Why the rush? (2021/Q4) 🎢
Since I was a kid there's never been a moment where I had "nothing to do". I mean, I had all these awesome games to play, and all these fun shows to watch!
Just beating games was not enough. Did you beat the Elite 4? Congrats, now level up all your team to level 100! Done? Well, now you must go and catch them all!!
But isn't it just Pokemon, is it? No. Life keeps bringing unfinished things to our attention. Whenever I finish studying a topic, I realize there's something else to look for. Have you just learned Python? Now you must learn APIs. Done? What's the purpose if you can't get a frontend running!? Learn some React. Finished? Have you ever heard about Web 3.0? [...]
Working and producing content isn't any different. In all my career, I never had a day after delivering a project where my boss told me:
"Gui, we're done over here! Our customers are happy! We accomplished our ultimate goal!"
Only movies have such endings where the hero beats the villain and goes home. Life is very different. So I started wondering:
🏃♂️ Why the rush?
Recently, I caught myself running... Actually, I have been running for quite a good amount of time. Rushing to work, to read, to create, to meet people.
And I can't stop wondering and asking myself: Why the rush?
After all, what are we all looking for? Is it money? Is it success? What the hell are we looking for that we can't wait?
I realized it's insane and it doesn't make any sense!
Tell me, once you get that six-pack, are you going to stop working out? Once you slim down, are you stopping eating healthy food? When you finish that book, are you done with reading?
We waste a lot of time focusing on stupid outcomes while we should be focusing on the process that brought them in the first place!!
It made me realize that:
✈️ Life is about the trip, not the destination
As some of you that may have read my cringe posts on life and goals before already know, I enjoy frequent reflections of life to experiment and consider new destinations.
Recently I was reflecting that 75% of this year is over. Meanwhile, I got distracted playing with some metrics to make my Notion fancier, and it just brought to my attention how much I have lived so far!
Of course, I don't know when I'm going to die to measure how much I have lived so far. But considering I can live up to 80, isn't it daunting to realize that I already lived "35%" of my life?
It made me think...
I like my coffee ☕ to last️. I like my chocolate 🍫 to "taste". Obviously, the ultimate goal is to ingest them, but I don't feel like rushing the process (and I don't want it at all!).
So, why the hell are we rushing to finish books? To have more followers? To gather more money? To deliver more work?
"[...] my son, be warned: there is no end to the making of many books, and much study wearies the body."
- Ecclesiastes 12:12
Have you ever realized how exciting it is to feel a plane taking flight? Or how sweet is it to feel the rain?
What made us being so eager to get things done, that we forgot to just live? See this sweet girl below and tell me: Does she look anxious to end the rain? Or to get out of it?
She is living. As simple as that. Is it raining? So enjoy the rain.
🎢 Enjoy the ride
Hopefully, this short article made you stop and reflect on your life. Keep pursuing your goals, but please, enjoy your life. After all, the whole purpose of it is to be lived.
And me? Right now I'm listening to some good music at the coffee shop while writing this article, see:
I'm not rushing to publish it. Actually, I'm sad that my coffee is over. I'd like to live more moments like this: writing and drinking good coffee. Publishing articles and ingesting caffeine will be a consequence of the process that I love doing.
✨ What I've done from 2021/Q3
If curious, see more details here.
| Goal | Result |
|---|---|
| 📈 My company's software is reliable and scalable | 🟡 Progressed and kept |
| 🦖 Tryceratops is stable and easy to use | ✅ Accomplished |
I made some relevant progress at Lumos by rolling out DataDog to observe our software, but we still need to get rid of noises. That will be a particular goal of me to make the experience of investigating issues more pleasant.
Regarding Tryceratops, I'm happy that I could push some improvements, fixes, and especially the new autofix support. Of course, the work isn't done, there are new bugs to be fixed, and new features to be implemented, and well... As I just shared above it's never done! Since I delivered everything that I wanted over the past quarter I consider it quite an accomplishment!
🔥 What I'm committing during Q4/2021
🦘 (Still) Skipping
- Learning Golang and Flutter
- Speaking Deutsch
- Learning web 3.0 (this is new)
📈 My company's software is reliable and scalable
There's not much that changed here. I just want to wrap up some meaningful work to improve how we deal with alerts.
🏗🧩 Build a full microservice architecture in public
I like to build, and I love to share knowledge, so I think it makes sense to share part of my experience in architecting and building microservices.
I'm planning on starting a new series showing what we're building, and of course, it will be open source to allow you to see things from the inside out. I hope to include Python, AWS, React, Terraform, and maybe some third-party API to spice things up.
The biggest challenge is to manage time... I have a lot to do at my current job, so I can't promise the whole microservice architecture will be done and implemented by December. I'm considering it should be fine to take longer, but I'll start it for sure still this year.
If curious to see, please, subscribe to the newsletter so you don't miss what's coming next! If you liked my posts on Python, I bet you'll enjoy this series as well.
📚 Regarding my readings this year:
The Lean StartupShow your work- Antifragile ⏸ (paused)
Atomic Habits- What Has Government Done to Our Money? 👈
- No Rules Rules
- Unit testing principles practices and patterns
I decided to pause Antifragile for now, I extracted a lot of knowledge from it already that modified me and helped me understand better about myself. It's a dense book, so I tried some other random ones on habits and finance.
Finally, I realize that I'm not writing about the books I read haha. The list is getting big!
