http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/04/79-theses-on-technology-the-spectrum-of-attention/" title="79 Theses on Technology: The Spectrum of Attention">something</a> <a href="http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/03/79-theses-on-technology-on-attention/" title="79 Theses on Technology: On Attention">we</a> <a href="http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/04/79-theses-on-technology-jacobs-responds-to-wellmon/" title="79 Theses on Technology: Jacobs Responds to Wellmon">pay</a>—in other, <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2011/03/22/dont-worry-be-idle/" title="Don’t Worry, Be Idle">less “productive”</a> but no less deeply important ways.</p>
<p>Similarly, setting aside this hour for writing every morning enables me to <em>think</em> more and better in the ways I need to for the sake of faithful stewardship of my own God-given gifts and desires, and (no less importantly) for the sake of using those gifts and desires for the good of my community.<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a> If I am unable to so much as muster a coherent thought because I’ve waited to do my writing until a time of day when I simply cannot think in that manner, then I am unable to use this combination of desire and ability for the glory of God and the good of my neighbors. But if I, aware of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html" title="Knowing Your Rhythms">my bodily and intellectual rhythms</a>, allocate an hour in the morning to write and an hour of lower concentration for e.g. taking a run in the silence of the empty winter fields near here, then I am able to both be productive when I ought to, and idle when I ought to.</p>
<p>“Productivity,” then, as I conceive it <em>whenever</em> I write about it here, is not an ultimate end. Having (and making good use of!) a to-do list, for example, is not about maximizing the number of things I can do in a given week. It is about carrying out my many vocations well, and not failing to do the things I ought. Your set of vocations looks different from mine. The set of things you ought not fail to do is different accordingly. And the tools you employ may be different: for reasons of phase of life, temperament, abilities, and so on.</p>
<p>“Productivity” as such is not the point. The point is faithfully doing the <em>right</em> things, and doing them for love of God and love of neighbors.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Cf. Augustine, _Confessions_, Book 1, paragraph 1.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>The order of this list is important, though it is perhaps also misleading: worship undergirds and shapes the others.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>That passage was addressed to people in legal slavery (albeit a slavery very different in kind from the chattel slavery of the American South). I’m not here going to dig more deeply into the hermeneutics of applying it to someone doing labor in a market economy; suffice it to say I think that if a first century slave should work hard so as to honor God in his or her work, so ought we.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>Our desires and aims are not for ourselves. They’re meant to be gifts to those around us; used rightly, they can be.<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Tweet less. Blog more.2018-01-02T06:45:00-05:002018-01-02T06:45:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-01-02:/2018/tweet-less-blog-more.htmlA game plan for how I plan to (and maybe how you can!) write a lot more blog posts this year.
<p>The other day, I <a href="https://twitter.com/chriskrycho/status/947607650484740098">tweeted</a>:<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Suggested 2018 resolution:</p>
<p>⚡️ Tweet less. Blog more. ⚡️</p>
<p>It’ll make all of our discourse better and richer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this post, I’m going to trace out how I plan to do that, in hopes that it’ll help others write (and <a href="https://twitter.com/mgattozzi/status/947694285004201984">finish</a>!) more blog posts—short posts, long posts, and everything in between. In another post (probably tomorrow or Thursday), I’ll explain <em>why</em> I think this is so important.</p>
<p>The game plan:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p><strong>Tweet less.</strong> If you’re tempted to string together more than two or <em>at most</em> three tweets… you have a blog post. Seriously! At 280 characters, if you assume a word is roughly 5 characters on average, and toss in spaces and punctuation, you’ve got 40–45 words in a tweet. Three of those is 120–130 words. Five tweets is 200–225 words.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Write down your ideas.</strong> I have a <code>#writing/ideas</code> tag in <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bear/id1016366447?mt=8" title="Bear by Shiny Frog on the App Store">Bear</a>, and new ideas I have just get thrown in there. When I have a day where I don’t have some <em>other</em> specific idea to tackle, I browse through that list and grab something that seems interesting. As an example: my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/chrome-is-not-the-standard.html">“Chrome is Not the Standard”</a> post had just been sitting in there for a couple months when I finally got around to writing it up a few weeks ago.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Be okay with being brief.</strong> I’m a wordy guy, but I think many people feel the need to write <em>much longer</em> material now than they did in the early days of blogging, precisely <em>because</em> Twitter exists. It’s as if the existence of a microblogging platform makes us feel like a 200-word post doesn’t justify its own existence. I don’t believe that: <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/momentum.html" title="Momentum">I write short posts sometimes!</a> And some of <a href="http://blog.ayjay.org">my</a> <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/">favorite</a> <a href="https://css-tricks.com/many-ways-learn/">bloggers</a> regularly do likewise.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p></li>
<li><p><strong>Be okay taking a while to finish.</strong> Sometimes a piece can take a few weeks (or months!) to gel. That’s okay. Keep at it. Take some of your allocated writing time and keep plugging. That’s how I finally finished <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/faithful-extension-question-human-origins/" title="“Faithful Extension and the Question of Human Origins”">this book review</a>.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>But finish things.</strong> That means: get them to a spot where you’re ready to post them (even if they’re not perfect [because they never are!]) or eventually just throw them away. Both are allowed.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Block out some time for it!</strong> The main reason for my flurry of posts of late is that <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html" title="Knowing Your Rhythms">I started writing every day before 7am</a>. And that’s a habit I’m keeping! It helps. Some days it’ll be <a href="http://www.newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> scripts. Some days it’ll be <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/four-languages/">technical writing</a>. Some days it’ll be <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/star-wars-the-internet-and-me.html" title="Star Wars, the Internet, and Me">reflections on _Star Wars_</a>. But blocking out the time means <em>writing will happen</em>.</p></li>
</ol>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>The irony, I know!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>This post itself is under five hundred words!<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
2017 in Review: Looking Forward2017-12-26T09:35:00-05:002017-12-26T09:35:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-26:/2017/2017-in-review-looking-forward.htmlMaking goals for myself for the year ahead—with a good mix of standing aims, primary goals, and flexible goals; and appropriate priority given to each of those.
<p>As I do every year, I’ve been making some goals for myself for 2018. I’m breaking these down into three big categories this year, having learned from the experience of summarizing my goals for last year:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Standing aims</strong>: things that I can’t exactly check off as <em>done</em>, but which are extremely important to me.</li>
<li><strong>Goals</strong>: things I <em>can</em> mark as done.
<ul>
<li><strong>Primary:</strong> the most important of my goals—the ones I’ll count myself as having failed in some way if I don’t accomplish them over the course of the year (barring <em>major</em> unforeseen goings-on, which are, well… impossible to foresee).</li>
<li><strong>Flexible</strong>: other goals, which I’d <em>like</em> to get to, but which it won’t bother me if I don’t get to them.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<section id="standing-aims" class="level2">
<h2>Standing aims</h2>
<ul>
<li>Integrate well into our new church—including finding specific ways and places to serve regularly, joining a small group, and making some good friends.</li>
<li>Spend more, better, and more consistent time with my family.</li>
<li>Work hard at Olo.</li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="goals" class="level2">
<h2>Goals</h2>
<section id="primary" class="level3">
<h3>Primary</h3>
<ul>
<li>Podcasting:
<ul>
<li>Ship a minimum of 3 episodes of New Rustacean per month January—October.</li>
<li>Publish Winning Slowly Season 6.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Writing:
<ul>
<li>Publish at least 4 medium-length (2,000–3,500 words) at Mere Orthodoxy.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Software:
<ul>
<li>Get ember-cli-typescript “finished”—i.e. with full support for addons and fast incremental builds.</li>
<li>Ship a <a href="https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design">responsive</a>, <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Progressive">progressive</a> version of a major application I work on.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Read, or finish reading, the following books:
<ul>
<li><em>Resurrection and Moral Order</em>, Oliver O’Donovan (started in 2017)</li>
<li><em>Theology and the Mirror of Scripture</em>, Kevin Vanhoozer and Daniel Treier (started in 2017)</li>
<li><em>How Buildings Learn</em>, Stewart Brand (started in 2017)</li>
<li><em>City of God</em>, Augustine</li>
<li><em>The Technological Society</em>, Jacques Ellul</li>
<li><em>The Meaning of the City</em>, Jacques Ellul</li>
<li><em>The Ethics of Freedom</em>, Jacques Ellul</li>
<li><em>Blasphemy: A Radical Critique of our Technological Culture</em>, Ivan Illich</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Fitness:
<ul>
<li>Run a half marathon.</li>
<li>Finish the <a href="http://www.childrenscoloradofoundation.org/courage-classic/">Courage Classic</a> with my dad.</li>
<li>Get back to my target/healthiest weight.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="flexible" class="level3">
<h3>Flexible</h3>
<ul>
<li>Publish one essay at a larger publication (for money, if possible!).</li>
<li>Archive static versions of the prior versions of my website.</li>
<li>Improve the page load performance of this site (e.g. with progressive font-loading).</li>
<li>Make meaningful progress on <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">Lightning</a> November–December.</li>
<li>Lead a book club at Olo.</li>
<li>Get up to 20 consecutive pull-ups and 100 consecutive push-ups.</li>
<li>Print hard copies of at least one year of my website archive.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>That seems like <em>plenty</em> to go after this year. One thing that isn’t apparent here is that a fair bit of this is aimed at goals that extend past this year. There are things I want to do in the first half of my thirties if possible, of which some of these are a part. I don’t have those kinds of things written down (and when I write them down, I probably won’t publish them here!) but as I come into the broad swath of life that is just “adulthood”—not <em>young</em> adulthood or <em>old age</em>—I am increasingly mindful of the kinds of things I want to do that take more than a single year to accomplish. Some of these move the needle substantially in that direction, so hopefully I’ll get there!</p>
</section>
</section>
2017 in Review: My Goals2017-12-24T17:50:00-05:002017-12-24T17:50:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-24:/2017/2017-in-review-my-goals.htmlThinking about how this year went and what I accomplished, and how I would like the next year to go and what I would like to accomplish then, has become an important part of my life. There is much value in taking stock and making plans—as long as you hold those plans loosely.
<p>As has been my habit for a few years now, I’m taking some time to reflect on the year as it comes to a close. Thinking about how this year went and what I accomplished, and how I would like the next year to go and what I would like to accomplish <em>then</em>, has become an important part of my life. There is value in taking stock and making plans—as long as you hold those plans loosely. And this particular set of reflections majors on holding plans loosely.</p>
<p>The best place to start seems to be with a review of my goals for 2017, set out <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html" title="2016 in Review, Part 6: Plans for 2017">here</a>. In a post later this week, I’ll write up some thoughts on what I hope to accomplish in 2018—though, as you’ll see, there are some hints of that here.</p>
<p>One other note: there are many things going on in our lives that don’t end up in these reflections—because these reflections (as I conceive them at present, at least) are about the kind of public-facing things I did this year. A blog is not a journal, even if there are some analogies between the two.</p>
<section id="major-goals" class="level2">
<h2>Major goals</h2>
<blockquote>
<ol type="1">
<li>Graduate seminary.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Done!</strong></p>
<blockquote>
<ol start="2" type="1">
<li>Spend good time with my family.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>This isn’t really a thing you can ever call <em>done</em> in a real sense; there’s always more to do. But we did it well this year, and better than any previous year. I’m looking forward to building on the foundation we laid this year as we move into 2018.</p>
<blockquote>
<ol start="3" type="1">
<li>Love our church well.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>I have much the same to say here as I do about family time. I’ll add that we did move across country and join a new church (and a new denomination!), and I expect to write at much greater length about the convictions which drove the <em>way</em> we landed on our new congregation after moving across the country.</p>
<blockquote>
<ol start="4" type="1">
<li>Work hard for Olo.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>I shipped a <em>massive</em> amount of code this year, including making some pretty significant architectural contributions for the main app I work on—laying the foundation for it to transition from being a <em>mobile</em> web application to being a <em>responsive, progressive</em> web application in 2018. I also built <a href="https://true-myth.js.org">True Myth</a> and made some pretty substantial progress on <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/typing-your-ember/" title="Typing Your Ember">TypeScript in Ember.js</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<ol start="5" type="1">
<li>Save money for a house.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Done!</strong> And, to our surprise relative to the beginning of the year, we’re moving in less than a month from now!</p>
<blockquote>
<ol start="6" type="1">
<li>Replace <a href="https://github.com/getpelican/pelican">Pelican</a> with <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">Lightning</a> for this site.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done.</strong> I basically ended up putting Lightning on hold entirely this year. New Rustacean and all of the things we had to do around moving just left me with insufficient time to make any sustained progress on it.</p>
<section id="minor-goals" class="level3">
<h3>Minor goals</h3>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>publish two episodes of New Rustacean every month (of various formats—not all the full-length teaching-a-subject type)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>On average… done.</strong> But only on average. I put out a <em>lot</em> more episodes in November and December than any other month, courtesy of the <a href="http://www.newrustacean.com/show_notes/interview/rbr_2017/index.html">micro-interviews</a> I conducted at <a href="https://rust-belt-rust.com">Rust Belt Rust</a>. The rest of the year, I did publish quite a few episodes, but not nearly as many as I would have liked – more like an average of 1–1.5 each month.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>publish 16–20 episodes of Winning Slowly</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Very much <em>not</em> done.</strong> Winning Slowly did not go <em>at all</em> the way we thought this year. Our ambitions were… ambitious, given we were both planning to finish graduate degrees and knew that <em>at least</em> Stephen and possibly <em>both of us</em> would be moving across the country. Total episodes published this year: 4.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>complete a full-length sprint triathlon<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></li>
<li>run a <a href="http://cityofoaksmarathon.com" title="City of Oaks Marathon">marathon</a></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done.</strong> The spring ended up busier and, most importantly, more unpredictable schedule-wise than I hoped, and than allowed for sufficiently regular exercise as to be ready for a triathlon in the summer. And our move across the country both eliminated the final six weeks of training I would have needed for the marathon, and also left us 1,800 miles away from the marathon.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>be able to do 15 consecutive pull-ups and 100 consecutive push-ups</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not sure!</strong> I haven’t done a max set in a few months. I <em>have</em> been doing a bunch of push-ups and pull-ups since arriving in Colorado, so… maybe. I’ll edit this in a couple days after I do a max set!</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>lose ten pounds and get back down to my target weight</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Sadly, not done.</strong> I have not yet gotten a good handle on what <em>specific</em> dietary changes I’ll need to make to accomplish this goal, but the ones I tried this year didn’t do the trick. I’ll try something new in 2018.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>document all the undocumented features in Rust, and get the Rust reference all the way up to date (<a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/38643">tracking issue</a>)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done:</strong> I made a fair bit of progress at the beginning of the year, but this is a <em>mammoth</em> task. That said, it’s on my radar to try to help drive it forward (hopefully with community involvement) in 2018—it would be great for a complete and accurate reference to be part of the Rust 2019 epoch.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>finish a couple side projects (and bring in the associated money!)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Done.</strong> In particular, I fixed the last couple bugs and tightened things down in the implementation of <a href="https://holybible.com">HolyBible.com</a>. While there’s a lot—oh is there a lot!—I would do differently now (3 years after I finished the base implementation of the app), I’m really delighted that in the last six months I’ve had exactly zero bug reports.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>teach in our small group at least a half dozen times</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done, <em>but</em>…</strong> this was an intentional choice as we started into the year, because there were a couple other guys who it was more helpful to have in that role for their <em>own</em> training. I’ve taught a lot over the years, and both of those guys are going to be actively in church-planting roles in the next year or so.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>write at least one long essay for Mere Orthodoxy</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Done.</strong> I published <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/rhythms-family-worship/" title="The Rhythms of Family Worship">one essay on our family worship</a> and another (just last week), <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/faithful-extension-question-human-origins/" title="Faithful Extension and the Question of Human Origins">a book review essay</a> on William T. Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith’s _Evolution and the Fall_.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>publish the scripts and transcripts of New Rustacean as an ebook</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done.</strong> I <em>do</em> expect to tackle this in 2018, but it just ended up not being a high priority in 2017.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>publish hard copies of the archives of my blog, in a way that mirrors the style of the site at the time it was written</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done.</strong> Same as with the New Rustacean ebook.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>fully archive the Blogger and WordPress versions of this blog as static HTML</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Started, but incomplete.</strong> I pulled those archives down for the Blogger site, but have yet to do some systematic cleanup on the <abbr>HTML</abbr>. (This <em>might</em> actually happen by the end of the year, depending on what all I do on my week off, but as of the time I’m drafting this, it’s not done.)</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>move all the sites I host (mine and others) out of shared hosting and into a server I manage (probably Digital Ocean or Linode)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done.</strong> I did get a Linode server configured, on which I’m running our family blog (<a href="https://krycho.com">krycho.com</a>), and which I should pretty easily be able to use for other non-static sites going forward. Though, as I’ve thought about it over the last year and change: it’s likely I’ll split it up into a small handful, with one consisting of a kind of “shared hosting” for the various friends’ WordPress blogs I host; and one consisting of my own and my family’s sites.</p>
</section>
<section id="in-summary" class="level3">
<h3>In summary</h3>
<p>This year didn’t really go as we thought it would. A lot of that came down to finding a house plan we loved and could build on a lot that we equally loved—it shifted financial and temporal priorities alike. Add in some pretty serious family health issues in my extended family, and, well, no surprise some of my plans and goals didn’t pan out. That’s how it goes! The point of making these kinds of goals, for me, isn’t so much that I accomplish everything on my list as it is taking time to orient myself and to choose what I will and won’t <em>focus</em> on in the year ahead. And in 2017, I did focus on many of the things on this list. Some of them ended up more important than expected; others less. Interestingly and importantly, though, almost nothing I really spent my time focusing on <em>wasn’t</em> on the list. And that’s why I keep doing this year after year!</p>
</section>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>750m swim, 20km (12mi) ride, 5km (3.1mi) run<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Momentum2017-12-22T19:35:00-05:002017-12-22T19:35:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-22:/2017/momentum.html“Productivity” often looks like this: just a bit at a time, day after day; and doing a little even when you don’t really feel like it, just so you keep some forward motion going.
<p>I’m now about two weeks into my new routine of writing every morning. In that time, I’ve managed to (finally!) publish a <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/faithful-extension-question-human-origins/" title="Faithful Extension and the Question of Human Origins: Cavanaugh and Smith’s Evolution and the Fall">book review</a> I had been planning to tackle (and had abortively started more than once) for months; I have written almost as many words as I have the whole rest of the year; and I published <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/chrome-is-not-the-standard.html" title="Chrome is not the Standard">one post</a> that apparently <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15980653">struck a nerve</a>. One thing that has become obvious is that <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html">my initial surmise</a> was correct: the early morning <em>is</em> the best time for me to be writing, and I get a lot of mileage out of taking anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes to get at it.</p>
<p>This little post is a reflection not just on that upside, though, but on rolling with the punches. It’s now 7:30pm, and I didn’t write at <em>all</em> this morning… because I didn’t sleep much last night. My little sister and her husband are in town with their 7-year-old and 3-week-old… and the 3-week-old, one room over from us, slept about the way 3-week-old babies tend to. Add in a 3:45am call from my wife and kids who had to <a href="http://www.kwtx.com/content/news/Fire-forces-evacuation-at-Dallas-Love-Field-465891633.html">evacuate the airport for a fire alarm</a> where they were trying to fly home from visiting family, and the need then to drive up to the airport to get them, and my normal writing block simply didn’t exist. So here I am some 13 hours later, trying to just write a <em>little</em> bit today anyway, because even after just these couple weeks I have come to value getting out some words every day. After I finish this little post, I’ll see if I can knock out another section of the New Rustacean episode I’m drafting for early January, too.</p>
<p>“Productivity” often looks like this: just a bit at a time, day after day; and doing a little even when you don’t really feel like it, just so you keep some forward motion going. Here’s to a lot of keeping-up-that-momentum in the year ahead.</p>
Star Wars, The Internet, and Me2017-12-14T07:05:00-05:002017-12-14T07:05:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-14:/2017/star-wars-the-internet-and-me.htmlI learned self-discipline in no small part by taking a break from Star Wars books. I grew up in the prequel era. I spent a decade learning how to be a good citizen of the internet via Star Wars fan forums. If you spoil <cite>The Last Jedi</cite>, I will be angry at you forever.
<p>A friend and I were talking a few days about an interesting quirk we both share: spoilers are one thing; spoilers for <em>Star Wars</em> are something else entirely—something <em>profoundly wrong</em>. On the one hand, of course, this is silly: spoilers are spoilers; the sentiment is a reflection of our deeper emotional attachment to the Star Wars universe. But it got me thinking.</p>
<p>My own journey with Star Wars has been long and winding. When I was a kid, I <em>loved</em> the movies and books—beyond a reasonable enjoyment. I obsessed. For a time it filled all my spare hours.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> (And I was homeschooled and smart, so that was a lot of hours.) It eventually became so bad, when I was in sixth grade, that my parents counseled me that I needed to do <em>something</em> to change, because it was consuming way too much of my time. I took six months off, and came back able to enjoy the universe—movies, books (and more books!), comics, etc.—without it dominating my mental life as it had before that.</p>
<p>I kept reading books and comics through high school and college. Somewhere in late middle school I found fan forums for the LucasArts video games (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20020523141043/http://www.lucasforums.com:80/" title="Internet Archive link">“LucasForums”, now defunct</a>) and got my first taste of online interaction—I “took my first step into a larger world,” you might say—discussing the details of the Expanded Universe in one board, and discussing and arguing ethics, religion, and philosophy in another. (Yes, on a Star Wars video game forum. You can’t make people <em>not</em> talk about those things; the best you can do is keep them segregated from the nominal topic of discussion in a forum. And people want to talk about those subjects with friends, people they have other common interests with.)</p>
<p>Midway through high school—during prime Star Wars fandom time in the late prequel era—I found my way to <a href="http://boards.theforce.net">boards.theforce.net (“The Jedi Council Forums”)</a>, and if the LucasForums had been my introduction to the online world, boards.theforce.net is where I “grew up” online in many ways. Over much of the next decade, I was an active participant in all sorts of things on those forums—from fan fiction-writing and contests, to extended debates on the merits of certain ongoing storylines in the books that made up the Expanded Universe, to the kinds of little controversies that embroil fan communities everywhere over this author’s choices and that author’s body of work and so on. Eventually, late in college, I spent over a year as one of the moderators of the Expanded Universe (strictly speaking, the <em>non-video-games</em> part) forum there.</p>
<p>And then I got married, and I told Jaimie that for our sake I was done with moderating at the end of my senior year in college. Moderating an internet forum <em>well</em> is an enormous amount of work. It’s a kind of community-building and it entails all the kinds of difficult work that entails. The fact that it’s online makes it more and not less difficult, in many ways. In the year I was there, we dealt with the gamut: ordinary forum things like overly aggressive arguers and trolls, and less ordinary things like helping a user who seemed to deal with <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder">borderline personality disorder</a> manage her behavior and be a productive member of the community. I learned an enormous amount there, and much of what I do in online communities <em>today</em> remains deeply influenced by the lessons I learned then.</p>
<p>It’s not really a surprise, then, that I have a visceral reaction to Star Wars spoilers in a way that I don’t for, say, the next Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. If I get totally spoiled about how <em>Avengers: Infinity War</em> plays out before I go see it, well… okay. It’ll be mildly annoying. Something about the ways that I invested in Star Wars and the ways my encounters with it at a broader cultural level were so important to my formation make it matter a lot more to me.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
<p>There’s an important question, of course, whether that kind of formation was <em>good</em> for me. Parts of it quite obviously wasn’t. My parents were right to encourage me to take a real and serious break when I was 12. But more than that, they were wise to take the tack of challenging me to think carefully about how to deal with it, rather than simply mandating a particular response themselves. Had they mandated it—which would have been the easier course, I’m sure!—it likely would have backfired and left me resentful of them and unmoved on the actual issue, for one. For another, learning to discipline myself and recognize and head off unhealthy obsessions was itself an important part of my spiritual, intellectual, and emotional formation. Dealing with a relatively benign obsession, and learning to deal with it in a helpful and thoughtful way, was <em>very</em> good for me.</p>
<p>Likewise, my participation in those forums had its risks, even if they were much lower than some of the moral panics of the time suggested. (Predators, it turned out, may have been lurking in chat rooms <em>somewhere</em>, but many corners of the internet were pretty safe.) The bigger risks to me were risks of time-wasting and getting sucked into pointless or meaningless arguments. But because the forums I ended up in were well-run, they ended up instead being a training ground for how to conduct discourse online in a civil way—to disagree, even deeply (and even, sometimes, about silly things) without resorting to insults and attacks, to argue the merits instead of the quality of the person making an argument. It also afforded me opportunities to make mistakes talking about things that <em>didn’t</em> matter, rather than primarily about things that did. If I annoyed someone with my view of Jacen Solo in The New Jedi Order, well… okay, better that than mishandling the gospel or misrepresenting Scripture’s teaching on something. Along those same lines, I had opportunities to lead online in a safe environment where most of what I was dealing wasn’t that serious, and I had lots of help including from many people much older than me to deal with the more serious things.</p>
<p>Last but not least, because I knew deeply and well the shape of what was, in many ways, internet discourse at its best, I also was well-primed to recognize two things.</p>
<p>The first is when things <em>don’t</em> look like that. I spent a year or so in college on conservative political news sites and comment threads, and while the mid-2000s were the heyday of <em>blogs</em> and <em>commenting</em>—in some really wonderful ways that I miss—even then much of what was floating around in political forums was the kind of toxic rhetoric that has become mainstream since.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> I jumped out of those communities because I was able to recognize, precisely because of my experience with The Jedi Council Forums, that this was <em>not</em> a model of good discussion on the internet.</p>
<p>The second is the way internet discourse and friendship are simultaneously delightful and very limited. There were people I very much enjoyed getting to know over the years, and a few I considered friends. But the limitations of those relationships were obvious (much, I imagine, as the limitations of friendships conducted solely through letter-writing in ages past was). Text is a delightful medium, and it affords certain things that face-to-face interaction doesn’t, especially time for precision and accuracy in communication. But it takes away as well as gives: your wording <em>must</em> be so precise, because otherwise it far more easily risks misunderstanding. Language must often be more conciliatory in text than it would in person to achieve the same effect, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as tone. And ten thousand emojis are not worth one real, sympathetic smile across a room for expressing, “I disagree with you, but I mean no harm in my disagreement.” The internet affords many opportunities to connect with people we would otherwise never meet, but it does not and cannot <em>substitute</em> for the kinds of friendships we have in person.</p>
<p>This latter insight was in many ways the first, foundational layer for much of my thinking on the goods and ills offered by the internet since—thinking that has come out especially in <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a>, and increasingly also is finding a home in <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/why-do-i-need-a-research-tool.html">the reading and research projects</a> I mentioned here earlier in the week. It also continues to inform the way I think about many other relationships I have <em>now</em> online. Though I am part of a number of several really delightful online communities, I never allow those relationships to become my substitutes for doing the work of building friendships with people face to face. And I also take the opportunity, whenever I can, to add face-to-face components to those relationships! One of my closest friends now is someone I met via a group of Christian developers I’m part of online—but he’s also someone I’ve spent many hours with in person now, and it was those hours in person that dramatically changed the character of our friendship. Similarly, another of my best friends is someone I get to talk to mostly only via chat now—but we had years of face-to-face relationship as foundation to stand on.</p>
<p>So the net of it all is good, I think. I’m grateful for the ways Star Wars has been a part, and an important part, of my life. (So don’t spoiler <em>The Last Jedi</em> for me!)</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Or at least, those in which I wasn’t re-reading <em>The Lord of the Rings</em> yet again. I was a nerdy kid.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>If I had grown up having a parallel experience with Marvel comics instead of Star Wars, the experience might well be flipped—though since the MCU is largely adaptations of, if often <em>very free</em> adaptations of, existing comics work, it would likely play out in rather different ways.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>My experience was with “conservative” sites, but you could see many of the same phenomena on the left then as well.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
A Little Status Update2017-12-13T18:45:00-05:002017-12-13T18:45:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-13:/2017/a-little-status-update.html<p>Just a little status update: I’m a few days into <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html">my new routine</a> of blocking out the time before 7am for writing projects—and so far it’s <em>amazing</em>. I’ve been able to make progress on a writing project<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> that has stymied me for months and months …</p><p>Just a little status update: I’m a few days into <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html">my new routine</a> of blocking out the time before 7am for writing projects—and so far it’s <em>amazing</em>. I’ve been able to make progress on a writing project<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> that has stymied me for months and months. Yesterday and today alike I wrote 600–700 words in roughly an hour (and words I’m relatively happy with, at that). All my previous efforts at this had come to about 600 words in total, largely in outline form, and when I’d taken a stab at it other than that I’d eventually given up and thrown away anything I’d written.</p>
<p>This is a pleasant change.</p>
<p><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html">Knowing your rhythms</a> is useful, it turns out; even more useful is taking advantage of them to actually get things done!</p>
<p>The other thing I’m noticing (as I write at about 6:45pm, in one of those “just okay” spans I mentioned in that post) is that my mind is ticking along again in what I’ve historically called “writing mode.” The idea of sitting down and knocking out a few hundred words of (admittedly self-indulgent) blogging has not seemed relaxing or fun in quite some time. But that’s changing a bit as I stretch those muscles again. I’ve drawn the analogy often enough in the past, but I’ll repeat it once more: writing is very much like exercising. The act of simply <em>doing</em> it day over day helps reopen pathways in the mind (like running down paths in the woods, perhaps?) and every day you do it makes the next day easier than it otherwise would have been.</p>
<p>So now: off to work on a New Rustacean episode script, because the juices are flowing.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>a review of William Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith’s <em>Evolution and the Fall</em>, if you’re curious<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Knowing Your Rhythms2017-12-11T06:50:00-05:002017-12-11T06:50:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-11:/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html<p>For the last few years, it’s been <em>very</em> apparent to me that I think most clearly and do my best work early in the morning and late at night. Between 6am and 10am, and from roughly 8pm to midnight, I am at my most alert and most mentally capable …</p><p>For the last few years, it’s been <em>very</em> apparent to me that I think most clearly and do my best work early in the morning and late at night. Between 6am and 10am, and from roughly 8pm to midnight, I am at my most alert and most mentally capable. By contrast, 10am to 1pm is <em>okay</em>, and 1pm to 4pm is <em>terrible</em> and 4pm to 8pm is back to <em>okay</em>. I can get things done in that span, but it’s very difficult especially to do things like writing.</p>
<p>I also can’t get by on only 6 hours of sleep, so a lot of my best time isn’t available to me one way or the other. In general that means that if I want to write or otherwise do really creative work, I have limited options. Since, as <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/why-do-i-need-a-research-tool.html" title="Why Do I Need a Research Tool?">I noted yesterday</a>, I’m aiming to be doing a fair bit of research and writing over the next few years, I need at least <em>some</em> of that time. That goes for the thinking-and-writing-intensive work of preparing for New Rustacean episodes, too.</p>
<p>While my job allows me considerable flexibility, I can’t just take <em>all</em> of the time for side projects, whether those research projects, or working on New Rustacean. Too: my evening concentration ability is much lower than my morning concentration ability, because I’m also the dad of two small children, and between finishing working in the late afternoon and getting them to bed around 7:30–8:00pm, I am much drained mentally. (Kids are awesome, but they can be exhausting!)</p>
<p>So I’m going to try something: every day starting this week and running through the end of the month (whether I’m working or not), the time before 7am is <em>mine</em>. After making breakfast for me and my wife, and reading my Bible for some time, I’m going to use that time to work on reading and research, blogging and longer-form writing, New Rustacean prep, and the like. If, by the end of this month, I evaluate that it’s going well (I rather suspect it will be), I’ll formalize that as something to keep doing in the next year. (Accordingly, I’ll report back on how it has gone so far in my usual end-of-year writeup!)</p>
<p>This morning, at least, it already feels like something of a win to have gotten some words out here at the start of the day, and I feel far more <em>able</em> to write now than I normally do after a full work day during that mid-to-late afternoon mental slump!</p>
Why Do I Need A Research Tool?2017-12-10T19:35:00-05:002017-12-10T19:35:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-10:/2017/why-do-i-need-a-research-tool.htmlYou can often get by on just your memory when all you're doing is chatting or blogging. But when you want to say something substantive… research tools are really helpful.
<p>For a bit of follow-up on <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/how-do-you-manage-your-research-notes.html" title="How Do You Manage Your Research Notes">this morning’s post</a>—</p>
<p>It struck me that there’s a really important thing implicit in the whole question that’s perhaps worth making explicit. That is: <em>it’s worth doing the work of capturing what you’re reading</em>, at least when it’s relevant to something you’re <em>studying</em>. This isn’t necessarily obvious, and especially if you have a good memory, you can often get by in shorter-form writing and day-to-day conversation by relying on your memory. It’ll get you <em>close enough</em> that you can say, “Oh, so-and-so says this,” or even fall back to “I wish I could remember where I read this…”</p>
<p>But when you want to do something a bit more substantive—say, a medium-length essay, or a detailed book review, much less a long-form essay or academic paper or (good grief!) a book—well, then you need a way of actually keeping track of what you’ve read and where you read it.</p>
<p>I’m in the <em>very</em> early reading phases for a research project I’d like to tackle over the next year (and possibly much longer): namely, developing at least for myself a more coherent <em>ethics of technology</em>.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> And one thing I learned in one of my largest projects at Southeastern Seminary (a summary of a variety of theological systems as represented by reading thousands of pages of introductions to them and writing about 80,000 words of summary of those pages) was the importance of taking careful notes on what I read and then being able to reference and make use of those notes later.</p>
<p>But that project also left me deeply, deeply frustrated, because nothing I tried actually satisfied me as a way of taking notes in a way I could reference later.</p>
<p>Writing quotes out by hand is laborious, and it doubles the work you have to do with that reference when you need to incorporate it into a paper or essay later: you’re often enough going to end up typing it out either way. But on the other hand, writing down a quote inscribes something into your mind in a way that tapping on a keyboard doesn’t. (This is part of why I outline every talk, teaching session, and sermon I deliver by hand!)</p>
<p>Similarly, while I’ve developed a system for marking up books in a way that’s reasonably unobtrusive but is easy to understand,<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> <em>finding</em> that markup in the text of a book has its own issues. I’ve resorted to dog-earing pages with the most important quotes and ideas in the past, but found this dissatisfying. I know some people use colored page markers, and I need to try that as an approach (though it offends my aesthetic sensibilities as much or more than dog-earing in its own way!).</p>
<p>And the inciting incident for this blog post: I was thinking as I read <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/it-might-be-impossible-for-future-historians-to-understand-our-internet/547463/" title=""Future Historians Probably Won't Understand Our Internet, and That's Okay"">a helpful article by Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic</a> and then saved it to pinboard that it’s a lot of <em>work</em> to do this kind of thing. But if you <em>don’t</em> do it, you’re floundering around and hoping that your memory or <a href="https://duckduckgo.com">DuckDuckGo</a> or the combination of the two will get you back to where you need to be for some or another bit of research you’re doing… and good luck with that. In my experience, the more I’ve read on a topic, the harder it can be to remember <em>exactly</em> where I read a particularly important idea.</p>
<p>So that’s <em>why</em> I’m curious about people’s research tools.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>You can see this as my following some of the same kinds of paths being worn down right now by writers and thinkers like <a href="http://blog.ayjay.org">Alan Jacobs</a> and <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/the-frailest-thing/">L. M. Sacasas</a>, and it’s certainly not <em>new</em> as a line of thinking for me—see a related post <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/theological-anthropology.html">here</a>, for example.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I use brackets to mark off important quotes, the same way someone might use a highlighter, because I hate highlighted books myself. I’ll underline <em>especially</em> important bits. I jot comments notes in the margins. I mark places where I disagree sufficiently strongly with an “x” and where I agree sufficiently strongly with a check mark or an exclamation point. Things that are essential items in the argument of the book—i.e. things which articulate or are central to argument for the thesis of the book—I’ll mark in the margins with a star. Nothing complicated!<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
How Do You Manage Your Research Notes?2017-12-10T10:25:00-05:002017-12-10T10:25:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-10:/2017/how-do-you-manage-your-research-notes.htmlI’m starting back in on serious reading and research… and I find the tools lacking. So: how in the world do you manage your research notes?<p>I started thinking again today about how I want to tackle reading and writing and organizing my notes and the like. Scribbling things in journals is one good approach (though it can be hard to find things later), and organization is something of a problem—I’ve considered a notebook-per-subject approach, but the problem is that my interests are cross-disciplinary; and in any case, for <em>everyone</em>, research often includes the unexpected insight from an apparently unrelated field. So segregating things off that way seems like the kind of thing that would ultimately still just end up frustrating me.</p>
<p>Using tools like <a href="https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/" title="my Pinboard">pinboard</a> is another approach. It’s a particularly valuable one for digital articles and the like, and it has the tag-like architecture I’ve come to think is most appropriate for organizing this kind of content. However, I haven’t yet upgraded to the full article archive mode it offers, and search-ability remains something of a bugbear for me as a result. (My lasting problem remains remembering <em>where</em> I read something specific.)</p>
<p>And bringing all the pieces together—notes scribbled in the margins of books and highlights or underlines in the same; thoughts jotted out at length in a paper journal; pinboard links; half-finished blog posts which helped me formulate ideas even if they never went anywhere—is its own task I have <em>no</em> handle on. Four and a half years of graduate education <em>exacerbated</em> the problem rather than suggesting solutions.</p>
<p>So I’m curious to hear, especially from working scholars and writers out there—into whose company I’d like to slowly grow myself in the years ahead—how in the world do you manage your research notes?</p>
The Value of Silence2017-11-26T19:30:00-05:002017-11-26T19:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-11-26:/2017/the-value-of-silence.html<p>Over the past year or so, I’ve increasingly become persuaded of the importance of times of silence for clear thinking.</p>
<p>While I’ve spent the last several years listening to podcasts in much of my walking and running time, I’ve started blocking out times in which I’m …</p><p>Over the past year or so, I’ve increasingly become persuaded of the importance of times of silence for clear thinking.</p>
<p>While I’ve spent the last several years listening to podcasts in much of my walking and running time, I’ve started blocking out times in which I’m <em>not</em> listening to things that way—times dedicated either to just instrumental music, or simply to silence. This goes for more than those walks and runs. I’ve also been thinking about driving time, which I likewise once filled with thought, but which in recent years I have, again, filled with podcasts.</p>
<p>I used to take <em>all</em> my runs in silence. I often drove in silence or with only instrumental music. I moved away from that somewhat in my years in North Carolina, in part because I discovered a great many podcasts I enjoyed, and in part because it was a way of sustaining mental focus when I had run the same routes too many times. Soon, it bled into my pomodoro walks and into nearly all my drives as well.</p>
<p>But much of my best thinking happened in those silences.</p>
<p>I need that space for letting my mind tease out questions and issues I’m thinking on. So: while not eliminating podcasts, I have been intentionally carving out more and more time again for silence. Pomodoro walks, runs, drives. Times when I simply listen to interesting music and think.</p>
<p>The need for silence goes beyond merely podcasts for me. I’ve continued to think about the role of Twitter in my life, the amount of time I spend looking at RSS feeds, and even my enjoyment of times in e.g. Slack communities I participate in. Twitter I have long limited strictly—it’s <a href="http://blog.ayjay.org/joe-posnanski-wises-up/">an enormous and often unproductive time sink</a>—but even RSS (which is much better for thought in nearly every way!) and healthy Slack communities can be <em>connecting</em> in ways that actually <a href="https://pinboard.in/u:ayjay/b:c7d2be58b366">inhibit deep thought</a>. We need a degree of solitude and silence to think well.</p>
<p>Thus, though each of those is often a good source of information, and I enjoy them, I am increasingly aware of the curious ways they interact with my ability to think clearly and deeply about things. And about the ways they shift the <em>arena</em> of my thinking clearly and deeply about things. Pose me a question and I’m apt to answer it, but the way I answer it in a Slack chat is different from—and often worse than—the way I’d answer it if I took the time to write it up as a blog post, and that in turn different from how I would approach it if composing a medium-length essay.</p>
<p>So I am sussing out where and how I want to draw those lines, where I want to <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2017/11/18/the-ethics-of-technological-mediation/">pay my attention</a>, because <a href="http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/03/79-theses-on-technology-for-disputation/">attention is indeed something we pay</a>. Fewer podcasts, less time in ephemeral media (even including blogging); more time in books and long essays and in writing itself as a means of coming to understanding. More time, indeed, scribbling notes in paper notebooks, for the ways that time spent thinking <em>and</em> disconnected from the internet shapes us. More time, when I’m writing in a digital form, with the wifi off. And hopefully, as a result, more and better thinking.</p>
Thinking, Fast and Slow: A Review2017-07-11T20:30:00-04:002017-07-11T20:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-07-11:/2017/thinking-fast-and-slow-a-review.htmlRecommended: Kahneman is a talented writer, has a fascinating research history, and makes a good case; there's a lot to learn here, and the quibbles I have are just that: quibbles.
<p><em>I keep my book review ratings simple—they’re either <em>required</em>, <em>recommended</em>, <em>recommended with qualifications</em>, or <em>not recommended</em>. If you want the TL;DR, this is it:</em></p>
<p><strong>Recommended:</strong> Kahneman is a talented writer, has a fascinating research history, and makes a good case; there’s a lot to learn here, and the quibbles I have are just that: quibbles.</p>
<hr />
<p>I’ve heard <em>very</em> good things about Daniel Kahneman’s <em>Thinking, Fast and Slow</em>, so when friends asked what they might get me for my birthday, it came to mind quickly. I didn’t spend long second-guessing the choice, and it’s not one I’ve regretted in the least (even though I have my differences with the book). That experience—an immediate choice, based on some degree of prior knowledge (but not <em>that</em> much); followed by basic continuation along the same judgment without giving it much further thought—is itself representative of many of the themes of the book. How do we choose? What makes us decide the things we do, and why? How can we make better decisions? Why do we so often make irrational choices, and so quickly, over and against what we might choose if we slowed down to think through our decisions?</p>
<p><em>Thinking, Fast and Slow</em> takes up all of those questions and runs with them. Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics but himself a psychologist by training and decades of practice, produced here a popularization of decades of research on how people think. His basic thesis is that we have two systems of thought: One is quick to the point of immediacy and even functioning unconsciously, intuitionist or heuristic in nature, and extremely effective and reliable for <em>many</em> situations—but because it is intuitionist or heuristic, also biased in certain predictable ways. The other is much slower, but capable of careful and rational consideration, not prone to the same kinds of mistakes as the first but also substantially more work to engage and itself readily enough misled by the judgments we make with that first system of thinking.</p>
<p>In the first quarter or so of the book, Kahneman makes his case that these two systems actually do characterize human thought, at least in broad strokes. And it’s a good case that he makes. Many of the examples he cites I was readily enough able to see playing out in my own mind, whether in real-time or by reflecting on past decision-making and judgment-making instances. This is also the part of the book on the strongest research ground, from what I can tell as an outsider. On the whole, I came away convinced of that basic theme. Whatever other places I differ with him, and there are a few, I <em>do</em> recommend the book for its first quarter at a minimum.</p>
<p>The latter parts of the book shift into examinations of specific ways that those two systems-of-thinking actually play out in practice, and here the material, though still strong overall, was a great deal more arguable. Much of this draws heavily on studies in psychology—and some of those studies have since run into some really serious problems with reproducibility. So much so that Kahneman—himself a popularizer rather than a producer of those specific experiments—wrote an open letter to the community of researchers asking them to do the hard work of either reproducing their results or walking back their claims.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> As such, even if I agreed with Kahneman philosophically throughout (and I don’t; more on that in a moment), there would be some gaps in the final section of the book.</p>
<p>Beyond some of these kinds of overall weaknesses, there’s also a downside to the rhetorical approach Kahneman takes. Throughout, he adopts an extremely conversational style, addressing the reader quite directly. As such, many of his claims take the form “You did <em>something</em> when you encountered <em>some test</em> in the text.” Many of these work and prove accurate… but quite a few of them don’t, too. The specifics will differ for everyone, of course, based on how well-trained they are at certain kinds of reasoning, their backgrounds, their ethical systems, and the like. But it happens, and it happened to me fairly often during the course of reading the book. One of the most striking examples was near the end, where Kahneman was trying to show that we often will assign different values to given things when evaluated independently than when evaluated side-by-side. He made there a claim about what the reader did or didn’t do in evaluating the needs of humans vs. evaluating the need for dolphins—specifically, that the specific valuation of humans over dolphins didn’t emerge until the two were compared more directly. But it <em>did</em> for me; it was the first thought I had. I’ll grant his broader point, of course, and I don’t doubt that in many cases the studies he cites represent real tendencies. I can certainly think of <em>other</em> scenarios where a similar kind of comparison might break down. But it’s an interesting place where the conversational style breaks down: you can only assert so much and get away with it. On the other hand, a book full of questions of the “Did you think <em>something</em>?” sort would get old quickly. This is a hard line to walk, and on the whole I think the style worked—but it had that nagging weakness, which stuck out to me fairly frequently when reading the book.</p>
<p>I also found, unsurprisingly, that Kahneman and I differ fairly strongly in our view of both ethics and human nature. On the whole, this didn’t directly impact my appreciation of the book. On occasion, however, his view of human nature diverged quite sharply from the Christian view. In particular, he left little room for the idea of our nature being <em>designed</em> to have certain kinds of limitations about it and majored heavily on rationalism as <em>ideal</em>. I don’t think strict rationalism <em>is</em> in fact ideal, and whereas he contents himself with describing <a href="http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/econs-and-humans/">Econs</a> as an <em>incomplete</em> view of how humans work (but one that he often refers to in rather aspirational ways), I would go much further: it would in fact be <em>wrong</em> for humans to act as the purely “rational” agents of much standard economic theory, because that kind of rationalism is in fact merely a particular brand of utilitarianism. I’d go further still and say that utilitarianism is itself a kind of irrationality, and that one of the ways human nature continues to function as a divine image is in our deep-seated and nearly inescapable distinguishing between kinds of things that economists tell us are of <em>equal utility</em>: for so they may be, but there is more to God’s green earth than the uses to which we may put it.</p>
<p>But important though those differences are, they are also far afield of the thesis and even the majority emphasis of the book. Indeed, precisely because it does acknowledge so clearly the way humans actually work, the book can serve as a helpful entry-point for conversation about the limits of utilitarianism. If utility is not a perfect description of how humans do work, perhaps it also behooves us to consider if it’s a good description of how we <em>ought</em> to work.</p>
<p>More than that, the book as a whole is a genuinely good and insightful volume. Many of the kinds of biases and errors Kahneman point out are unarguably problems—and many of them contribute significantly to systematic issues in the world at large. Being more aware of how our ability to think clearly and rightly degrades when we are, say, tired and hungry, should make us think carefully about assigning a judge a long docket of cases to sentence: why should two men who committed the same crime get different punishments simply because one received his sentence in the morning when the judge was alert and fresh off her breakfast and coffee, and the other late in the morning when she was feeling hungry and drained? There are not easy solutions to these kinds of problems, but we cannot even begin to address them unless we know they exist in the first place. Similarly, at a personal level, knowing these things about ourselves can help us be aware of where we’re vulnerable to them and adjust accordingly—whether by aiming to increase our awareness of them situation-by-situation, or (better) by making careful choices when able to do so which we can then lean on in the situations where we have to make snap judgments.</p>
<p>There’s a lot more to say about that latter point, not least on the topic of Christian formation, discipleship, and catechesis. But that’s for another post. Read at least the first section of <em>Thinking, Fast and Slow</em>: you’ll profit from it, and you’ll enjoy it.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Hat tip to <a href="https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/in-defense-of-individualist-culture/">Sarah Constantin</a> for bringing that letter to my attention. Her <a href="https://srconstantin.wordpress.com">blog</a> is well worth your time in general: you’ll learn from her even when you disagree with her, as I often do.)<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
A Book List!2017-07-08T21:45:00-04:002017-07-08T21:45:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-07-08:/2017/a-book-list.html<p>I’ve just posted my in-progress <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017-book-list.html">2017 Book List</a>. I’ll update it with books as I finish them, and I’ll also update it with reviews (even of the “here’s a brief comment” variety) as I do them. This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for …</p><p>I’ve just posted my in-progress <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017-book-list.html">2017 Book List</a>. I’ll update it with books as I finish them, and I’ll also update it with reviews (even of the “here’s a brief comment” variety) as I do them. This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for my own sake for a while, and bumping into <a href="http://tbrown.org/notes/2017/06/23/reading-and-sharing/">this post by Tim Brown</a> reminded me how much I want to be sharing what I read with other people.</p>
<p>Sometimes I get myself spun up on thinking that I need to be reviewing books with the best of them. In reality, I really just want to do like Tim says in that post (emphasis his):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I am reading and sharing ideas about what I have read, I feel like my best self. <em>I want more of that feeling.</em>… I’m wondering if acknowledging what I read, along with a substantial visual (a book cover image?) and any highlights or notes, could feel just as good as having a physical book…. Maybe I could list my piles of books here on my website, and link them to blog post entries with highlights/notes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s it exactly. So I’m going ahead and doing the work: I’m going to keep that list up to date, and I’m going to try to write and share <em>something</em> about every book I read for the rest of the year. It doesn’t have to be a lot—just a sentence or two will do in many cases. “I liked it” or “This had a lot of potential but didn’t quite measure up to it.” Something simple like <a href="https://wynnnetherland.com/reviews/to-hell-and-back-europe-1914-1949/">what Wynn Netherland does</a>, or something long and careful when it makes good sense.</p>
<p>Maybe someday I’ll be able to write one of those killer reviews that ends up changing a whole conversation, or maybe I’ll just have a bunch of interesting notes I can look back on later and be able to see what I thought about a book when I’m curious a decade later. Either way, I think it’ll be a nice win.</p>
<p>So: <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017-book-list.html">book list</a>.</p>
Log All the Things!2017-07-07T20:00:00-04:002017-07-07T20:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-07-07:/2017/log-all-the-things.html<p>For the past few weeks, I’ve tried adding something new to my existing <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html" title="Getting things done in 2016 and beyond">pomodoro routine</a>: a daily and weekly summary of what I’ve done.</p>
<p>Over the past few years, I’ve been a fairly steady practitioner of the habit of marking what I do in any given 25-minute …</p><p>For the past few weeks, I’ve tried adding something new to my existing <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html" title="Getting things done in 2016 and beyond">pomodoro routine</a>: a daily and weekly summary of what I’ve done.</p>
<p>Over the past few years, I’ve been a fairly steady practitioner of the habit of marking what I do in any given 25-minute work cycle. However, I’ve felt of late that while I usually had a good sense of what my goals had been and whether I had accomplished them for any given small <em>part</em> of the day, I didn’t have a clear sense of what I had done over the day as a whole—much less at the end of a whole week.</p>
<p>So I just started summarizing it at the end of each day, or early the next day, and pulling those summaries into a single document at the end of the week. (If you’re curious, I’ve been doing all of this in <a href="http://www.bear-writer.com/">Bear</a>, which of course I use in its Markdown mode.) So on any given Friday, I can actually look at my week as a whole and have some concrete sense of what I’ve accomplished.</p>
<p>I’ve only done this for the past three weeks, but I <em>really</em> like it and I intend to keep it up.</p>
<p>The main thing I need to figure out how to integrate into it is non-work tasks. And really, that goes for my life in general right now. I’m <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/on-decompression.html" title="On Decompression">still sorting through</a> what it looks like to just be working a full-time job and having a few side projects. But I’d like to be able to look back at the end of each month and boil down those weekly summaries, and at the end of the year likewise with the months—and from the combination, actually know a bit more concretely what my year was like.</p>
<p>We’ll see how it goes. I’m sure I’ll be back with more to say in this space soon enough.</p>
On Decompression2017-06-10T10:00:00-04:002017-06-10T10:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-06-10:/2017/on-decompression.htmlI’ve been thinking about reading plans and books lists. And rest. And I'm taking a break from formal plans for the rest of this year, because I and our family need it.<p>I’ve been thinking about reading plans and book lists. And about rest.</p>
<p>Plans and lists may not sound like rest to you; that’s fine: they don’t to me, either. I’ve been eager to move back into the kinds of reading I’m actively interested in doing now that I’m done with my seminary degree. But one of the challenges is that I need—and I’m <em>very</em> aware of this need—to decompress a bit.</p>
<p>The last roughly 8 years have been <em>going</em> fairly constantly. I began my first job after college the day after Jaimie and I got back from our honeymoon. For the next two years I worked full-time there <em>and</em> taught myself web development and then did 8–10 hours a week of web development consulting on the side while she finished school. I kept up that pace for another year and a half after that other than a slight break just after Ellie was born, and then we moved to North Carolina for me to get an M. Div. from <a href="http://www.sebts.edu">SEBTS</a>. Since we moved here, I’ve always been working—anywhere from 20 to 60 hours a week, always in at least one class a semester and often as many as three. All along the way, I’ve also been reading and writing for myself: these things are relaxing for me. And for the sheer joy and need of a good outlet, I added podcasting along the way as a hobby.</p>
<p>But the takeaway of all of that is that I’ve had to be <em>extremely</em> structured and disciplined with my time. I have always had a detailed schedule and an idea of what I wanted or needed to be working on at any given time: from learning new things in software to writing blog posts, and from actually programming as a job to writing papers for seminary.</p>
<p>It’s time to breathe a bit.</p>
<p>I feel very keenly the need to <em>decompress</em>. Not to stop doing things, but to add some slack to the schedule, to keep my number of hard external commitments low and to keep any self-imposed pressures low as well. That will let me recharge and avoid burnout, and it will give me lots of good time to just hang out with Jaimie and our little girls. We’ve made space for the family all the way through, but it has always been a matter of scheduling it and fitting it in. I’m looking forward to a season where it’s just normal for us to play and read and do life together. As I said: a kind of decompression, letting things stretch back out a bit and decreasing the tension of always being on a tight schedule.</p>
<p>That means that until about January 2018, I am not making myself a <em>reading list</em> in the way I want to in the future. Why do I even want that? Because I <em>need</em> it. So the better question is: why do I think I need a reading list or a plan?</p>
<p>I’m a voracious, multi-disciplinary reader, but this has two problems. One is I can be a bit like a squirrel: always seeing something shiny in that new subject <em>over there</em>. The other is that I can get sucked incredibly deep into one genre so that I end up reading only theology or programming or the like for six months. Having a plan and a reading list will help me both dig deeply and in focused ways into the subjects on which I want to think (and write!) more, but it will also help me balance that with a good mix of other kinds of reading from other fields—something which is both broadly helpful and which inevitably <a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com/art/and-the-stew-tastes-good/">produces a better mix of insights</a> than just reading one subject in isolation does.</p>
<p>But, for all the reasons outlined above: not now.</p>
<p>I still have books I want to read over the rest of this year. The list right now looks like this:</p>
<ul>
<li>Fyodor Dostoevsky, <em>The Idiot</em></li>
<li>Daniel Kahneman, <em>Thinking, Fast and Slow</em></li>
<li>Oliver O’Donovan, <em>Resurrection and Moral Order</em></li>
<li>Brandon Sanderson, the various sequels to <em>Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians</em> (which I read and quite enjoyed last month)</li>
<li>Charles Taylor, <em>A Secular Age</em></li>
<li>J. R. R. Tolkien, <em>Beren and Lúthien</em></li>
</ul>
<p>That’s a “list,” but it’s a list composed of exactly one kind of book: whatever I feel like reading. There are other books I’ve already started that aren’t on that list because while they’re important to me, they’re not decompressive at all: they feel like work, like pressure. And what I and my family need right now—especially in the midst of planning a cross-country move to be nearer our families in a new home!—is to relieve pressure, not add more.</p>
<p>So now I’m going to go read one of those books on our porch. Whichever one I feel like. And then I’ll read whichever one I feel like <em>next</em>. And if the list changes, that’s fine too.</p>
<hr />
<p><i class="editorial">Note: I cross-posted this to <a href="http://krycho.com">our new family blog</a>!</i></p>
Corraling My Coffee Habit2017-02-23T20:10:00-05:002017-02-23T20:10:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-02-23:/2017/corraling-my-coffee-habit.html<p>Because we buy good coffee and good coffee is expensive, and because we’re trying very hard to save for a house, I’ve been thinking about how to corral that particular budget line.</p>
<p>For a bit of context, we use <a href="https://www.youneedabudget.com" title="You Need A Budget"><abbr>YNAB</abbr></a>, and we have two ways we spend money …</p><p>Because we buy good coffee and good coffee is expensive, and because we’re trying very hard to save for a house, I’ve been thinking about how to corral that particular budget line.</p>
<p>For a bit of context, we use <a href="https://www.youneedabudget.com" title="You Need A Budget"><abbr>YNAB</abbr></a>, and we have two ways we spend money on coffee: going out to coffee shops, and as groceries. Perhaps surprisingly, it has been the latter of those two which has been giving us trouble: that second cup of coffee every day—you know, for the pick-me-up in the early afternoon—adds up in a hurry, especially when you’re buying <a href="https://counterculturecoffee.com/">Counter Culture</a> or <a href="https://bluebottlecoffee.com/">Blue Bottle</a> or the like.</p>
<p>So I decided this week to make one small tweak to our budgeting flow which should help stem this tide of coffee a bit. Namely: we now have an allocated amount of coffee per day, and if we go past that, a corresponding amount of money moves from our coffee shop budget into our grocery budget.</p>
<p>Here’s how that works in practice. Our last bag of Counter Culture cost $17.61. I allot myself 8 ounces per day. On Tuesday, I drank an extra 6-ounce cup in the afternoon. The bag is 12 ounces of coffee beans, which is 340 grams. A 6-ounce cup, made the way I make it, uses 11 grams of beans. So then I did a little math: <code>(11 / 340) * 17.61 ~= 0.57</code> – so I moved $0.57 from my coffee shop budget to my grocery budget. I did the same with the extra 4-ounce cup I had yesterday and the extra 2 ounces I had in my cup this morning.</p>
<p>Is this budgeting done in excruciatingly minute detail? Yes. Is it helpful to me? Also yes. Do I recommend it? Not unless you’re in the same ballpark of obsessiveness as I am!</p>
Where Do I File This?2017-02-19T11:00:00-05:002017-02-19T11:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-02-19:/2017/where-do-i-file-this.html<p>I want to write more. Blogging does me good. <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/a-few-theses-on-blogging.html" title="A Few Theses on Blogging">I say this</a> often, but I’m finally coming to a point where it might be a bit more doable. Finishing my M. Div. is giving me more time, and that’s <em>really</em> wonderful. The trick now is deciding which of …</p><p>I want to write more. Blogging does me good. <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/a-few-theses-on-blogging.html" title="A Few Theses on Blogging">I say this</a> often, but I’m finally coming to a point where it might be a bit more doable. Finishing my M. Div. is giving me more time, and that’s <em>really</em> wonderful. The trick now is deciding which of the many things I want to do will get my attention. I can split my focus a thousand ways, or I can pick a few tasks and zero in on them and aim to be good at them.</p>
<p>In the case of blogging, I have no doubt it’s something I want to continue. But I need to think about <em>how</em> and <em>why</em> I want to use it, and this relates closely to some of my goals for an information architecture-level restructuring of the site I want to do when I finish building <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">lightning-rs</a>. <em>Blogging</em>, at its best, isn’t long-form articles (though there is certainly room for those on my website as a whole), but <a href="http://blogs.mereorthodoxy.com/samuel/2017/02/17/4-requests-young-evangelical-writers/" title="4 Requests to Young Evangelical Writers">short, cogent pieces which pack a punch and move on</a>, or <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2017/01/those-darn-millennials.html" title="those darn millennials?">thinking out loud</a>. Even in my own experience, the best <em>blog posts</em> I have written are quite different from the best <em>essays</em> I have written. Embracing that seems like a helpful first step.</p>
<p>I have more than a few large project-style blog posts I have not finished—most regrettably, at present, one about podcasting which I told a friend I was working on some weeks ago—in part because I have tried to treat them like blog posts <em>and</em> essays or projects at the same time.</p>
<p>What I think I’d like to end up with is <em>something</em> like this, in terms of structure in the new site:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Journal</strong>—something like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book">“commonplace journal”</a>, but shared publicly. This would include several kinds of content:
<ul>
<li>blog posts—things like this little piece, of course, but also the <em>vast</em> majority of the content I put on the site</li>
<li>links to <em>other</em> blog posts</li>
</ul></li>
<li><strong>Projects <em>&</em> Series</strong>—the home for more substantive chunks of content
<ul>
<li>long-running series like my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/rust-and-swift.html">Rust and Swift</a> posts, which are not particularly <em>bloggy</em> (for lack of a better word)</li>
<li>things like my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">2016 in Review</a> series</li>
<li>some projects more like some of the things <a href="http://craigmod.com">Craig Mod</a> has done over the years: curated collections of materials that complement each other</li>
</ul></li>
<li><strong>Articles</strong>—call this aspirational; if or when I have things published in a more formal way, I’d like them to have a home on my website as well</li>
</ul>
<p>This structure has some challenges of its own, of course. Where does a poem go? Is it part of my “journal” or is it more of a one-off “project”? And within those, I shall want both overlapping “categories” as well as cross-cutting “subjects”: it is impossible to cleanly separate <em>all</em> of my Tech and Theology writing from each other, yet having <em>some</em> high-level categories grows increasingly important for navigating the site as its content grows. (This becomes a problem even just for me as I look for old posts to link them—much less for any <em>other</em> reader of my site!)</p>
<p>Part of the problem with all such taxonomies is that they are arbitrary and constrictive so far as they cannot overlap. Perhaps something goes in <em>both</em> <strong>Projects</strong> and <strong>Journal</strong>—but then that makes it far harder for a user of the site to navigate. And here, as I hinted in my parenthetical above, there is another of these tensions: how I think of something and use it for organization of my materials is broadly orthogonal to the needs or interests of potential readers, and both of us use the site!</p>
<p>Of course, these are problems for all sufficiently complex collections of data. It is equally as hard to manage these questions of organization for large, focused writing projects (like a thesis or a novel) as for a varied collection of materials like this site, though the details differ. It is much <em>harder</em> when dealing with an operating system and its collection of myriad kinds of data. We muddle on with our self-imposed limitations, because the alternative tends to be chaos. Unconstrained tagging systems quickly devolve to madness.</p>
<p>And this is not merely a digital problem: filing cabinets have the same constraints. Yet perhaps the apparent <em>freedom</em> offered by the digital world exacerbates it; the sense that perhaps we could escape the constraint that a note can only go in one place—because it <em>can</em> go in more than one virtual place—makes us reach for solutions which may only increase our frustration in the end. Perhaps just being forced to put something in a place (even if not a perfect one) is a good discipline. But perhaps not; perhaps that freedom is a gift if we use it wisely. I think there is room for further work here in any case.</p>
<p>So: more to come as I continue to chew on these problems of information architecture and user interface. <a href="https://twitter.com/chriskrycho">Links to others’ thoughts</a> and <a href="mailto:hello@chriskrycho.com?subject=Structuring%20content">more detailed comments of your own</a> most welcome.</p>
2016 in Review, Part 6 of 62017-01-01T08:00:00-05:002017-01-01T08:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-01-01:/2017/2016-review-6.htmlSome big goals for 2017, and some smaller ones too.<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li>Part 6: Plans for 2017! (this post)</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>In 2017, I really only have a few big goals:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Graduate seminary.</li>
<li>Spend good time with my family.</li>
<li>Love our church well.</li>
<li>Work hard for Olo.</li>
<li>Save money for a house.</li>
<li>Replace <a href="https://github.com/getpelican/pelican">Pelican</a> with <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">Lightning</a> for this site.</li>
</ol>
<p>I have a bunch of smaller goals, too, of course. That list includes:</p>
<ul>
<li>publish two episodes of New Rustacean every month (of various formats—not all the full-length teaching-a-subject type)</li>
<li>publish 16–20 episodes of Winning Slowly</li>
<li>complete a full-length sprint triathlon<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></li>
<li>run a <a href="http://cityofoaksmarathon.com">marathon</a></li>
<li>be able to do 15 consecutive pull-ups and 100 consecutive push-ups</li>
<li>lose ten pounds and get back down to my target weight</li>
<li>document all the undocumented features in Rust, and get the Rust reference all the way up to date (<a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/38643">tracking issue</a>)</li>
<li>finish a couple side projects (and bring in the associated money!)</li>
<li>teach in our small group at least a half dozen times</li>
<li>write at least one long essay for Mere Orthodoxy</li>
<li>publish the scripts and transcripts of New Rustacean as an ebook</li>
<li>publish hard copies of the archives of my blog, in a way that mirrors the style of the site at the time it was written</li>
<li>fully archive the Blogger and WordPress versions of this blog as static HTML</li>
<li>move all the sites I host (mine and others) out of shared hosting and into a server I manage (probably Digital Ocean or Linode)</li>
</ul>
<p>But basically all of those are flexible (and, if I’m honest, so is #6 in the first list—though it’s a <em>high</em> priority as far as the flexible ones go).</p>
<p>I have a pretty good handle on how I’m going to chase those things. The productivity patterns I’ve established over the last couple years are serving me well so far, and I expect them to continue to. After graduation, things will obviously look a little different, and I’m looking forward to that, too. Being able to take vacations where I’m not losing ground by not working on school projects? That sounds truly amazing.</p>
<p>I’m also looking forward to digging into more books I want to read and making progress on writing I want to do in the realm of theology, philosophy, ethics, and so on. I’ve spent nearly all the mental energy I have available for those subjects on seminary work over the past several years (with varying degrees of value for that effort). Once again being able to focus my own external studies as I like will be very freeing, I think. I hope to find some ways to continue to work at something like an academic level, and—crazy though it sounds right <em>now</em>—I do hope to get a Ph.D. in <em>something</em> in a few decades. But I am looking forward to having a lot of years of reading and writing outside academia between now and then.</p>
<p>All those goals are good, but ultimate I’m willing to just see what the year brings. I’d love to compose music again more regularly and at greater length. I’d love to write more fiction, and more (and better) poetry. But we’ll also be starting some schooling with Ellie, and dealing with the logistics of planning a move to Colorado sometime in late 2017 or the first half of 2018. We’ll be enjoying just not having nearly so much to do right after finishing seminary. It’s worth remembeirng to rest, and not do just jump into another season of being incredibly slammed by busyness. I plan to take some time to read novels and play video games, too. Those things are good for our souls in their own way.</p>
<p>And come what may, I hope to glorify God in the midst of it. Rest, work, play, side projects, you name it—<em>soli deo gloria.</em></p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>750m swim, 20km (12mi) ride, 5km (3.1mi) run<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
2016 in Review, Part 5 of 62016-12-31T09:30:00-05:002016-12-31T09:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-31:/2016/2016-review-5.htmlMy strategy for productivity: less social media, careful use of my time, and embracing the "pomodoro technique".<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Or: a ridiculous year summarized!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li>Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond. (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>At a number of points over the last few years, I’ve tackled the question of productivity. I always have far more I <em>want</em> to get done than I’m able to actually get to. A few of those posts:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/boosting-my-productivity.html" title="Boosting My Productivity">Boosting My Productivity</a> (December, 2014)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/a-new-schedule.html" title="A New Schedule">A New Schedule: Trying to make better use of my time toward my goals</a> (July 2016)</li>
</ul>
<p>A common theme of all productivity plans, of course, is that one can get more focused on the details of the plan than on actually being productive! I’m happy to say, however, that this <em>wasn’t</em> the case for me with these productivity approaches. First, I have never allowed myself to be slavish about them. If I need to do something different on a given day, I do something different. Second, I am generally able to remember that the point of the plan is <em>what I’m getting done</em>. So with that in mind, some comments particularly on the plan I sketched out <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/a-new-schedule.html" title="A New Schedule">mid-year this year</a>.</p>
<p>I fell off that wagon almost immediately. Readers who’ve stuck with me through these various updates will note that this ambitious plan preceded my disastrous 20-mile run and the ensuing bout of walking pneumonia by a matter of days. It took me until September to get back on the horse, so to speak, because even after I got over being sick, I was traveling—and nothing throws off my schedule like traveling! Happily, I got quite a bit done both during the conference trip I took and during the week I was in Colorado for my youngest sister’s wedding, but it wasn’t until after both of those that I was able to settle back into the routine I’d aimed for.</p>
<p>The major themes of that post were a detailed plan for my days, cutting out a lot of my social media, and thinking about weekends. The detailed plan for my days I kept off and on. I never consistently managed to have the block of time-for-side-projects at the end of my days, and that increasingly meant those things cut into weekends (impacting that goal as well). As for social media, that’s largely been a success: I now rarely get on Facebook, and only check Twitter from time to time. Certainly neither is much of a timesink anymore. I do continue to make heavy use of Slack outside of work, but I’ve found a good balance there (and the main communities I’m a part of have gone through their own adjustments as we’ve <em>all</em> found the need for this kind of focus and balance).</p>
<p>So it wasn’t perfect, but I did find it a very useful approach overall. I fully expect to stick with something very like it in 2017. Hopefully I won’t be pulling as many 10–11 hour days as I was in the latter half of 2016—but regardless, building this new discipline around the overall structure of each day was very helpful.</p>
<p>One <em>big</em> part of my approach to productivity that I’m definitely going to keep is the “pomodoro” technique. I first mentioned this in the <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/boosting-my-productivity.html" title="Boosting My Productivity">first</a> discussion I posted about this, but I’ve embraced it more and more. I work in 25-minute blocks, punctuated by 5-minute breaks. Nearly all of those 5-minute breaks entail walking, and as a result I get about 2–3 miles of walking in every day on top of my runs. That helps enormously with focus. This fall, I also embraced the <em>other</em> half of the pomodoro technique: writing down goals and outcomes for each of those 25-minute blocks. Even more than the daily goals I discussed in the opening post of this series, this lower level of tracking has proved very helpful. It has given me a sense of what I have actually accomplished each day, and it has also helped me <em>focus</em> as I’m trying to keep moving on various tasks each day. I highly recommend using the pomodoro approach (adapted as necessary to your particular circumstances, of course) as a tool for that kind of focus and productivity.</p>
<p>I’d be remiss if I didn’t also note the following <em>very</em> substantial factors in my productivity:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>fitness/health:</strong> if I’m active, I focus better. People say they don’t have time to exercise; I mean it when I say I don’t have time <em>not</em> to. I keep it pretty simple: running, cycling, swimming, and body-weight strength stuff. But I do it basically every day. And we eat fairly healthily. Both of those are incredibly important.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>sleep:</strong> no matter how busy I am, I don’t pull all-nighters or anything of the sort. I get a minimum of 6 and usually 7–7½ hours of sleep every night. Even when I’m tired from pulling week after week of 10-hour work days, I can keep going because I get enough sleep.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>no commute:</strong> working remotely is awesome for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that I don’t lose the hour or three every day to the road/subway/etc. that many people I know do. That’s a <em>lot</em> of time over the course of a year. 48 working weeks means if you commute for an hour total every day, that’s 240 hours a year—that’s 30 8-hour days worth of “getting things done”.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Perhaps at some point after I finish seminary I will expand the various things I do in productivity into a more complete series, but this gives you a good idea of what 2016 looked like, and what I expect 2017 to look like!</p>
2016 in Review, Part 4 of 62016-12-30T07:00:00-05:002016-12-30T07:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-30:/2016/2016-review-4.htmlOlo is great; I helped build (almost from scratch) a large mobile web application; I did some open-source software; it was a good year professionally.<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li>Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source. (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>This year at Olo was a great year overall. I very much enjoy working with the people there, the tech stack is good and they’re paying me to do what I love, and if the product isn’t lighting my world on fire (online restaurant ordering is cool, but restaurants aren’t a passion of mine), that’s a tradeoff I can live with. Working with good people with a good tech stack on a product you find <em>fine</em> rather than <em>amazing</em> is actually pretty great. I’m grateful for previous jobs, but this one has superceded them in every possible way. I’m <em>glad</em> to start work every day—and in truth, there have been more than a few days where I would have liked nothing more than to keep writing JavaScript rather than switching over to do some reading and writing for seminary. That bodes well for my future plans: post-seminary, I expect to bump from 30 to 40 hours a week with Olo<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> and keep making our software as awesome as I can. And I expect to enjoy that!</p>
<p>Speaking of numbers: GitHub reports that I contributed +29,463/−13,726 lines of code in our new mobile web ordering experience, which I helped build nearly from scratch this year. (That “negative” is stuff I rewrote or removed entirely by finding a better implementation.)</p>
<p>Quite a bit of my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">writing</a> this year was technical, too: some ~33,000 of the words on my blog—fully a third of the things I published on this site apart from microblog posts and schoolwork—was about software. That included entries 11–18 of my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/rust-and-swift.html">Rust and Swift</a> series, but about 20,000 words were assorted discussions of JavaScript, Rust, podcasting, functional programming, etc. A fair bit of that content came out of things I worked on for Olo, either directly (as in the case of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/what-is-functional-programming.html" title="What is Functional Programming? (And why should we care about it?)">this talk</a>) or indirectly (as in the case of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/keyof-and-mapped-types-in-typescript-21.html" title="keyof and Mapped Types in TypeScript 2.1">this discussion of TypeScript 2.1</a>) That’s a good mix, and I hope to continue putting out material that’s useful to others as well as interesting to me. (I do get tweets now and again confirming that the content is helpful, and I <em>don’t</em> run analytics on the site at all—so if you like something I write, please tell me. It’s encouraging. And that goes for <em>any</em> author you read, as a rule.)</p>
<p>Finally, I actually did a little bit of open-source contributing this year. Not as much as I’d like, but a little. And I also count New Rustacean as a pretty substantial contribution to the Rust community. The fact that it isn’t code doesn’t diminish what it’s doing. If you’re feeling like code is the only thing that <em>really</em> counts, recognize that all the code in the world isn’t that useful without explanations of how to use it, helping people become interested in the first place, and so on. Speaking of non-code contributions, the open-source contribution I’m <em>most</em> proud of is certainly the <a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1636">Rust RFC</a> I wrote and which was recently accepted and merged. It proposed (and it is now the official policy of the Rust project) that no new features may be added to the (stable version of the) language or the standard library without first being documented. This is a big deal for the language, and it was also a big deal for me, in that it was another place where—despite being far too busy to write a lot of Rust code this year—I could make a real difference in a community I’m passionate about. And one of my goals for next year is a direct follow-on from that: <a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/38643">actually implementing the requirement</a>!</p>
<p>The other big thing going on for me in the software world is that I started work on <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">Lightning</a>, a new static site generator in Rust. (There’s another such project, <a href="http://cobalt-org.github.io">Cobalt</a>, which is already usable.) I’ve been pushing up against the limits of <a href="http://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/">Pelican</a>, my current generator, for a while. And I’ve looked around time and again, and never found a CMS or SSG that does everything my peculiar publishing needs require (<em>especially</em> in a way that I like!). And my needs are indeed peculiar, though probably not wholly unique; for most people, any one of <a href="https://staticsitegenerators.net"><em>many</em> other site generators</a> would work just fine. So I’m doing what I’ve been thinking about doing for years, and building my own. My immediate goals are mostly just to have something that is super speedy and which checks off all my needs from a CMS/site generator. My longer-term goals include getting some good foundational knowledge I’ll need for <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/ulysses-byword-and-just-right.html">my <em>next</em> project</a>. I’m a thousand lines in, and have some pieces working. I hope very much to move off of Pelican and onto Lightning (and get a freshened theme for this site) in 2017!</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Yes, Olo has been incredibly generous and hired me as a full-time employee at 30-hours-a-week with pro-rated salary. Like I said: amazing company.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
2016 in Review, Part 3 of 62016-12-29T10:30:00-05:002016-12-29T10:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-29:/2016/2016-review-3.htmlOn top of my 200,000 words of writing this year, I also published some 66 episodes and almost 20 hours of podcasting across four different shows.<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li>Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more! (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>Beyond <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">the written word</a>, the other “writing”-type work I had this year—some of it including <em>actual</em> writing in the form of detailed scripts—was podcasting!</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th style="text-align: center;">Show</th>
<th style="text-align: center;">Episodes</th>
<th style="text-align: center;">Total time</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">25</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">11h 40m</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">22</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">6h 46m</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://runwith.chriskrycho.com">Run With Me</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">19</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">1h 1m</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.sap-py.com">sap.py</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">1</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">12m</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;"><strong>Total</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><strong>67</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><strong>19h 39m</strong></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Again, several of those numbers surprised me a bit. For one thing, I had to put New Rustacean on hiatus starting in October courtesy of the crunch I ended up with from the <em>Rust vs. Swift</em> project colliding with the other summer-and-fall commitments I had. For another Stephen and I paused Winning Slowly between Seasons 4 and 5 (as we usually do) and also have taken a mid-season pause on Season 5 because of end-of-semester crunches for both of us and then his wife having a baby a few weeks earlier than expected. Yet in spite of that, almost 20 hours of audio content this year! If I hit that again in 2017, I’ll be happy.</p>
<p>Whether <a href="http://www.sap-py.com">sap.py</a> will be back, I have no idea. I love making the show with Jaimie, but it’s really up to her whether she wants to keep working on Python. Of late, she’s been working on <a href="https://www.etsy.com/shop/PemberlyPrintables" title="Jaimie's printable shop on Etsy">printable art</a> instead, and that’s delightful in its own right. I’ve <a href="http://runwith.chriskrycho.com/runs/14/">just</a> gotten <a href="http://runwith.chriskrycho.com">Run With Me</a> going again in the past day; I got off track when my headphone microphone stopped working for a bit and never got back <em>on</em> track when it started working again. I’m looking forward to once again talking about running while running.</p>
<p>I expect to be publishing an even wider variety of kinds of episodes of New Rustacean in 2017. Listeners should get another couple of interviews, a lot more of the “here is a Rust concept in detail” episodes (at least one a month in general, I hope!), news episodes, undoubtedly a few bonus episodes, and a new “Crates You Should Know” format designed to highlight crates I’ve found useful in my own Rust work. I continue to find Rust a wonderful language, and I hear regularly that this is one of people’s favorite programming podcasts. I hope to keep it that way!</p>
<p>We expect to wrap up <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/season-5.html" title="Winning Slowly Season 5: Structure and Agency">Season 5</a> of <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> mid-spring, and then begin recording Season 6 mid-to-late summer. All of that is pending how things go as Stephen finishes his dissertation and likely prepares to move across the country to take a job as a professor somewhere, of course. But that’s the plan—and yes, we already know the rough shape of Season 6, even this far out. We know the season topic, and have some basic ideas of where we want to go with it. As is usually the case with our “seasons” now, it will take ideas we’ve touched on here and there and turn them into a full-blown, months-long exploration of those ideas as applied to specific issues. Winning Slowly remains one of my very favorite projects, not least because there is (to our knowledge) nothing else out there doing quite the same thing. Tackling long-term trends in technology with a distinctively (though not always overtly) Christian perspective (but <em>not</em> a reductionist one) is apparently our gap to fill. We’ll take it.</p>
<p>Two other podcasting-related bits. First, I wrote a <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/theses-on-podcasting/" title="32 Theses (and several more words) on Podcasting">~5,000-word piece for Mere Orthodoxy</a> explaining how the medium works, what its constraints are, and what is involved in doing it well. If podcasting is interesting to you, I think the piece is well worth your time—precisely because of, and not in spite of, its length! Second, I gave a pair of guest lectures for Stephen at N.C. State University this fall, which are both available in the <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/season-bonus.html">bonus section</a> on <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a>. Those cover some of the same ground as the piece at Mere O, but they also talk a lot more about the details of finding a topic, an “authorial voice”, and an angle for your show.</p>
2016 in Review, Part 2 of 62016-12-28T07:00:00-05:002016-12-28T07:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-28:/2016/2016-review-2.htmlOne of my goals for 2016 was to continue writing not only on this blog but in other outlets. I did a *lot* of writing this year, but relatively little of it is published. But here's a look at some of the numbers! (And they are large!)<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia.</a></li>
<li>Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words. (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>One of my goals for 2016 was to continue writing not only on this blog but in other outlets. I did a <em>lot</em> of writing this year, but relatively little of it is published. But here’s a look at some of the numbers! Note that “This site” excludes republication of school papers, and that I don’t have an exact count for the school papers because I’ve already discarded a few of the shorter pieces, but their average length is well-known to me. More on the unpublished <em>Rust vs. Swift</em> project below.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th style="text-align: center;">Category</th>
<th style="text-align: center;">Words</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/m-div/">School</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">~130,500</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/author/chris-krycho/">Mere Orthodoxy</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">~6000</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">This site</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">~63,000<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;"><em>Rust vs. Swift</em> project</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">~9350</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;"><strong>Total</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><strong>~207,850</strong></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Of the writing for school, only a small fraction of it is <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/m-div/">published here</a>, unlike previous years. Roughly 75,000 words of that content is research notes I put together for an independent study I did—which was deeply profitable for me in terms of thinking through hermeneutical and theological systems, and which will hopefully be helpful for the professor for whom I prepared them, but which are not at all publishable. Another 10,000 of those words fit in a category charitably describable as “busy-work” and publishing them is <em>possible</em> but would have no <em>value</em>. The school-writing also includes the notes and manuscripts for my sermon-delivery class. You can find those sermons <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/sermons/">on this site</a> as well well, with audio, video, and the manuscripts available—but the notes are not worth publishing, as they’re entirely internal. Still: they’re words, I wrote them, and there are a lot of them.</p>
<p>On the plus side, I wrote one of the papers I’m proudest of from my entire seminary career in the spring: <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/realism-and-antirealism.html">Realism and Antirealism—A key debate in the philosophy of science (with interesting implications for young-earth creationism)</a>. I’m happy with it not least because I wrote it in a very compressed fashion because of some family health issues that hit at the end of that semester, and it still turned out extremely well because I had <em>planned</em> it meticulously. Despite having only a single draft with one typo-level revision pass, it’s easily the best paper I’ve ever written. It turns out that doing a really careful outline helps when you’re working at this scale. I’ve not normally been a fan of outlining (and I’ve not normally found it helpful when I’ve tried it), but for any longer, more sustained argument, it’s absolutely necessary.</p>
<p>Of the content on this site (excluding republication of school papers), an astounding ~14,000 of those words are in my “microblog” content. It’s amazing how much those little posts add up. That said, I’m surprised to see that I’ve put out as many <em>other</em> words as I have this year on this site, and the total there is rather staggering. Writing on this site includes everything from <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/ask.html" title="Ask: a short story">fiction</a> and <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/to-paint-god-as-a-man.html" title="To paint God as a man: an Advent poem">poetry</a> to <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/a-simple-childrens-catechism.html">a simple children’s catechism</a> to <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/what-is-functional-programming.html">an introduction to functional programming</a>. I’m exceptionally pleased in retrospect to see how this came out, and I look forward to writing on equally varied terms in the year ahead.</p>
<p>Some 13,000 of the words I wrote for this site were in my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/rust-and-swift.html">Rust and Swift</a> series, a project I’ve enjoyed enormously since starting it in 2015 and would like to get back to in 2017. It went on hold because I was offered, and accepted, a contract to write a 30–40 page report for O’Reilly comparing the two languages, which was intended to come out this fall. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way some wires got crossed and my pitch and what they wanted didn’t end up being the same. Once that became clear (at the beginning of October), they opted to drop the project. This was a huge disappointment to me: it was a small hit financially, but a big one time-wise, as I sunk a <em>lot</em> of hours into it in what was an already-very-busy fall; the project was over ¾ done when it was dropped.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<p>A few big lessons I learned from this:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p>Don’t overcommit. Even if the project had gone through without issue, it would have been more on my plate than I could reasonably handle. The fact that it was canceled after having done a lot of the work meant it was also <em>financially</em> frustrating, but I had overcommitted regardless. Won’t do that again.</p></li>
<li><p>Be <em>even more</em> clear up-front about the terms and goals of a project. I don’t know how we ended up with the crossed wires we did, but it was extremely frustrating.</p></li>
<li><p>If you can get an advance, get an advance. Just saying.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>In general, I’m quite pleased with the <em>volume</em> of my output in 2016 (who wouldn’t be, right?). I’d definitely like a lot more of that to be public-facing in 2017, even if it’s lower in overall volume. I hope to take the material from that canceled <em>Rust vs. Swift</em> project, expand it slightly, and self-publish it. I also hope to put together at least one substantive essay for Mere Orthodoxy next year. And of course there will probably be thousands of words in this space, too—inevitably more than I even realize.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Note as well that this excludes all the <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/newrustacean.com/tree/589cd13225cde91f92bfca93f6679f2395d78886/docs">podcast scripts</a> I wrote this year! Those would add well over 10,000 more words to this count.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Yes, that number includes these posts!<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>They wanted an analysis of when you’d choose each language; I pitched a comparison along similar lines to my blog series, looking at the language design choices as a view into software engineering tradeoffs. When the mismatch became clear, I pointed out that “when to choose Rust vs. Swift” is, generally speaking, a roughly two-sentence answer: “Choose Rust for cross-platform, high-performance/low-level code. Choose Swift if you’re writing apps on an Apple platform.” This was not, apparently, obvious to everyone else involved. In the words of the internet: <span style="whitespace: nowrap">¯\_(ツ)_/¯</span><a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
2016 in Review, Part 1 of 62016-12-27T17:00:00-05:002016-12-27T17:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-27:/2016/2016-review-1.htmlAccidental 20-mile runs, walking pneumonia, gaining weight because of metabolic shifts, and other adventures in my "fitness" in 2016.<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li>Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia. (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p><em>Wait, hold on,</em> you say. <em>Go back. How did you get walking pneumonia?</em> This is a fun story, and it’s a huge part of what made the other parts of the latter half of 2016 go the way they did.</p>
<p>I went for what I expected to be a 15–16 mile long run as part of training for the half-marathon I signed up for this year. The previous week <a href="http://runwith.chriskrycho.com/runs/12/" title="Run summary on runwith.chriskrycho.com">I’d done a 14-mile run</a>, so 15–16 would have been no problem. I was feeling <em>awesome</em> on the run, so decided to extend it to 17. This was right at the edge of what makes good sense for a week-over-week increase in mileage; you generally want to stick with ~10% increases and max out at 20%; but 17 is right at that limit relative to 14. So I turned right to cut through another nearby town instead of left to head directly home when I was at roughly the 11-mile mark.</p>
<p>Then, where I <em>did</em> cut back toward home, I took a wrong turn out of a five-way intersection. (You can see on the north end of the map, in Youngsville, <a href="https://www.strava.com/activities/644619792" title="Run overview on Strava">here</a>). I realized this half a mile on, but figured there would be a spot to cut over. There is not. So I got back to where I had taken the wrong turn, filled up my water bottle and hit the bathroom, and made my way home. But at this point, I was already at ~15 miles, and ~4 miles from home. As I got back into our town, I decided: why not just go ahead and extend out to 20 miles?</p>
<p>And the truth is, that extra three quarters of a mile probably didn’t matter a bit. 19.25 vs. 20 miles? Same difference in its effect on my immune system, which is to say: it completely crashed it. A 42% week over week increase in mileage is no joke. The little cold I picked up from my 2-year-old daughter turned into borderline bronchitis. Yay.</p>
<p>What with a busy spring preceding—I had no idea how much busier I would be taking 2 classes and working 30 hours a week than I had been taking 3 classes and working 20 hours a week—I didn’t manage a triathlon. I had contented myself with the thought that I’d likely set another PR in my half marathon, but after weeks of recovery from walking pneumonia, that thought fell apart as well. I lost about a minute per mile in my pace, and my mileage was shot as well. I never got it back—not least because of a writing project which went south on me. I ended up being sick off and on all fall, and I’m only now getting my feet back under me. Sad to say, one of those times I got sick was the week of the half marathon I signed up for, and I’d been getting loud, clear signals from my body on previous runs that I was pushing too hard. So no race <em>at all</em> this year. But better that than pushing and injuring myself.</p>
<p>The year also saw a so-far unreversed weight gain that I find incredibly frustrating. In the first six months of 2016, I gained about ten pounds—despite keeping up the same basic activity level. I attribute this to a combination of factors: metabolic shifts in my late 20s, shifting back to doing almost purely running rather than a mix of running, swimming, and cycling, and the impact of acclimation to a workout load. I’m far from overweight, but I’m also slower and generally a bit flabbier as a result.</p>
<p>Here’s hoping 2017 is <em>much</em> better in all these regards! I plan to do a sprint-length triathlon and a full marathon. And I hope to lose those ten pounds again and get back to that healthier overall weight. That combo seems like the thing to do the year I turn thirty and graduate seminary.</p>
2016 in Review, Introduction2016-12-27T16:00:00-05:002016-12-27T16:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-27:/2016/2016-review-intro.html2016 was a long, difficult, strange, sometimes wonderful and sometimes dreadful year for me. It was one of the most professionally and scholastically enjoyable and rewarding years of my life, and also one of the most exhausting. As I often do at years-end, I am taking stock publicly of what went well, what went poorly, and what I might do different in a variety of categories!<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way! This first day, you’re getting two posts; the rest of the year, one (at least: in this series!).</i></p>
<ul>
<li>Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>2016 was a long, difficult, strange, sometimes wonderful and sometimes dreadful year for me. It was one of the most professionally and scholastically enjoyable and rewarding years of my life, and also one of the most exhausting. As I often do at years-end, I am taking stock publicly of what went well, what went poorly, and what I might do different in a variety of categories—here, mostly in terms of my public-facing endeavors. This year’s summing-up post will also (for, I think, the first time) include some numbers! But first, a few comments on the big picture.</p>
<p>At the end of 2015, I <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/thoughts-on-2015-and-2016.html">offered a similar set of reflections</a>. At the end of it, I laid out some plans for 2016:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am going to set a single goal in each of five major categories in my life:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>spiritual:</strong> everything in my walk with God, including my own personal devotions, my involvement in the life of the church, and my “ministry” actions in general</li>
<li><strong>family:</strong> both quantity and quality time spent with my wife and my quickly-growing-up little girls</li>
<li><strong>personal:</strong> podcasting, blogging, and writing for <a href="http://mereorthodoxy.com/author/chris-krycho/">other outlets</a></li>
<li><strong>professional:</strong> working in my new job and as a consultant, and carrying on toward the conclusion of my M. Div.</li>
<li><strong>health/fitness:</strong> continuing to stay healthy, including eating well and continuing to stay fit by running and doing triathlon work</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>Early in the year, I made the habit of writing these out formally on a day-by-day basis—and I did this off and on. If you were to look at my little (Moleskine-branded and delightful-to-me) daily planner, you’d see streaks of weeks where I noted specific tasks and whether I hit them or not, punctuated by weeks and months where I did nothing of the sort. I have always found it difficult to stick with these kinds of things, in part because I usually have a pretty good idea what I need to do on any given day without writing it down somewhere. (I use <a href="https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/" title="OmniFocus">other tools</a> for tracking mid- and long-term deadlines for school.) In July, I started mashing this idea up with <a href="http://bulletjournal.com" title="Bullet Journal site">bullet journaling</a>, and I found that I (a) really like the system and (b) also didn’t stick with it consistently. A lot of that came down to the fact that I got thrown off—horribly—by getting a mild-but-still-utterly-debilitating case of walking pneumonia in July. (On which, more in a moment.)</p>
<p>So much for last year’s ideas about <em>how</em> I was going to hit those goals. How did I actually do at addressing them? The answer is: <em>okay</em>. 2016 was not an amazing year. It was not a terrible year. But it had as many downs as ups.</p>
<p>My own walk with God remains <em>steady</em>. Nothing amazing to report here, but I’m more than okay with that. I will perhaps say more on this in another post, but the older I get the more convinced I am that emotional highs are a trap. Sentiment and true religion are <em>not</em> the same thing; and Scripture calls us to <em>faithfulness</em>, not <em>spiritual feelings</em>. As such, in a year with this many bumps, I am glad to say that I had no horrible falls, and I read my Bible nearly every day and prayed every single day.</p>
<p>Our family learned some Bible verses, and started working on the Heidelberg Catechism. We shared the gospel with people as we were able, and met faithfully with our church. We were not extraordinary, and we were far from flawless, but I think we did <em>well</em>. I hope and pray in God’s grace we are able to continue in faithfully doing well in the years to come. Certainly if there is one thing I hope to do more of in 2017 it is spend time with my girls. I am not a huge “kid person,” but these years are precious and go by quickly; far better to spend more time with them and have a podcast episode or a writing project go out later (or not at all) than to miss these little years.</p>
Winning Slowly 5.05: “Faint Not”2016-10-04T08:17:00-04:002016-10-04T08:17:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-10-04:/2016/winning-slowly-5-05-faint-not.html<p><a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/5.05/">This</a> is one of the most important episodes Stephen Carradini and I have ever published. We go after civil forfeiture <em>hard</em>. Give it a listen!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/5.05/">Winning Slowly 5.05: “Faint Not”</a>—Negative / Invisible / Legal (Organized): civil forfeiture and entrenched legal evil</p>
<p><a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/5.05/">This</a> is one of the most important episodes Stephen Carradini and I have ever published. We go after civil forfeiture <em>hard</em>. Give it a listen!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/5.05/">Winning Slowly 5.05: “Faint Not”</a>—Negative / Invisible / Legal (Organized): civil forfeiture and entrenched legal evil</p>
Winning Slowly Season 52016-08-09T07:30:00-04:002016-08-09T07:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-08-09:/2016/winning-slowly-season-5.html<p><em>Up the ante</em>, you say? Sure, we’ll tackle the small, easy problem of <em>systemic force and individual agency</em> this season on <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/5.01/"><strong>5.01: A Ph.D.-Level Math Problem</strong></a>—Structures and systems, agency and individuals: three axes (and a sub-axis) for thinking about the world we live …</p></blockquote><p><em>Up the ante</em>, you say? Sure, we’ll tackle the small, easy problem of <em>systemic force and individual agency</em> this season on <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/5.01/"><strong>5.01: A Ph.D.-Level Math Problem</strong></a>—Structures and systems, agency and individuals: three axes (and a sub-axis) for thinking about the world we live in.</p>
<p>We introduce our system for thinking about the “structure/agency” or “systems and individuals” problem: how do the systems and structures of our lives shape us? How do we shape them? How free are we, and where are the places where more freedom is good, and the places where it might actually be bad? How do we confront the structural issues we face, or strengthen and preserve the good systems we do have in place?</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/5.01/">Listen to the whole thing!</a> And then <a href="mailto:hello@winningslowly.org?subject=5.01:%20A%20Ph.D.-Level%20Math%20Problem">tell us</a> what you think.</p>
A New Schedule2016-07-16T22:10:00-04:002016-07-18T11:45:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-07-16:/2016/a-new-schedule.html<p>I tried something this week; we will see if it sticks. In the aim of being <em>much</em> more productive with my time, and with the idea that I hit a minimum of 40 hours a week between school and work,<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I made the following changes:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>I embraced a weekly …</li></ol><p>I tried something this week; we will see if it sticks. In the aim of being <em>much</em> more productive with my time, and with the idea that I hit a minimum of 40 hours a week between school and work,<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I made the following changes:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>I embraced a weekly schedule, where each week day includes:
<ul>
<li>the time I get up, and a goal for how long it takes me to go from when my alarm goes off to when I have breakfast made for Jaimie and me</li>
<li>half an hour of Bible reading and devotions</li>
<li>five minutes to read the news</li>
<li>five minutes to plan my day</li>
<li>two hours of reading and writing for school</li>
<li>six hours of software development work for Olo<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></li>
<li>a specific workout in my self-designed training plan for the <a href="http://cityofoaksmarathon.com">half marathon</a> I am running this fall</li>
<li>an hour dedicated to creative projects I am working on—I’ll fill this with things like writing blog posts, prepping New Rustacean episodes, recording and editing Winning Slowly, and working on building a modern iOS and macOS app</li>
<li>roughly 90 minutes devoted entirely to spending time with my family, over dinner and afterward until our girls go to bed</li>
<li>about two hours freely available—this varies enormously: it might include more of those creative endeavors, it might be just hanging out with Jaimie (watching <em>The Flash</em> or something) for a few hours, it might be spending time with friends we have over for dinner and time afterward, etc.</li>
<li>sleep 7–7.5 hours every single night—this is my sweet spot, so hitting it makes a big difference in being able to hit all those other marks throughout the day</li>
<li>a lot of small spaces throughout the day during my <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique">pomodoro</a> breaks which I use for other reading (especially news, RSS, etc.)</li>
</ul></li>
<li>I cut nearly all social media: Facebook, Twitter, Slack, and email all receive drastically lower amounts of time now.
<ul>
<li><strong>Facebook:</strong> I now check once a week. I may post news stories to it, but I am basically treating it as a “write-only” medium—posting content to it but not interacting there. (I find interactions there to have a <em>very</em> low ratio of value to time spent.)</li>
<li><strong>Twitter:</strong> I now check once a day, for no more than five minutes. It is incredibly easy to get sucked into reading my Twitter feed at great length, and far more difficult to conclude that using my time that way is remotely valuable for my goals.</li>
<li><strong>Slack:</strong> I now use in dedicated blocks of time. I get very good value out of Slack:
<ul>
<li>for professional use, as we use it to coordinate our work at Olo, and it’s very handy for quick interactions for a distributed team</li>
<li>for side projects: Stephen and I use it to coordinate and plan for <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/">Winning Slowly</a>, and I also provide a fair bit of input and discussion for <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com">Mere Orthodoxy</a>, as well as occasionally write there (you may see something of that sort this very week, in fact).</li>
<li>for personal use, as a virtual water cooler with a bunch of other developers in one team, and with a group of Christians in tech in another, which is <em>very</em> helpful for staying sane while working at home</li>
</ul>
All that notwithstanding, Slack can also be a huge time-sink and distraction, so I limit the blocks I use it, and try to be effective with that time.</li>
<li><strong>Email:</strong> I now have closed much of the day, and only check at intervals. Especially with the way we get automated emails for various kinds of error reporting, issue tracking, and so on at work, having my mail up all day is a quick path to constant interruption. (Further minimizing notifications from email will help even more on this.)</li>
</ul></li>
<li>I have <em>started</em> thinking about how I want to treat my time on the weekends, as well: dedicated blocks of time with family, for side work I’m doing a little of, for those creative side projects, etc.</li>
</ol>
<p>There’s a lot there, and I’ve only been at it one week. So far, however, I like it, and it’s felt like something I can sustain effectively going forward. A few things will have to be tweaked a bit when I’m in class proper in the fall, not just doing an independent study. But the main routine is very good and very helpful so far, and I intend to stick with it.</p>
<p>A few other other observation on the changes themselves:</p>
<ul>
<li>They <em>do</em> require a lot of discipline to stick with over the course of the week.</li>
<li>This was most helpful because I did take that planning time each day and set specific tasks I wanted to accomplish in that time.</li>
<li>I didn’t quite pull it off all the way; some schedule surprises Thursday and Friday threw it off. I did still get done basically everything I wanted to this week, though!</li>
<li>I also didn’t manage that full hour-long creative block every day. I managed about 30–45 minutes most days, because I found myself craving some non-thinking time right after wrapping up work. I’ll need to sort that out more as I go.</li>
<li>I suspect that making this an actual habit will yield huge dividends over time, but it’s going to take a while to make it <em>stick</em>.</li>
</ul>
<section id="background" class="level2">
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>So, <em>why</em> did I do all of that?</p>
<p>Over the past few months I have been feeling, increasingly keenly, the amount I have to get done (work, school, side projects like <a href="http://www.newrustacean.com/">New Rustacean</a> and <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/">Winning Slowly</a> and a few more simmering as well) and the amount of time I have to do it (no more than anyone else). I have also been feeling the effects of too much “multitasking,” which I increasingly recognize along with everyone else is impossible. If I am jumping back and forth between some kind of work (writing software, reading, or writing) and other activities like email, Slack, or Twitter, I simply do not get as much done. But I <em>want</em> to.</p>
<p>There is a trap of thinking that productivity is the most important thing in the world. It is very American. I understand the temptation, but I do not generally indulge it.</p>
<p>However, I <em>do</em> care about accomplishing the particular things I want to do, and doing those as well as being a good husband and dad and a faithful member of our church means using my time as effectively as I can. This is not a new concern for me, and <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/boosting-my-productivity.html">as such I have written about it before</a>.</p>
<p>A lot of the things I wrote about before I still do, and they work well for me. I still use OmniFocus to manage my tasks; I still use the pomodoro approach for keeping my brain moving throughout a whole day, and I still refuse to use email as a task manager (though I’ve been less disciplined about hitting “Inbox Zero” than I’d like of late). However, I found in the past few months that, while good, those habits aren’t quite <em>enough</em> for everything I have going. They are necessary but insufficient.</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>If I can manage more on the school front over the weekends, that’s a win, but this breakdown is usually enough to get done everthing I need to.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Olo is a <em>fantastic</em> employer. Among many other things Olo does exceptionally well, they were willing to hire me as a salaried, full-time type employee with full benefits, but working 30 hours instead of 40 while I’m finishing my M. Div. I have pro-rated pay and vacation (though, pro-rated vacation just means I have the same amount of functional time off as everyone else does), but otherwise am just like every other employee in terms of health-care, training availability, laptop, etc. Olo is the best place I’ve ever worked, bar none, and by a <em>large</em> margin.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Bullet Journal: Getting Started2016-07-06T06:45:00-04:002016-07-06T06:45:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-07-06:/2016/bullet-journal-getting-started.html<p><a href="http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/">Color me intrigued.</a></p>
<p><a href="http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/">Color me intrigued.</a></p>
A brake on our enthusiasm2016-05-31T22:21:00-04:002016-05-31T22:21:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-05-31:/2016/a-brake-on-our-enthusiasm.html<blockquote>
<p>One of the reasons we do history… is because it acts as a brake… on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the reasons we do history… is because it acts as a brake… on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.</p>
</blockquote>
Run With Me!2016-04-11T21:35:00-04:002016-04-11T21:35:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-04-11:/2016/run-with-me.html<p>I may have gone mad with power or something, but I launched another podcast today! Crazy, I know.</p>
<p>It’s both more and less crazy than it might sound, though. More, because of what the podcast is, and less, because of what the podcast is. So what is it?</p>
<p><a href="//runwith.chriskrycho.com"><em>Run …</em></a></p><p>I may have gone mad with power or something, but I launched another podcast today! Crazy, I know.</p>
<p>It’s both more and less crazy than it might sound, though. More, because of what the podcast is, and less, because of what the podcast is. So what is it?</p>
<p><a href="//runwith.chriskrycho.com"><em>Run With Me</em></a> is a microcast, with 3–5-minute long episodes <em>about</em> running, recorded <em>while</em> running.</p>
<figure>
<img src="//cdn.chriskrycho.com/runwith/cover-web.jpg" title="_Run With Me_ cover art" alt="Run With Me" /><figcaption><em>Run With Me</em></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I allow myself an absolute maximum of ten minutes to edit and publish the episodes. (So far, I’ve never needed more than about <em>three</em> minutes.) So, for anyone worried that I’m unnecessarily or unwisely adding something more to my already-full plate: don’t be. Apart from spending some of my relaxation time this weekend building the site, the only time I’ll spend on this will be time I would already be spending running or cooling down after a run.</p>
<p>So far (two episodes in!) it’s a ton of fun. I’ve enjoyed the process of recording it, and it’s nice to be able to talk about running confident that whoever listens is actually interested. (As I explain further on the show, that interest in not boring my audience is part of why I’m doing this, rather than just talking to people I know.)</p>
<p>If you have any interest in running, and especially if you like listening to podcasts while you run, I think you’ll enjoy this. I’d love it if you subscribed!</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/run-with-me/id1102273878?mt=2"><i class="fa fa-fw fa-music"></i> iTunes</a></li>
<li><a href="https://overcast.fm/p418939-N58r18"><i class="fa fa-fw fa-play-circle"></i> Overcast</a></li>
<li><a href="http://pca.st/5toh"><i class="fa fa-fw fa-play-circle-o"></i> PocketCasts</a></li>
<li><a href="http://runwith.chriskrycho.com/feed.xml"><i class="fa fa-fw fa-rss"></i> Old-fashioned RSS</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>A few comments on the podcast from a form/genre angle, and a few from a technical angel:</p>
<p>You can think of <a href="//www.manton.org/2016/01/new-podcast-timetable.html">“microcasts”</a> as being not terribly dissimilar from a <a href="//v4.chriskrycho.com/micro/">microblog post</a> in its own way. I’m happily stealing the idea of a microcast from <a href="//www.manton.org">Manton Reece</a>, whose <a href="//timetable.manton.org">Timetable</a> show is a delightful little thing. (It’s not original to him; a quick [Google search] will turn up instances of the term dating back several years at least, but he’s where I got the idea, and I think he’s certainly one of the first to be popularizing the form.)</p>
<p>I find podcasting as a medium extremely interesting in general (I’m <a href="//www.winningslowly.org">sure</a> you would <a href="//www.newrustacean.com">never</a> have <a href="//www.sap-py.com">guessed</a> that), and I think microcasts will proliferate rapidly. As my friend <a href="http://oluseyi.info">Oluseyi Sonaiya</a> and I have often discussed, brevity is a real virtue in podcasting, and one too-little appreciated by many amateur producers in the space. <a href="http://independentclauses.com">Stephen</a> and I aim for that balance with <a href="//www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a>, and it’s always been a part of my consideration with <a href="//www.newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> as well. People’s time is valuable. Saying something and then <em>being done</em> is a kindness to your audience.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>And then, practically speaking, there’s the simple reality that it’s just <em>harder</em> to record a long-form podcast while running. Especially a good one.</p>
<p>At a tech level, producing the podcast is incredibly simple: I use the built-in microphone in the headphones that come with an iPhone to record, and do the recording and (extremely minimal) audio production in <a href="https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/ferrite-recording-studio/id1018780185?mt=8&at=1001l4KM">Ferrite</a>. When I say minimal, I mean really minimal: I chop off the bits before I start talking, and the bits after I start talking, and I do all of that on my iPhone. Then I export to Dropbox, and from there to my CDN. That’s it.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>No comments about the length of my blog posts, please.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Trust, Fame, and Deceit2016-01-10T15:45:00-05:002016-01-10T15:45:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-01-10:/2016/trust-fame-and-deceit.html<p>I <a href="/2016/women-in-rust.html">recently noted</a>, in the course of seeing how my <a href="http://www.newrustacean.com/">New Rustacean</a> podcast was doing, that the subscriber list for its Twitter followers was overwhelmingly, terribly male. So I responded a little: I posted publicly about it on Twitter, making known my intention to find some ways within the podcast …</p><p>I <a href="/2016/women-in-rust.html">recently noted</a>, in the course of seeing how my <a href="http://www.newrustacean.com/">New Rustacean</a> podcast was doing, that the subscriber list for its Twitter followers was overwhelmingly, terribly male. So I responded a little: I posted publicly about it on Twitter, making known my intention to find some ways within the podcast to feature female Rust developers, just to help make the Rust community that much friendlier to women. (I’m <a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/686150249619013632">told</a> that it’s actually very welcoming so far, for which I’m grateful!)</p>
<p>The response was gratifying in some ways: I got a fair bit of response from within the Rust community, and heard back from a number of women who listen to the show. At least one of them linked to the show, recommending it strongly.</p>
<p>I was happy about this. And then I started thinking about the way this cycle played out. Everything in it was genuinely well-intended on my part. I very much want to see the tech world in general and open-source software in particular be friendlier and kinder and more respectful to women. I want it to be a genuinely egalitarian space. I would go so far as to say that I think that is essential for it to be a genuinely <em>good</em> space.</p>
<p>But what if those <em>weren’t</em> my intentions? What if, in point of fact, I was a misogynist pig with a penchant for sexual harassment?</p>
<p>The same social media tactics would still work. People who’d experienced my wickedness first-hand would know better, but many wouldn’t. I’d just be a friendly-sounding voice out there on the internet, giving every impression of being on the side of people whose go of things in the tech community has been pretty rough at times. My stature would go up as a consequence. My podcast would grow in popularity. The likely hood of my being a well-liked and well-respected member of the community would only increase.</p>
<p>And the opportunities I would have to abuse that position of influence would all concomitantly increase as well.</p>
<p>Again: that <em>isn’t</em> me. But unless you know me and see how I live my life, you don’t know that. You don’t know from a tweet, or a blog post, or even a whole public internet history. Sad to say, but <em>people lie</em>, and they do it for many reasons. When, in the midst of any furor over another revelation of sexual predation from a well-regarded person who has said all the right things, remember that words are cheap. “Actions speak louder than words” is a truism for a reason.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean you should mistrust everything you hear or read. It doesn’t mean that behind every nice-seeming person on the internet is actually a creepy psychopath plotting how to manipulate you. It just means that you shouldn’t be surprised to find that, out of the great mass of people who genuinely are friendly and helpful, there are nonetheless a few for whom their friendliness and helpfulness are a manipulative charade.</p>
<p>A few thoughts:</p>
<ul>
<li>Keep trusting people. You can’t live your life sanely otherwise.</li>
<li>But don’t be surprised when some people aren’t what they seem.</li>
<li>If someone acts one way in public but is completely different in private, do whatever you can to deal with it. Above all, if you’re their friend, <em>call them on it</em>.</li>
<li>Give grace; people make mistakes. But also don’t assume that just because someone who’s lied repeatedly apologizes, they’re going to change. Giving grace and forgiving people doesn’t mean being blind or naïve.</li>
<li>Don’t manipulate people. It’s easy to do it, and the temptation toward popularity can get tangled up even with genuine desires to do good in ways that profoundly complicate your actions. Watch out for it.</li>
<li>Don’t let that worry keep you from doing good things for other peoples’ good. Keep your eyes on your own motives while you do it, but <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22%3A34-40&version=NIV">love others as you love yourself.</a></li>
</ul>
Thoughts on 2015 (and 2016)2015-12-26T13:30:00-05:002015-12-26T13:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-12-26:/2015/thoughts-on-2015-and-2016.html<p>As we come to the end of the year, I have been reflecting on the things I set out to do this year, and on my hopes for the coming year. At the start of the year, I posted a number of goals for my “public” life this year, and …</p><p>As we come to the end of the year, I have been reflecting on the things I set out to do this year, and on my hopes for the coming year. At the start of the year, I posted a number of goals for my “public” life this year, and I also wrote up a number of personal goals for myself. Goals are well and good, but if I do not evaluate how I did on them, and think about areas I succeeded and areas I failed, and on how I might do better in the future, those goals will not make much difference. (<em>Much</em> difference, I say, because I have long found that even just having goals makes a difference in how I approach the year.)</p>
<p>At the start of the year, I posted a list of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/public-ish-plans.html">“Public-ish Plans”</a>. My self-evaluation on those counts isn’t amazing. The Winning Slowly goals, I managed: we have separate pages for each season, and we recorded two more seasons—each one better than those before. Hosting things on Digital Ocean and migrating my wife’s blogs off of Blogger and WordPress, not so much (read: not at all, though I did <em>start</em> writing a Ghost theme for her current WordPress site… and haven’t touched it in at least six months.) I wrote some music this year, but not three minutes worth—you <em>can</em> hear all 37 seconds of it <a href="https://soundcloud.com/chriskrycho">on SoundCloud</a>. I wrote <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/poetry/">poetry</a>; I managed to average about one poem a month starting in March. I wrote a few essays, but nothing close to one per month. I posted a whopping two book reviews (out of the six I hoped for), and both of those were written for school. I managed to add a picture to the About page, but I didn’t even come close to blogging about the family on a monthly basis.</p>
<p>In sum: about 50/50 on those goals.</p>
<p>That said, I managed quite a few other things <em>not</em> on that list this year. I started learning Rust, and started <a href="http://newrustacean.com/">a podcast about it</a> which is easily the most successful online endeavor I’ve ever undertaken, with a good 500 regular listeners. (That’s a small crowd on the internet, but massively more than any writing I’ve done, and actually larger than Winning Slowly’s current audience.) I have basically carried home a major transition effort for my main software development client, and helped them bring a new developer up to speed. I landed a new software development job, doing things I’m much more passionate about, which I’ll be starting in mid-January. I ran a triathlon (and placed third in my age group), and I set another personal record in the half-marathon I ran this fall.</p>
<p>One of the lessons I take away from this last year, then, is that it’s important to set goals, but it’s also important to let those goals change over time. Some of those goals are still things I’d like to accomplish—like migrating us to DigitalOcean, and getting Jaimie’s sites off of Blogger especially. Another (fairly obvious one) is prioritizing. I had a lot of major goals for last year, and in retrospect, I think I had <em>too many</em>. It’s hard to keep all of those in sight of the course of the year, especially with other professional and scholastic demands to meet (themselves often good in their own right).</p>
<p>With all of these things in mind, I’m planning to approach 2016 a little differently. I haven’t made formal goals yet, but I have come up with the basic outline I want to use going forward.</p>
<p>First, I am going to set a single goal in each of five major categories in my life:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>spiritual:</strong> everything in my walk with God, including my own personal devotions, my involvement in the life of the church, and my “ministry” actions in general</li>
<li><strong>family:</strong> both quantity and quality time spent with my wife and my quickly-growing-up little girls</li>
<li><strong>personal:</strong> podcasting, blogging, and writing for <a href="http://mereorthodoxy.com/author/chris-krycho/">other outlets</a></li>
<li><strong>professional:</strong> working in my new job and as a consultant, and carrying on toward the conclusion of my M. Div.</li>
<li><strong>health/fitness:</strong> continuing to stay healthy, including eating well and continuing to stay fit by running and doing triathlon work</li>
</ul>
<p>Note that this list is intentionally <em>unordered</em>.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> My spiritual life remains the highest priority, because if my walk with God falters, everything else will go amok. Beyond that, however, the amount of time and effort I invest in each category not only can but should vary over time. Family will broadly remain in the second of those slots, though there may be days or the occasional week where one of the other concerns <em>very temporarily</em> takes a higher priority. The others will adjust relative to each other as need be: there will be times when school requires more, and so my own writing gets less time, and there will be times when I have more flexibility and so am able to devote more to those personal interests, and so on. The goal here is not the mythical notion of “balance” but rather faithfulness, which has some superficial similarities but ultimately <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/faithfulness.html">plays out rather differently</a>.</p>
<p>I’m hoping, in light of those goals, to set annual, monthly, and daily goals in each of those categories. The daily goals should help me move toward the monthly goals, and the monthly goals toward the yearly goals. I only get to set one goal in each of those categories for each tier: at five goals, that’s already plenty! I hope that evaluating each day will help me be more focused and faithful, and that situating daily and monthly goals each in light of larger goals will help me actually accomplish those larger goals. We’ll see how it goes, of course. I’ll be back in a week or so with whatever goals I decide to make public in those categories, and again in a year with an evaluation rather like this one.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Under the covers, it’s literally an HTML unordered list.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
How I Became a (Relatively) Quick Runner2015-11-22T11:00:00-05:002015-11-22T11:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-11-22:/2015/how-i-became-a-relatively-quick-runner.html<p>A few weeks ago, I ran the <a href="http://cityofoaksmarathon.com">City of Oaks</a> half marathon event for the third consecutive year. I finished at 1:24:58, which comes out to be about a 6:29/mile pace. I finished 20th overall, out of thousands of half-marathoners. If that seems fast to you …</p><p>A few weeks ago, I ran the <a href="http://cityofoaksmarathon.com">City of Oaks</a> half marathon event for the third consecutive year. I finished at 1:24:58, which comes out to be about a 6:29/mile pace. I finished 20th overall, out of thousands of half-marathoners. If that seems fast to you, well, it seems fast to me, too.</p>
<p>People often ask me how I run so far and so quickly. I always laugh when they ask, because for my part, I haven’t thought of myself as particularly fast—the guys who finished first in my race this year ran over a minute per mile faster than me.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> The best half-marathoners in the world are running a 4:30/mile pace! But I grant that a 6:29/mile pace is, in the grand scheme of things, pretty quick.</p>
<p>That leads me to the <em>other</em> reason I don’t tend to think of myself as fast: my training approach.</p>
<p>My half marathon times have always been pretty good,<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> but it is <em>not</em> because I am particularly athletic. As I mentioned in <a href="/2015/how-i-became-a-runner.html">my first post</a> in this series: you can ask my high school football coaches. I was never particularly quick, and even now my best mile time is somewhere around 5:30. I knew people even in high school who were in the mid- to low-4:00 range. Still, going sub-6:30 for 13 miles is no joke, and if you had told me even five years ago—after I started running!—that someday I would run the race I did a few weeks ago, I’d have laughed in disbelief.</p>
<p>But it really is all in the training. I have two things going for me, and only two: I train <em>smart</em>, and I train <em>consistently</em>.</p>
<p>Consistency first: year-round, I am doing some sort of workout six days a week. Throughout the winter and spring, that will look like a mix of running, spin classes at the gym, and swimming as I prep for another triathlon. From now till the end of January or so, I’ll just do pretty much whatever I feel like in that mix, while keeping at it. From February till whatever point early next summer that my triathlon is, I’ll dedicate two workouts a week to each of the sports. Then I’ll slowly transition to nearly-all running. Through the fall, I will run 5–6 days a week, cycling for a commute when weather permits one of those days instead.</p>
<p>That right there is the single biggest factor in my performance. If <em>anyone</em> did 30–45 minutes a day four days a week, an hour one day a week, and ninety minutes to two hours another day a week, he would get quicker rapidly. If he did that for five and a half years (as I have been), he would likely be in very similar shape to me.</p>
<p>As for training smart, I basically just follow the <a href="http://philmaffetone.com/what-is-the-maffetone-method/">Maffetone method</a>. Most of my runs are easy, aerobic runs. Even at the height of my training for a half marathon, when I am running 45–50 miles each week, 80% of my miles are at a conversational pace. (I’ve carried on fifteen-minute-long phone conversations on runs before!) My long runs include a hard, roughly race-pace finish for the last three or four miles, and I do one hard run a week which is half aerobic and half pushing harder than race speed.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> But overall, I run a slow-for-me pace most of the time. I use a heart-rate monitor to help me stay in an easy, aerobic training zone, and I simply don’t go over that.</p>
<p>That slow-run training pays off in a couple ways. First, it builds up my body’s ability to process energy aerobically (see <a href="http://philmaffetone.com/what-is-the-maffetone-method/">the Maffetone method article</a> for details). Second, it’s much easier on my body—I simply don’t have the joint problems or soreness that many runners do. Third, it is <em>much</em> easier mentally, because I can enjoy my runs and not feel exhausted after them. That means it’s much easier to do them day after day, and that takes me back to the consistency point from above.</p>
<p>So if you want to run fast: run a lot, and usually run slow.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>The top finisher came in at 1:10:03 (to my 1:24:48)—a 5:21/mile pace. The record on the course—which isn’t a perfect match for what we ran today, but pretty similar—is 1:04:21, which is about a 4:55 pace. That’s <em>blisteringly</em> fast.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>In my first, in December 2011, I ran a 1:36:32, which is about a 7:23 pace.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>I also occasionally through speed work days; this fall I did one day of hill repeats: a quarter mile pushing <em>hard</em> up a hill, a quarter mile easy back down the hill, and a minute of rest. Five miles of that is tough; I’d like to do more in future years.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
How I Became a Runner2015-10-12T20:00:00-04:002015-10-12T20:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-10-12:/2015/how-i-became-a-runner.html<p>Sometime in the last few years, I became “that runner guy.” It is no longer strange for me to introduce myself to someone new in the area we live, and hear them say, “Have I seen you running?” I smile and nod: “Yep, that’s me.” And to be fair …</p><p>Sometime in the last few years, I became “that runner guy.” It is no longer strange for me to introduce myself to someone new in the area we live, and hear them say, “Have I seen you running?” I smile and nod: “Yep, that’s me.” And to be fair, I do run a lot: six days a week, most weeks, always at least half an hour. In three weeks, I’ll run my seventh half marathon,<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> and I finished my first triathlon last summer. So, yes, I do run a lot.</p>
<p>But it’s still a little strange to me. I came to running late, and in a roundabout way. Many of my friends ran cross country in high school; I played football (and poorly at that) instead. I ran off and on in college in a (mostly failing) attempt to stay in shape and avoid college weight. The only running I did consistently was playing Ultimate on Fridays with some friends. For the first year I was out of college, my routine was much the same.</p>
<p>And then I got mono. I drank after a friend who carries around a particularly virulent strain of it, and was down for the count: a month in bed, and two months of recovery after that. I was, in theory, the captain of a church league Ultimate team that spring. I missed half the games, and even when I was able to attend some of them in the latter half of the season, it left me literally needing a nap just to stand and watch for an hour. In the hopes of being back in good enough shape to play the following fall, I started running as soon as I was cleared by the doctor.</p>
<p>That first run on a treadmill in May 2010 was painfully slow. Even when I was furthest out of shape before that, running an 8-minute mile had been doable—painful, perhaps, but doable. That day I ran a 12-minute mile, and was done for the day. The same thing another day that week. And again.</p>
<p>But slowly, over time, I built up my endurance. I managed to run two miles outside a few weeks later. By the time Ultimate season rolled around in late August, I could run five miles, and was doing three to five miles four times a week. I was in good enough shape to play Ultimate, and I enjoyed it.</p>
<p>Still, I found running hard, and didn’t particularly enjoy it. I ran solely as a means to the end of playing Ultimate. More, five miles was my upper limit if I ran hard (as I always did). When I thought about people who ran half-marathons—still less the full—I simply could not understand how they did it. But I started to <em>want</em> to understand.</p>
<p>And then I had one simple conversation, which changed my entire approach to running. It set me on a course to this seventh half-marathon, and to being “that runner guy” around here. It led to my being the healthiest I’ve ever been. And, strangest of all, it ended up with my <em>loving</em> to run—and not because I like pain.</p>
<p>But more on that next time.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Dallas White Rock 2011, Oklahoma City 2012, Fort Worth 2012, one whose name I can’t remember in April 2013, City of Oaks 2013, City of Oaks 2014.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
My dream of dreams2015-08-13T09:00:00-04:002015-08-13T09:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-08-13:/2015/my-dream-of-dreams.html<p>Yes.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In my dream of dreams, Trump actually runs third party, which emboldens Bernie Sanders (should he not get the nom–whoa, Sanders vs. Trump would be the greatest political race <strong><em>OF ALL TIME</em></strong>) to also run third-party, since all of them have viable “cores,” and we get a four-party …</p></blockquote><p>Yes.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In my dream of dreams, Trump actually runs third party, which emboldens Bernie Sanders (should he not get the nom–whoa, Sanders vs. Trump would be the greatest political race <strong><em>OF ALL TIME</em></strong>) to also run third-party, since all of them have viable “cores,” and we get a four-party race that spawns four actual parties and American politics is freed from its bipartisan lock and a bald eagle screams across the sky while Stephen Colbert tears his shirt and flexes his muscles and fireworks explode in the shape of America over his head.</p>
</blockquote>
Faithfulness2015-06-18T17:00:00-04:002015-06-18T17:00:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-06-18:/2015/faithfulness.html<p>It’s been a lot more than a month since the promised monthly update. I’ll blame it on a lack of self-discipline… or perhaps on the presence thereof.</p>
<p>Every day, we face choices about where to spend our time. In this particular season of life, that has often meant …</p><p>It’s been a lot more than a month since the promised monthly update. I’ll blame it on a lack of self-discipline… or perhaps on the presence thereof.</p>
<p>Every day, we face choices about where to spend our time. In this particular season of life, that has often meant not writing, even things I <em>want</em> to write. I have a family to care for, a church to serve, work to do, and schoolwork to accomplish. Family is a daily endeavor, work and school nearly so, and church regular if not quite daily. In the midst of that, I have to decide: <em>What will I do today?</em></p>
<p>Our culture tends to put the question in terms of balance; my friend and pastor Ashok Nachnani suggested to me a while back that it is better to think in terms of <em>faithfulness</em>. “Balance” suggests holding all these things in equal proportion, juggling them against each other. “Faithfulness” suggests fulfilling the responsibilities as best we can, with the time we are given. The actual day-to-day outcome may not look particularly different, but it is an important shift in the way we think nonetheless. To be faithful may mean letting some desireable things go, and it may mean doing some things in a different way or to a lesser degree than we might like.</p>
<p>Writing, for example.</p>
<p>I <em>love</em> writing. I like keeping a public record for my friends and family to see how my life is. I enjoy stretching my mental muscles in the way that writing requires. I enjoy thinking through pen or keyboard. But faithfulness to the responsibilities God has given me right now means <em>not</em> trying to balance those desires against each other, and instead doing what is best for my family and my church. For the most part, right now that means not writing.</p>
<p>As I put it to Jaimie a while back, at this point in life I have time for one hobby—and only one. That hobby, at this point, is fitness. I run half marathons, and now I do triathlons (first one coming up in 10 days!). That takes up a non-trivial amount of time every week. It helps me in the other areas of my life, to be sure: it helps me be less physically tired, improves my focus in school and work, and serves to maintain my health. Nonetheless, it is hobby-like and it takes a substantial amount of time every day.</p>
<p>So right now, I write a great deal less than I want, and a great deal less than I did in college or early in our marriage. I miss the days when I had time to work on poetry for hours at a stretch, or simply to muse for a few thousand words. But it is far more important for me to spend time with Ellie and Kate than it is to write poetry, or to compose music, right now. Lord willing, I have 55–60 years ahead of me. Of those years, they will be close only another 15–20, and they will be the age they are today <em>only for today</em>. As much as writing and composing and hobby programming all look appealing to me, and as much as those really are good expressions of the ways God has gifted me, focusing on them would not be the most <em>faithful</em> use of my time—not today.</p>
<p>This is not to say that writing and composing and developing interesting software are not important. Rather: they <em>are</em> good and valuable things. But they are things to focus on at other times in life. As fast as this life goes, and I am increasingly aware that it goes quickly indeed, I can expect in the ordinary course of things to have <em>many</em> years available for those things. I can exercise my gifts faithfully in the right time and season. Today, I can learn to love my little girls well, invest deeply in their lives, and savor moments that will never come back.</p>
<p>Most of all, I must remind myself that teaching and shaping them is easily the most significant thing I will ever do. Should I write an essay that persuaded a thousand people to change their views on the arts, or to adopt a better view of the church, still my impact on two little lives would be more important. If I can point them faithfully to Christ and help them learn to walk faithfully with him as healthy members of his body, that will be a good life to have lived. Everything else is icing on the cake.</p>
<p>Icing is good, for the record. Sometimes, in these sorts of posts, we can mistake <em>relative importance</em> for <em>absolute importance</em>. I should, at various times in my life, make sure to exercise the good gifts God has given me in ways appropriate to that time and context. Right now, that means continuing to write, but less frequently. In the future, it will mean something else.</p>
<p>And all of this must stand in the context of resurrection hope. Too often, I live—too often, we <em>all</em> live—as though the next 60 years are all we may expect, the only time for writing and composing and so on. But it is not. I look forward to endless ages of creativity, exercising those gifts <em>more</em> fully than I am able now. So: Lord Jesus, come soon. And in the meantime, may I be faithful in each season to do as well as I can.</p>
These Are My People2015-05-17T22:25:00-04:002015-05-17T22:25:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-05-17:/2015/these-are-my-people.htmlWhen I went to Seattle for BibleTech 2015, I expected to put a nice mark on my résumé and learn some interesting things. I came out with something much, much more valuable.
<p>At the end of April, I flew out to Seattle to <a href="//v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/tolle-lege.html">give a talk</a> at <a href="//bibletechconference.com">BibleTech</a>, a conference hosted by Faithlife (the company that owns Logos Bible Software). What I found was not only a bunch of interesting content—though there was certainly plenty of that, and props to the Logos/Faithlife people for putting on a great event—but also an awful lot of people <em>a lot like me</em>.</p>
<p>Those of you who know me well know this is rare. Finding people who share <em>one</em> of my primary interests <em>and approach it the same way I do</em> is relatively rare. Finding people who share an interest is not especially hard, but that qualification is extraordinarily important: I know lots of people interested in programming, and lots of people interested in theology, and not many at all who approach either the same way I do. Finding people who are interested in both software <em>and</em> theology (still less also music and linguistics and so on) has been so rare as to be a point of quiet but significant and ongoing frustration in my life.</p>
<p>And then I went to BibleTech, and met a lot of amazing people.</p>
<p>I was reflecting on the experience today—thinking about why I’ve so deeply enjoyed not only the conference itself but <a href="//bibletechnology-slack.herokuapp.com/">the community</a> that has sprung out of it—I realized: <em>These are my people.</em> They share a passion for software development, theology, linguistics, and in many cases even music. There may not be many of us in the world, but a substantial number were assembled in Seattle April 30–May 1, 2015. That’s no small thing.</p>
<p>I have no idea what the future holds for me—whether it will continue to include writing software for the Bible specifically or not—but I <em>can</em> say that this phase of my life has been enormously beneficial in this one way if in no others. It is nice to find kindred spirits in the world, and to know that, even if I am pretty strange, there are other strange people out there, too, and that we can keep working in our strange ways to make the Word of God more available and more useful to people every day.</p>
<p>Good work, BibleTech.</p>
The Brutality of Police Culture in Baltimore2015-04-28T18:20:00-04:002015-04-28T18:20:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-04-28:/2015/the-brutality-of-police-culture-in-baltimore.htmlLink: Connor Friedersdort, writing at The Atlantic on the systemic culture of police brutality in Baltimore.<p>When the police beat an 87-year-old grandmother who called 911 to get medical help for her grandson who had been shot—just because they don’t believe her—and suffer no consequences for it, the “law” as such has become wicked. This doesn’t excuse riots, but it sure as heck <em>explains</em> them. Baltimore is broken, but primarily in a massive system of abuse. Yes, pray for peace. But remember that civic peace comes in large part through civic <em>justice</em>; rule of law follows the law ruling justly.</p>
<p>Connor Friedersdorf has a lot more; <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-brutality-of-police-culture-in-baltimore/391158/">you need to read it</a>, even though—or rather, precisely because—it is such a mess.</p>
Snow Days and Friends Moving2015-03-14T13:30:00-04:002015-03-14T13:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-03-14:/2015/snow-days-and-friends-moving.html<p>Another month gone, another bunch of little changes, and a few bigger changes, too.</p>
<p>February marked the final burst of winter here. We had a number of days of wintry weather, leading to several days where Southeastern’s campus was closed—though none on days when I had class! One …</p><p>Another month gone, another bunch of little changes, and a few bigger changes, too.</p>
<p>February marked the final burst of winter here. We had a number of days of wintry weather, leading to several days where Southeastern’s campus was closed—though none on days when I had class! One of those days included well over six inches of snow, and marked the first time Ellie has ever been able to play in the snow. Though she was a little nervous at first, she loosened up as she watched a neighbor kid play and was soon having a blast working on snowmen and a snow fort. She even tried to throw a few snowballs, but—like her momma—she didn’t much care for having them tossed her way.</p>
<p>Kate quite enjoyed the snow as well, even though her snow clothes were still a bit too big for her.</p>
<p>In the meantime, I kept plugging away at work and school. His past week was Spring Break for us, but “breaks” here usually just mark an opportunity for me to get ahead on my class assignments. I wrote one of my three papers for the semester—the shortest, but it’s helpful to have it out of the way nonetheless.</p>
<p>This week also saw our friends PJ and Katie finish packing up their apartment here to <a href="http://www.adoptedbytheking.com/2015/03/from-wake-forest-with-love.html">move to Texas</a>, and we helped them wrap that up and participated in a few get-togethers to give them a good send-off. We are simultaneously glad for them, because this seems like it will be a very good thing for them, and incredibly sad, because we will miss them dearly.</p>
<p>Good friends are a rare and precious thing, and we have been blessed in ways that are hard to describe in our friendship with PJ and Katie. Having them live in the same town as us for that past couple years, and then less than a mile away for the last year, has been wonderful. We are blessed to live in a time when it is easy to stay in touch, of course, but no amount of Skype or FaceTime can make up for being unable to share a meal. Gladly, we are hoping to see them again in just a few months at the Southern Baptist Convention (which I am planning to attend for class credit at SEBTS), and that softens the blow, if only a little. Too, they are moving to be only about 90 minutes’ drive from where Jaimie’s parents live, so we will certainly see them when we visit there.</p>
<p>Still, I am sad, and so is Jaimie. Ellie hasn’t really understood it yet, but she will no doubt be sad as it comes home to her over the next few weeks.</p>
<p>So it goes until Christ comes again. <em>Maranatha.</em></p>
Small Caps and Margins2015-03-13T23:30:00-04:002015-03-13T23:30:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-03-13:/2015/small-caps-and-margins.html<p>In addition to the various other issues I tackled in the <a href="http://mereorthodoxy.com/speak-truth-beauty-review-echoes-eden/">review</a> I published at Mere O a few weeks ago, there was one other secondary but to my mind non-trivial issue with Barrs’ <em>Echoes of Eden</em>. I left it aside because it certainly wasn’t Barrs’ fault, and would …</p><p>In addition to the various other issues I tackled in the <a href="http://mereorthodoxy.com/speak-truth-beauty-review-echoes-eden/">review</a> I published at Mere O a few weeks ago, there was one other secondary but to my mind non-trivial issue with Barrs’ <em>Echoes of Eden</em>. I left it aside because it certainly wasn’t Barrs’ fault, and would have seemed absurdly nitpicky to my audience there. But it bears comment nonetheless.</p>
<p>The small caps! The divine name appeared in a number of places throughout the books, as <span class="smcp">Lord</span> (just as it does in the Bible). Unfortunately, Crossway chose to use a Palatino variant without real <a href="http://ilovetypography.com/2008/02/20/small-caps/">small capitals</a>. Yes, I know: it’s a little detail, and in the grand scheme of things it isn’t <em>that</em> important. But it’s the little details like that which add up to the difference between a so-so printing of a book and a truly delightful printing of a book. They make a big difference in the experience of reading the book (albeit usually a subconscious one, unless like me you are a typography nerd). I think that a book on the arts, of all books, should have really delightful typesetting. (Honestly, <em>all</em> books should have good typesetting, but the lack is even less excusable when the book is about beauty!)</p>
<p>Today I started reading Bruce Ashford’s new book, <em>Every Square Inch</em>. Five pages in, I’m enjoying his writing so far, but two things are making it a less-than-delightful experience. One is the typeface—the same custom serif used in Logos. It is functional, but there are many irritating details about it. Above all, it screams that it was designed for screens and has not been adjusted for use in print. The other major issue is the page margins. The inner margins are perfectly respectable; the outer margins are so narrow that my much-less-typographically-obsessive wife <em>also</em> immediately noted and commented on them.</p>
<p>These things matter. The old patterns of book-printing—careful designs of everything from leading to line length to the size of margins—were patterns for a reason. In the new digital-everything era, too many of these lessons have been forgotten or ignored by startup presses, and it’s making everyone’s reading experience unnecessarily worse. Typography is a skill and an art that can make an <em>enormous</em> difference in the experience of reading a book; it is one we need publishers like Lexham Press and Crossway to reappropriate.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>Rant over. But please, publishers: work to make your typography <em>excellent</em>, not just passable. Pay attention to your margins and your small capitals.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Crossway I <em>know</em> can do it, because their ESV line includes some of the best Bible typesetting done by <em>anyone</em>. They just need to apply that everywhere!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
The State of Our Family in Early 20152015-02-10T20:30:00-05:002015-02-10T20:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-02-10:/2015/early-2015-family.html<p>It has been a <em>long</em> time since I wrote a family update here, and I skipped the Christmas letter this year because I was exhausted. I resolved at the beginning of the year to write at least one update every month, though. I want these updates here for <em>myself</em>, if …</p><p>It has been a <em>long</em> time since I wrote a family update here, and I skipped the Christmas letter this year because I was exhausted. I resolved at the beginning of the year to write at least one update every month, though. I want these updates here for <em>myself</em>, if for no other reason. (Then, of course, I promptly missed January, but this is counting for that; there will be another post here at the end of the month.)</p>
<p>What have we been up to, you ask? Well, quite a lot! Since the last time I wrote a blog post, we had a baby, who is now crawling around. (If you’re reading this, you probably already know that, of course.) Ellie is talking, constantly practicing saying things the right way and asking the names of things; Kate is scooting around the floor exploring everything and is increasingly verbal herself.</p>
<p>They love playing together. Ellie and Kate are good friends—a while back Jaimie heard Ellie quietly talking to Katie in the back seat of the car, repeating, “You’re my best friend, Kate.” Sometimes when Ellie gives Kate a hug and a kiss goodnight every night, Kate goes into the most adorable squeals of delight. Indeed, no one elicits those squeals as much as Ellie. In addition to her scooting around the floor, Kate is happily eating solid foods—and the girl <em>loves</em> her food. Today I put her in her high chair and she started laughing as I put the tray in front of her. She often thumps the tray, the table, or the floor to express her joy. And last but not least, this little gal is <em>strong</em>. Her favorite time is getting in a bouncer and jumping for as long as we will let her.</p>
<figure>
<img src="/images/girls-games.jpg" title="My ladies playing Lego Star Wars"/>
<figcaption>
My ladies playing <i>Lego Star Wars</i>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We have been teaching Ellie a lot. Jaimie has slowly started working through the ABCs with her. She can count to 5, and she knows her way to 10, but sometimes gets sidetracked along the way. She is learning her colors and spent a while defaulting to calling everything “pink”… except for her favorite <em>purple</em> dress. In the last month, she has started being able to identify the colors more reliably, along with lots of shapes. She loves cars and trucks and especially buses and fire trucks. She sings to herself and dances all the time. She loves building with blocks. She is learning to say “please” and “thank you”—learning, in this case, not because she doesn’t know how but because she has started <em>forgetting</em>. She is learning to pray and to sing to God and learning the answer to simple questions like, “Who made you, Ellie?”</p>
<p>Jaimie has continued to write off and on, though the first many months we had Kate it was much spottier than it had been. She’s working on secret projects that are making her happy, and that makes me happy.</p>
<p>As for why she didn’t get as much time, I was <em>busy</em> last semester. I picked up a second contract, building the new <a href="//holybible.com">HolyBible.com</a>, and between that and my ongoing contract work and my one class, I pulled a lot of 50–60 hour weeks. That’s not particularly an experience we are keen to repeat, but it was the right call at the time: we were able to save up the money to fill up our six-month emergency fund and to pay for the rest of seminary. This semester is going a bit easier: I am taking Hebrew III and Baptist History and working ~30 hours a week instead of ~50–55. I <em>love</em> my language classes; without a doubt Hebrew III and Greek III have been my very favorite classes since I started seminary.</p>
<p>I ran another half marathon in November, and set a PR at 1:25:37—a 6:32/mile pace. I was super happy with that outcome, and I plan to run the same race again for the third year in a row this coming fall, Lord willing. In the meantime, I have started swimming and cycling regularly with the aim of completing my first triathlon early this summer. (I’m going to stick to a short “sprint” tri to start, and work up from there.) While I love running, I would like to have the use of my joints in twenty (and forty, and sixty) years, and accordingly I need to make sure I do not keep putting over 1,000 miles a year on my legs. I have been going to a spinning class to get my legs in better cycling shape for the last month (and the last two weeks Jaimie has come with me!). We have also been doing a Pilates class weekly; my back needs to be a lot stronger and my legs a lot looser, and that is helping quite a bit.</p>
<p>We continue to be extremely happy in our church here, FBC Durham. God has used our church to encourage and challenge us in a wide variety of ways—too many (and perhaps in many cases too subtle) even to summarize. We are excited to see what the years ahead hold for us there, as the church itself continues to flourish and grow and we seek opportunities to continue serving and building up this particular outpost of the body of Christ.</p>
<p>In short, life is <em>good</em>. It is not perfect, of course; I long for Jesus’ return and the New Heavens and New Earth more and more all the time. But we see God’s faithfulness and goodness in the hard months no less than in the easy ones. We see the Spirit working in our hearts to make us more like Christ, and it is good.</p>
<p>I could go on, but a thousand words is enough. More again, and sooner than the last gap!</p>
The Joy of Good Tools2015-01-09T18:00:00-05:002015-01-09T18:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-01-09:/2015/joy-good-tools.htmlI started out with a post on being willing to pay for GitHub. I ended up with a meditation on vocation and delight. It's quite the journey!<p><i class="editorial">Note: This started out as a <a href="https://alpha.app.net/chriskrycho/post/47820144">series of posts on App.net</a>, but as I realized that it was growing a bit, I decided to <a href="/2014/a-few-theses-on-blogging.html">take my own advice</a> and turn it into a short blog post. (The first four paragraphs of this post are the same as the posts that spawned it.) And then, as so often happens with my writing, it rather took on a life of its own. So much for short.</i></p>
<hr />
<p>After wrestling with Bitbucket issues again all day, I think I’ve finally hit the breaking point. Time to go ahead and drop the money on GitHub and migrate my private repos there. (Yes, GitLab is neat, but tool integrations matter, too.)</p>
<p>I think I’m also probably going to spring for a small subscription to Pivotal Tracker. It’s cheaper to do GitHub+PivotalTracker at my scale than to host GitLab and run YouTrack on a VPS. And that’s <em>not</em> counting my time.</p>
<p>The big thing with Pivotal is that I <em>need</em> the ability to estimate more effectively even than something like Trello affords (and I don’t want to spend time wrangling with Chrome plugins), and it gives me that. Totally worth the cost in saved pain.</p>
<p>And as for GitHub as compared to the free GitLab… well, honestly, the F/OSS-copycat model bothers me on a lot of levels. The fact that their strategy is “copy GitHub as closely as possible, and charge for it” is not my idea of “winning slowly”.</p>
<p>(“Winning slowly” is more than just the name of my <a href="//www.winningslowly.org">podcast</a>. In fact, it’s the opposite: we named the podcast that because it’s one of the core commitments in our lives.)</p>
<p>So I’m going to pay for Pivotal and GitHub. My time is worth something, and the quality of the tools I use matters, too. Ongoing irritation and frustration adds up over time. Good tools can make us happier. Bad tools can make work more frustrating than it needs to be. Given just how frustrating work can be anyway, the last thing in the world I want to do is unnecessarily spend my time being even more frustrated by my tools. And you know what? $7/month for each of those tools is absolutely worth more than the frustration of wrestling with tools that do the job less well.</p>
<p>I’m actually really excited by this. Pivotal Tracker will help me avoid making the painful mistake of underestimation in the future, by helping me see how long things actually take and giving me a way to plan out major projects with that data immediately available. GitHub will be simultaenously more functional and much lovelier than Bitbucket—no strategy tax holding it back!—and will be much nicer to use.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, it comes down to this: I’m happy to pay for good tools that make my work more enjoyable.</p>
<hr />
<p>To my surprise and amusement, this leads me to a closely related point I had been writing up in a separate blog post: the value of tools that <em>delight</em>. It is not merely that bad tools make work unpleasant. Good tools can make work a <em>joy</em>. Indeed, because my vocations is such a significant part of my life, few things bring me as much simple pleasure as a tool that does its job well, is pleasant to use, and is beautiful, all at once.</p>
<p>The latest example of this for me is <a href="//www.neat.io/bee/index.html">Bee</a>, a tool designed to make working with issue trackers like JIRA, GitHub Issues, and FogBugz easier and more pleasant. I use JIRA for one of my long-term contracts—I actually set it up for the company—and I have a love-hate relationship with it. JIRA’s power is great, but the web interface is slow and cluttered.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>I have used other desktop tools with JIRA before, and they were even worse than the web interface. I stumbled across Bee the other day (I cannot even remember how!), decided to try it out, and fell in love. It is simple, fast, and <em>elegant</em>. That is a killer combination. I have been using it daily for over a week, and strange though it might be to say of a desktop client for issue trackers, I get genuine pleasure out of using it. (Yes, I know: that is a bit strange.)</p>
<p>I have the same experience with a number of other tools I use—<a href="//www.git-tower.com">Tower</a>, <a href="//bywordapp.com">Byword</a>, and <a href="//www.jetbrains.com/idea/">IntelliJ IDEA</a> to name just a few. This very post is written in Byword, and I’m <em>happy</em> about it. I wish I felt that way about every tool I use.</p>
<p>And this goes beyond software. I have had the same experience driving a car. The Mazda3 I drove in and after college was a delight. The MUV<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> we drive right now is sufficient. The Chevy Malibu we rented for driving to and from Texas in December was <em>irritating</em>, with an inordinate number of small failures to consider how the thing would actually be used. I would buy another Mazda3 in a heartbeat; I would contentedly take another Lexus RX300-alike; I would avoid a Chevy Malibu like the plague.</p>
<p><em>Every</em> category of tool is like this.</p>
<p>The difference between a poor or mediocre tool and a good tool can make the difference between frustration and satisfaction. The difference between a good tool and a <em>great</em> tool can make the difference between satisfaction and delight. That inspires me: it makes me want to make things so that they do more than <em>suffice</em>—so that they <em>excel</em>, so that they delight and energize their audience. Whether that is someone using a web application I write or someone listening to a piece of music I composed, I want them to experience more than good-enough. I want them to feel joy.</p>
<hr />
<p>There is something profound here, I think, something that goes even deeper than just the experience of being happy enough with a good tool to pay money to use it. I think human beings are meant for that profound joy—meant for it in every breath. That these kinds of delights are rare, and so often marred even at their best by little failures, is a mark of the imperfection—and, in human terms at least, the <em>imperfectibility</em>—of the world in which we live. But the fact that such moments will be rare until the eschaton neither undoes nor diminishes the imperative to strive after them—especially for those of us who, as Christians, affirm the goodness and the <em>telos</em> of the created world. Quite the contrary. We have a responsibility and a charge as subcreators always to be able to say of the work we have done, “It is good.”</p>
<p>I am not there yet. I hope very much, though, that the work I do this year will be—for at least one person—a little sip from that deep well of delight. Whether I succeed or no, at least the bar is set where it ought to be.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Atlassian’s designers seem to be shooting for the kind of “flat” minimalism that is in right now… and missing the mark entirely. <em>All</em> of their tools are a cluttered mess in the UI/X department.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>A “Mom Utility Vehicle”, my wry term for “SUV”-type vehicles sitting on standard car chasses.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Public-ish Plans2015-01-02T20:15:00-05:002015-01-02T20:15:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-01-02:/2015/public-ish-plans.htmlA totally informal list of things I kind of hope to get done in public in 2015.<p>I have not (yet) made a formal list of goals for 2015, though I think I may do so on Sunday evening. While New Years’ resolutions can be silly and get us in trouble (when we set unrealistic goals, or unhelpful goals), the turning of the year can also be a helpful time to evaluate the way we spend our time and the things we want to accomplish.</p>
<p>What follows is a list of public-ish things I am <em>hoping</em> to manage in 2015, in no particular order. Come the end of the year, I will Lord willing look back and see which of these I was able to pull off!</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Publish at least two seasons of <a href="//www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> with <a href="//stephencarradini.com">Stephen Carradini</a> just as we did last year—but better.</p></li>
<li><p>Get the site for Winning Slowly updated so that it paginates between seasons! This means writing an extension for <a href="//docs.getpelican.com/en/3.5.0/">Pelican</a> that can paginate on something besides page count. An excuse to write Python? I call that winning.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p></li>
<li><p>Migrate Jaimie’s <a href="//jaimiekrycho.com">Jaimie’s professional writing website</a> from WordPress to <a href="//ghost.org">Ghost</a>. (Maybe do something similar with her current <a href="//jaimiedawn.blogspot.com">personal site</a>, which runs on Blogger. Yuck.) I’ve gotten a bit of a start on that already, and I hope to knock it out sooner rather than later.</p></li>
<li><p>Get to a point where I’m hosting all my own sites on my own DigitalOcean droplet (or similar). I’ve been moving that direction slowly but steadily anyway—whereas I started and ran for a long time on simple shared hosting, I’ve been using <a href="https://www.webfaction.com/?aid=67929">Webfaction</a> for a good chunk of the past year, and now am pretty well ready to take the plunge this year into just running my own server. No skin off their backs; Webfaction has been great, as was <a href="https://billing.stablehost.com/aff.php?aff=319">StableHost</a> before them. I’m just ready to be in control (even with the bit of extra maintenance that entails).<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p></li>
<li><p>Write at least three minutes of music, and post it to my <a href="//soundcloud.com/chriskrycho">SoundCloud</a> account. Preferably five minutes, but at least three.</p></li>
<li><p>Write some poetry.</p></li>
<li><p>Write a substantive essay and post it at least once a month.</p></li>
<li><p>Post at least a half dozen book reviews (which, among other things, means reading at least a half dozen books worth reviewing). These can be fiction or non-fiction. Personally, I’d like to get everything from Dostoevsky to Schreiner in there.</p></li>
<li><p>Add a picture to my <a href="/about">About</a> page!</p></li>
<li><p>Post a <a href="/family">#family</a> update at least once a month. It’ll be good for <em>me</em>, just to have a better way of tracking what’s going on with our little gals, and I know my family would enjoy it, too.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>In sum, I’d like to be doing <em>something</em> in nearly every public-facing category in which I’m interested. Maybe it won’t be a lot, but keeping my musical skills doing matters to me. Keeping my brain engaged on a wide variety of topics matters to me. Keeping my writing skills sharp matters to me. I cannot <em>excel</em> at all of those things, certainly—especially not if I wish to be a good husband and father! But keeping them active means keeping them from further atrophying, and that is something, at least. It will hopefully leave them more available to me for times in the future when I am able to dedicate more time to them.</p>
<p>If 2014 and 2013 were both years in which I focused primarily on software—and all to the good!—then I hope 2015 will be a year in which I am able to broaden out again and focus on a wider variety of things!</p>
<hr />
<p>You’ll note that there really aren’t any purely personal goals on this list. Not to worry: I have them, and I intend to formalize them in the next couple of days. But one of the things I have learned over the many years I have been blogging is that not everything needs to be public. Some things can be; indeed, some <em>should</em> be. Some things <em>may</em> be public but <em>need</em> not, and yet others <em>should not</em> be public. Right now, I am choosing to leave quite a few things in the “may be need not” category private. (This direction, I can always change my mind later. It’s essentially impossible to do the opposite in the internet era.)</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p><em>Slowly</em>. Beat you to it.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Note: those are both affiliate links; they’ll give me a slight kickback. For StableHost, you should also use the code <code>krycho50percent</code> to get 50% off! I’d love it if you used it if you decide to sign up for either of them.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Boosting My Productivity2014-12-18T08:05:00-05:002014-12-18T08:05:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2014-12-18:/2014/boosting-my-productivity.htmlThis semester, I needed to get productive, and I did. Here's how. (To-do lists, Inbox Zero, and pomodoros!)
<p>This fall, I have had a lot on my plate: building HolyBible.com, continuing to work for Quest Consultants, and doing a pastoral ministry internship. I needed to be more productive—a lot more. Happily, I have been, and it only took three small changes.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<section id="use-a-to-do-list" class="level2">
<h2>Use a To-Do List</h2>
<p>Making a list of items to accomplish has been incredibly helpful. I started using <a href="https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/">OmniFocus</a> in August for class due dates and any work tasks not tracked in other ways.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> At that point, I organized everything—a bit too much, actually. Over the last couple months, I took some good advice I have seen in a number of places:</p>
<ul>
<li>Do not over-organize. Most tasks can go in a simple inbox.</li>
<li>Hit your due dates. Making it a habit to hit every due date will help you not to miss important tasks.</li>
<li>Do not put due dates on things that do not need them. You will eventually stop paying attention to them—and also to the due dates that <em>do</em> matter.</li>
</ul>
<p>I try to knock out a few small things from my Inbox every day, and hit all the due dates I set for myself. I am missing fewer things, getting more things done, and getting them done sooner than I did before. I like my app, but I know people who have just used an old-fashioned planner. The trick is to find a strategy that works for you.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
</section>
<section id="email-is-not-a-to-do-list" class="level2">
<h2>Email Is <em>Not</em> A To-Do List</h2>
<p>At some point, I got in the habit of using my email as a to-do list. In theory, seeing a list of unanswered emails every day should have motivated me to respond to them. In reality, they just sat there and slowly piled up. At best, they nagged at me. At worst, I basically forgot them.</p>
<p>When I started using OmniFocus, I killed this habit. Now I make a task for anything I need to act on, and I delete or archive everything else.<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a> If the task is time-sensitive, I put a due date on it; otherwise, my third rule above applies. I also have a repeating task reminding me to empty my inbox at the end of each day (“Inbox Zero”). Having an empty inbox at the end of every day removes a certain amount of mental baggage: I have a task for everything I <em>need</em> to act on.</p>
</section>
<section id="take-breaks" class="level2">
<h2>Take breaks</h2>
<p>Finally, I have started using the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique">“pomodoro”</a> technique. The basic approach is to work steadily for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break.<a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5" role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a> After four such cycles, I take a slightly longer break—usually 15 minutes. On each break, I walk around and do something unrelated to whatever I am working on. I also write down a brief summary of what I did on that cycle.<a href="#fn6" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref6" role="doc-noteref"><sup>6</sup></a> There is nothing complicated about this: I just use a simple timer to track the work and break cycles.<a href="#fn7" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref7" role="doc-noteref"><sup>7</sup></a> I have seen a <em>dramatic</em> improvement in my ability to sustain my concentration on my tasks throughout the day since I started.</p>
<p>There are a few reasons for that improvement. First, I have dedicated break times, so I know that I can go check social media, read tech and news sites, etc. <em>later</em>. That makes it easier to concentrate on work for the blocks in between; the distractions can wait. Second, it puts a limit on those break times. We have all been surprised to find we have lost an hour reading online; using a timer helps prevent that. Third, getting up and moving around helps keep my brain active—I can tell that the movement considerably improves my alertness and concentration.</p>
<p>These breaks have other benefits, too. There is mounting evidence that sitting all day is terrible for our health. Even exercising as much as I do <a href="http://www.npr.org/2011/04/25/135575490/sitting-all-day-worse-for-you-than-you-might-think" title="Sitting All Day: Worse For You Than You Might Think">cannot fully counteract</a> a sedentary lifestyle. However, there is also evidence that getting up and moving on a regular basis <em>does</em> help. Walking briskly, I usually manage a fifth or a quarter of a mile on a five-minute break. That adds up over the course of a day: if I am disciplined about walking on my breaks, I regularly walk 2–3 miles in a day, even with lunch and other non-walking breaks in the mix.</p>
<p>I have also found the breaks spiritually helpful. One of the requirements for my pastoral ministry internship was to memorize Ephesians. Five-minute breaks are <em>perfect</em> for memorizing and reviewing Scripture, so I was able to be productive on those breaks, even while letting my brain relax from my other work. It is similarly useful for dedicated times of prayer throughout the day. The combination of scripture memory and prayer has been invaluable in combatting sin and stirring up my affections for Christ.</p>
<p>In short, I get a triple benefit by doing pomodoros. I am more productive when I am working, my body will remain healthier because I am less sedentary, and I am growing in holiness and intimacy with God. Of all the changes I made this semester, incorporating pomodoros into my day has been the most important, and I plan to make it a regular part of my life henceforth.</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>This is just what I do. It may not work for you. It may even drive you crazy.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I.e., things not covered by JIRA, Trello, Bitbucket issues, etc.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>While <a href="https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/">OmniFocus</a> suits me, I would recommend <a href="https://en.todoist.com/">Todoist</a> to most people instead: it is less expensive and easier to use, and while it does not do <em>everything</em> OmniFocus does, it can easily do everything most people need.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>I archive order confirmations, messages from friends, and work conversations, and delete everything else.<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn5" role="doc-endnote"><p>Why the 25/5 pattern? That seems to be a limit in human cognition; it lines up closely with research on student attention spans in the classroom.<a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn6" role="doc-endnote"><p>This helps me see what I have done over the course of a day and gives me a sense of progress. It is also extremely useful when writing up a weekly report for an employer.<a href="#fnref6" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn7" role="doc-endnote"><p>I have used <a href="http://www.tomighty.org/">Tomighty</a> and <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pomodoro-one/id907364780?mt=12">Pomodoro One</a>, which are both free and work well. The app is not the point, though: an old-fashioned kitchen timer will do just as well.<a href="#fnref7" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Whiplash2014-07-14T23:15:00-04:002014-07-14T23:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2014-07-14:/2014/whiplash.htmlGet a big contract—jubilation! Watch your daughter almost choke to death—terror!<p>I have a pretty severe case of emotional whiplash<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> at the moment. In the last eight hours, I have gone from jubilant to the most worried I have ever been to simple, utter exhaustion.</p>
<p>This afternoon, I heard back from a then-potential and now-actual client who hired me and a friend to design and build a web application for them. They are going to pay us a substantial sum to do it. This is <em>fantastic</em>. I have been hoping this particular opportunity would come through, because everything about it is appealing to me. It is an interesting application; I like the material it involves (a <em>lot</em>); I will learn a bit along the way; I will get to stretch my front-end design chops again; I will make some seriously good money at it. I am, in a word, stoked.</p>
<hr />
<p>Fast forward four and a half hours. Jaimie and I are helping Ellie wrap up her evening activities and getting ready to take her upstairs and put her to bed. Kate is lying in a little sleep-rocker—her favorite spot to sleep during the day. She makes a bit of a coughing noise; we note it but think little of it (babies <em>often</em> make that kind of noise). A few minutes later, Jaimie is walking by and glances at Kate. Our baby girl is bright red and turning purple. She grabs her. “Kate! Breathe! Breathe, little girl!” She isn’t breathing; she is getting upset but she isn’t crying. (Babies cry at the drop of a hat.) Little bubbles at her mouth. Jaimie is doing the baby variation of the Heimlich maneuver. I am nearly helpless; I keep using my finger to pull Kate’s mouth open; she finally latches onto the finger, starts sucking, and breathes.</p>
<p>Thank God.</p>
<p>We hold her. She breathes—<em>mostly</em> normally. We keep paying close attention to her. The couple times I let her lay down on her back she starts seizing up and turning red again within a few minutes until I pick her up and pat her vigorously and she calms down again. We manage to get Ellie in bed. We call the doctor; she sends us to the hospital. A friend comes to watch Ellie and we run out the door. It is a 30-minute drive (and I am speeding, and Jaimie is holding Kate to make sure she keeps breathing).<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> Kate wheezes off and on the whole way there. She still isn’t crying, and she should be. She hasn’t eaten in six hours; she should be hungry. Why isn’t she hungry?</p>
<p>They admit us. They get all her vitals. The doctor is a kind, soft-spoken man with the last name Saad; I like him. He asks dozens of good questions. He tells us, “95–99% of the time, this is just reflux. We just care about that other 1% of the time.” There is no reliable way to stop a baby from choking on milk she spits up because of reflux.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> They are going to do an EKG and chest X-rays just to make sure she is okay.</p>
<p>She seems to be okay. She is eating again—like a champ, like she normally does, like she should be.</p>
<p>I go home to relieve the wonderful friends who are sitting in our house to make sure Ellie is fine. Ellie is still sleeping. Good.</p>
<p>Breathe.</p>
<hr />
<p>Whiplash. I am no less excited about that project. And my youngest daughter almost died tonight. Had she started choking while we were upstairs, or while we were all asleep tonight, God only knows what would have happened. We are grateful to God that we were feet away from Kate, that Jaimie “happened” to look at her just then. We are grateful, too, for the extra money coming in; it will help with the so-very-worth-it-but-not-easy-on-a-seminary-budget cost of an emergency room visit.</p>
<p>Ice cream.</p>
<p>I think I’m going to sleep now. Hopefully tomorrow is less extreme.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>So much so that I am having a hard time spelling “whiplash” correctly. I keep typing “whiplast”.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>If a police officer stops us, I will explain. He or she will understand. They will help us get to the hospital faster.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>Terrifying, just a bit? Yes.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
A Few Theses on Blogging2014-07-09T21:15:00-04:002014-07-09T21:15:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2014-07-09:/2014/a-few-theses-on-blogging.htmlTwelve thoughts—only loosely connected—on writing blog posts consisting simply of a series of loosely connected thoughts.<p>I am a habitually—even chronically—long-winded blogger. I always have been. I sat down a few weeks ago to write up an explanation of my running approach, and I haven’t finished it yet… because it is over 2,500 words long and growing rapidly longer. But as I have considered my approach to blogging of late, and as I have also been posting fairly regularly on App.net (my social media locale of choice), it occurred to me:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Blog posts do not have to be the lengthy things I usually make of them.</li>
<li>I often write up a series of thoughts—not necessarily an “argument” or indeed anything more than a series of connected thoughts—on App.net, connecting them via the ‘reply’ mechanism and enumerating them. Rather like I am here.</li>
<li>Doing so inevitably clutters up the streams of anyone following me.</li>
<li>That clutter may or may not be problematic: some folks may enjoy those connected thoughts. Others may not.</li>
<li>For those that <em>do</em> enjoy those connected thoughts, a blog post like this would probably serve just as well.</li>
<li>For those who do <em>not</em> enjoy them… well, this sort of thing would be a welcome way to clear their streams up without causing me any particular difficulty.</li>
<li>Using lists does not automatically mean I have given in to the constant temptation to make my blogging about driving views.</li>
<li>Seriously.</li>
<li>This blog will <em>never</em> drive substantial amounts of traffic. That is fine by me. Indeed, I would probably feel a bit odd if it did.</li>
<li>Therefore, when I have those sorts of thoughts-in-a-line in the future, I will do as I have done here. I will write a ‘listicle’ (the shame!) and share it for others to partake of—or not!—as they please.</li>
<li>Taking that approach will almost certainly free me up to blog more briefly when I feel like it, as well. That, too, can only be a good thing.</li>
<li>After all: I am happier when I am writing.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></li>
</ol>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>As I have so often <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/the-long-race.html">noted before</a>…<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Three Month Cycles.2014-05-27T20:45:00-04:002014-05-27T20:45:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2014-05-27:/2014/three-month-cycles.htmlMy general pattern of active focus in one particular area for months at a time, followed by a switch to a different area. I wish I could identify the pattern.<p>Over the past few years, Jaimie and I have observed that I tend to go in cycles in my time-spending habits. The issue is not so much whether I spend my time well, but where I spend it. I will go on a blogging kick for a few months, as I did at the beginning of this year, then not write much at all for a few months—but in the interval spend gobs of time reading, or writing software, or so on. I am not sure what it is that triggers the change, but it has been a fairly regular fixture of my life for at least the length of our marriage.</p>
<p>Every once in a while, I will even go on a weeks-long video games or television kick. This is bliss for Jaimie, as she finds spending time together playing video games or watching television shows we both enjoy to be one of our best connecting activities. But then the spell comes to an end, and I’m back off to a reading kick, or designing a new website, or embarking on some crazed software development scheme or another. It somewhat drives Jaimie crazy, I suspect.</p>
<p>I am not entirely sure what makes me tick this way. I do know that in those dedicated phases of work I can knock out significant tasks in the given area where I am motivated at any given time. (I have no doubt, for example, that I could pull off the 50,000 words needed for National Novel Writing Month some November, if I were in a writing mode.) Being able to predict these things would be nice, though. I could make a plan for the year and have a good idea what projects I would accomplish. Instead, I find myself extraordinarily productive in <em>some</em> area at any given time—but never sure what it will be a month later. That’s not a <em>problem</em>. It is, however, a bit perplexing.</p>
<p>To be sure, I can and do force myself to continue on with certain tasks even when they are not particularly holding my interest. Sometimes that discipline is really helpful, and I eventually break through to another extended session of productivity in the same area. Sometimes, though, the interval—whether it is switching from writing to software and back again, or from software to Doctor Who and back again—brings me back fresher and more energized to complete the tasks. That is no surprise; I see the same patterns play out on the time scale of hours and days with my paid work (where just taking a month off is not particularly workable). Again: I just wish I could get a handle on the timing, so I could take advantage of that in making plans.</p>
<p>Right now, I seem to be in a video games and general blogging mode. I <em>want</em> to dig back in on my software projects, and I expect I’ll do so soon. And by “soon” I mean: whenever I quit playing more <em>Skyrim</em>. Probably in about two weeks.</p>
<p>In the meantime, I think I’m going to start tracking the particular moods I am in so that I can see if there is an established pattern throughout the year. Whether it correlates with the season, my other activities, or nothing at all would be helpful to know. For Jaimie’s sanity, if nothing else.</p>
The Long Race2014-05-24T00:07:00-04:002014-05-24T00:07:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2014-05-24:/2014/the-long-race.html<p>It has been too long since I have written anything—too long not for my audience (small as it is), but for my soul. The last few weeks of class were of course even busier than the rest of the semester, courtesy of a couple major assignments I wrapped up …</p><p>It has been too long since I have written anything—too long not for my audience (small as it is), but for my soul. The last few weeks of class were of course even busier than the rest of the semester, courtesy of a couple major assignments I wrapped up and studying for and taking finals, all while doing my normal work as a software developer on the side. Writing simply fell by the wayside, alas. Even my devotions posts simply didn’t happen. And that is all right; there are seasons for all of these things, and it is not as if I didn’t write many thousands of words in late April and early May. They simply were not <em>blogging</em> words.</p>
<p>So here I am tonight, writing simply to unwind. I spent much of the day working on various software projects—a pattern I expect to carry throughout the summer. In addition to my regular work for Quest Consultants Inc. back in Norman, I am picking up various web design and development jobs over the summer. God has been gracious in answering prayers for opportunities to pick up extra contracting work, and I have several really excellent opportunities to supplement my 20 hours a week for Quest with other work. That is nice not only financially, but also intellectually. The change of pace between different kinds of work helps me stay fresh on all of them. My own personal <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/a-little-crazy.html">side projects</a> are coming along slowly, but that is all right. Slow but steady is the best way to go about those kinds of projects anyway.</p>
<p>That lesson is one I have learned more and more from my ongoing and ever-increasing delight in running. So far in May I have run about 125 miles; I expect to run over 150 miles this month in total (though of course all such plans are always subject to revision, and never more so than when one’s wife is 37 weeks pregnant). I am now running easy, aerobic miles ten to fifteen seconds faster per mile than I could manage in my personal best half marathon time a few years ago. I run so (relatively) quickly now not because of any particular innate athleticism—quite the contrary, as anyone who has known me since high school can attest. I can run as far and fast as I do only because I have stuck with it and used a <a href="http://markallenonline.com/maoArticles.aspx?AID=2" title="Working Your Heart">smart training plan</a>. And really, as in most parts of life, it is that sticking-with-it that leads to getting somewhere. Of course, sticking with it is no guarantee that things will work out. It is usually a requisite step along the way, though—a necessary-though-insufficient condition. That is simply the way God built the world.</p>
<p>Little Ellie is quickly wrapping up her second year of life in this big world. She is saying lots of words (at last!), whining until she has driven Jaimie a bit crazy (in too-typical toddler fashion), and growing up in big ways and small. We are having a great deal of fun watching her start to be more socially aware and active, even if it is a little strange to have a daughter old enough that she has friends whom she loves and who love her in turn. She has also discovered a deep love of <em>Star Wars</em>—no surprise for a daughter of ours, though the intensity of her delight in the movies, for a girl who is not yet two years old, did surprise both Jaimie and me a bit. You should hear her try to say “Darth Vader” or “Dark Side” or “Star Wars.” It is impossibly adorable.</p>
<p>Jaimie is, as noted above, some 37 weeks pregnant and quite ready to be done carrying our second little gal on the inside. She is still plugging away slowly at the <a href="http://jaimiekrycho.com/shaking-epheria-pt-1/" title="Bloodlines: The Shaking of Epheria, Part I">second novella</a> in her <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlines-Epheria-The-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B00HY478QO/" title="Get Bloodlines of Epheria on Kindle!">Bloodlines</a> fantasy trilogy. She manages to keep Ellie entertained—no small feat—and does a remarkable job taking care of things around the house so that I can focus on work and school. Her struggle with <a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com/theology/marriage-depression/" title="Marriage and Depression">depression</a> has not diminished, but God has given us grace to carry on and she and I have both learned to respond in better, healthier, more helpful ways when the slumps come.</p>
<p>As for the future, we really have no idea what the next several yeras will hold. I plan to finish my Master of Divinity—Lord willing, around December 2016. In the meantime, we will keep raising our little girls, I will keep writing software, and we will keep exploring and seeing what we want to do and how best to pursue those desires in a way that honors God. Who knows what those years will hold? God only, and certainly not us.</p>
Spinning!2014-03-20T19:10:00-04:002014-03-20T19:10:00-04:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2014-03-20:/2014/spinning.htmlAs she so often does, Ellie simply delighted me tonight, in two wonderful moments—both of which involved spinning to classical music.<p>As she so often does, Ellie simply delighted me tonight, in two wonderful moments:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>As I was cleaning up the dishes and playing Max Richter’s <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/memoryhouse/id545010150"><em>Memoryhouse</em></a> album, I saw Ellie dancing, and encouraged her to keep going. After a moment, I looked over to see her spinning in circles. And spinning in circles. And spinning in circles. When she finally stopped, she started freaking out as she couldn’t get her balance. I swooped in and picked her up, laughing with her once she recovered.</li>
<li>After she calmed down, she started tugging on my shirt. It took me a few seconds to realize what she wanted, but then it clicked: she was trying to turn me by twisting my shirt. “You want to spin?” I asked her. She nodded vigorously. “Is this a spinning song?” Again, the vigorous nod. So I started spinning around and around with her in my arms, and the sheer joy in the grin plastered across her face was something to behold. We spun first one way, then the other, all the way through <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfoSv8iWA_I">“The Twins (Prague)”</a>.</li>
</ol>
<p>Moments like these are worth remembering.</p>
On Days Off2014-02-23T10:30:00-05:002014-02-23T10:30:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2014-02-23:/2014/on-days-off.html<p>These past few days I have completely missed my normal writing times—no devotions, and certainly not the other few pieces I had been planning to write. This was disappointing: I have enjoyed the habit of writing regularly, and I intend to keep it up. As I have often noted …</p><p>These past few days I have completely missed my normal writing times—no devotions, and certainly not the other few pieces I had been planning to write. This was disappointing: I have enjoyed the habit of writing regularly, and I intend to keep it up. As I have often noted in the past (in more blog posts on previous versions of the site than I can count, still less dig up at the moment), writing serves to focus my thoughts as little else does. Moreover, though my <a href="/devotions">#devotions</a> posts are not especially excellent as writing goes, the discipline of writing is like many other things: sometimes it matters most that you <em>do</em> it more than the doing of it be particularly magnificent.</p>
<p>Most of my running is this way. The vast majority of my runs are entirely unexceptional and become notable only in their consistency. They are not tiring and not particularly fast—for me, at least! This is an important qualification, I recognize, though one that is nonetheless closely tied to the very ordinary nature of these runs. They become interesting, and are effective, only in the aggregate. My entire training plan is built on going slowly and training the “easy” side of my physiological response to running. The effect over time is extraordinary, though: my easy runs with a toddler in a stroller today are faster than my best runs alone were a few years ago.</p>
<p>My hope for this year is to do something the same with my writing. I do not expect that the majority of my words will be particularly elegant or well-put-together. I expect most of my posts to go largely unread and unnoticed, and that is perfectly fine with me—indeed, <em>more</em> than fine, because I am writing them first of all as a double act of self-discipline. From those devotional posts I hope to gain not an audience but the benefit of thoughtful reflection the Scriptures I read and the helpful effect of regular writing on my <em>other</em> writing.</p>
<p>So when, as in the last few days, I simply cannot get to that writing because other things intrude, I have a double response. First, I recognize that this is totally all right, under the circumstances. Jaimie and I have been spending time with friends and each other, and my normal writing times in the evenings have simply been elided by those other activities. Second, though, I recognize that such things are likely to come up often, and as such am motivated to commit once again to doing this writing in the mornings as much as possible.</p>
<p>For several weeks in the beginning of the semester this spring, I was able to get up, do my reading, and do my writing before I went to class at 8am. A few weeks ago, Jaimie’s grandmother passed away and we flew her out for the funeral, and that weekend completely tossed my habits and schedule out of alignment. Instead of my two normally scheduled tasks for the weekend (school and work), I had three—and one of them in the form of a teething toddler. The other two slipped. I have only just finally caught up, and as such I am hoping that in the week ahead I shall be able to resume my previously very effective habits of doing all these things to <em>start</em> the day rather than to finish them.</p>
<p>That, of course, assumes I get over this blasted cold that I seem to have caught last night… Life is a funny thing, sometimes.</p>
Hey, Look—A Podcast!2014-01-28T20:20:00-05:002014-01-28T20:20:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2014-01-28:/2014/hey-look-a-podcast.html<p>Today, I was happy to be able to finally go public with a project on which I have been working for the last couple months (and for which I have been planning since mid-fall): <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/">Winning Slowly</a>. Winning Slowly is a biweeklypodcast by yours truly and my good friend <a href="http://stephencarradini.com">Stephen Carradini …</a></p><p>Today, I was happy to be able to finally go public with a project on which I have been working for the last couple months (and for which I have been planning since mid-fall): <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/">Winning Slowly</a>. Winning Slowly is a biweeklypodcast by yours truly and my good friend <a href="http://stephencarradini.com">Stephen Carradini</a> offering thoughtful commentary on trends in culture, technology, religion, ethics, and art.</p>
<p>Of possible interest to my readers:</p>
<ul>
<li>You can listen to the first episode, <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/2014/01/we-need-some-context/">We Need Some Context!</a></li>
<li>You can <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/feed.xml">subscribe to the feed</a>.</li>
<li>You can follow and get updates via all sorts of social networks:
<ul>
<li>Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.som/winningslowly">@winningslowly</a></li>
<li>App.net: <a href="http://app.net/winningslowly">@winningslowly</a></li>
<li><a href="http://broadcast.app.net/40022/winning-slowly-episodes/">App.net broadcast</a> – notifications on your phone or emails as you like</li>
<li><a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/+WinningslowlyOrgCast/">Google+</a> (yes, shockingly enough)</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>We’re still very much in a “beta” phase. The audio quality needs significant improvement, our back-and-forth needs to get smoother (and, at times, more back- and-forth!), and so on. We’d love to hear your feedback. But be gentle.</p>
A Note to RSS Subscribers2014-01-05T09:00:00-05:002014-01-05T09:00:00-05:00Chris Krychotag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2014-01-05:/2014/a-note-to-rss-subscribers.html<p>A note to anyone who has subscribed to this RSS feed: you should resubscribe by adding <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/feed.xml" class="uri">http://v4.chriskrycho.com/feed.xml</a> to your reader, as this feed location is now defunct. Thanks!</p>
<p>A note to anyone who has subscribed to this RSS feed: you should resubscribe by adding <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/feed.xml" class="uri">http://v4.chriskrycho.com/feed.xml</a> to your reader, as this feed location is now defunct. Thanks!</p>