Zinibu

Procrastination and the Art of Getting Things Done

2016-12-09T17:34:00-05:00

Procrastination is commonly perceived as wasting time on useless activities. I don’t see it that way. The Latin origin of the word and its modern definition agree—procrastination is moving something forward from one day until the next. There’s no mention of what you do today.

You may run a solo operation, have a full time job, or be somewhere in between, but as a creator, you’ve got to embrace procrastination to work in a faster, more efficient way. Your reading this is proof that it’s possible; I procrastinated like a boss for six years to build this website, and then I needed two more months to write these words.

Bitwa pod Grunwaldem

I was inspired to pen this article after spending one morning in procrastinators’ headquarters—Reddit—where I read this message:

“I need to study for my last exam, so I spent last hour adding lightsabers to the most famous painting in my country, Bitwa pod Grunwaldem (Battle of Grunwald), by Polish painter Jan Matejko. I really should be studying right now.”

The poster was Bartosz Kiełbaszewski, a software engineer from Warsaw who apparently knows how to procrastinate with gusto. Take a look at the result.

Then it struck me—you can tap into your procrastination energy to get things done. It’s a detour, yes, but also an opportunity to focus in a way that’s not always possible with your main task.

Try to remember something that you’ve created while borrowing time reserved to other activity; something that you’re proud of, like Bartosz’ Grunwald; something that makes you wonder how you pulled it off. You may have gone through the process while having fun and being deep in the zone. That, right there, was a good use of procrastination, and to reproduce the experience at will, you need to know more about a monkey, self-deception and how habits work.

Finding your way in the Dark Playground

Tim Urban, who writes pretty well but draws like a three-year-old (which is awesome), has clearly explained why procrastinators procrastinate. Tim identifies the root of the problem: a battle in your head between the Rational Decision-Maker, your responsible adult self trying to navigate through life, and the Instant Gratification Monkey, a silly beast who doesn’t know better and only wants to go to the Dark Playground, “a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening.”

You may already be familiar with some of the inhabitants of the Dark Playground: silly memes, Facebook posts, an iguana, and snakes, lots of snakes. Granted, you may dig up some interesting fact while wandering there, like the origin of James Bond’s name in Wikipedia, but you’ll feel guilty and anxious as you realize that your time in the Dark Playground is undeserved—you should be doing something else.

And you’ll keep consuming time on anything to avoid getting to your main, most pressing task until the scary red creature that Tim calls the Panic Monster shows up; it embodies the real danger of messing things up to the point of looking like an idiot, missing a deadline or losing your job.

If you are an employee—and want to stay one—the Panic Monster will get you to work. Unfortunately, if you don’t make any changes, you’ll be stuck repeating the loop, waiting until the last minute, rushing to meet deadlines, and being content with mediocre results on every future project.

On the other hand, if you’re self-employed or work part time on your side projects, the Panic Monster may never show up and without its pressure you may not finish anything off. As an independent, creative worker, you can’t take that risk.

In 1996, John Perry, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University, wrote about structured procrastination, which he defined as “the art of making this bad trait work for you.” Perry’s premise starts with the idea that procrastination isn’t about doing absolutely nothing, but doing other useless or marginally useful things. He believes a procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult and important tasks on time as a way of not doing something more important. He is damn right; I experience this every day.

Structured procrastination is a powerful tool for creators, especially if you have a plethora of interests. A long to-do list will guarantee that you won’t run out of excuses to work on something else today. Keep in mind, however, that what’s interesting now may become the task to avoid tomorrow, and that’s perfectly fine.

Yup. It’s a game of self-deception, but Perry concludes: “virtually all procrastinators also have excellent skills at self-deception.” How convenient, isn’t it?

I’ve spent years shuffling my never-ending list, which keeps growing, but only recently I’ve come to realize that I’ve been doing structured procrastination all along.

Like a little mini-celebration

I’m sure you’ve spent plenty of time with the Instant Gratification Monkey and exercised some form of structured procrastination, but knowing what the problem is and reordering tasks is not enough. You have to get shit done by EOD—the obnoxious, jargonish way of saying end of day—and to accomplish that, you’ll have to turn getting things done into a habit.

Charles Duhigg, in his excellent book The Power of Habit, tells the story of a team of Procter & Gamble scientists and marketers in 1996 trying to figure out how to sell a new spray called Febreze, an astounding feat of chemistry capable of removing bad smells, that had been a sales flop.

The P&G team found out, after many interviews and a thorough investigation, what was happening: people become accustomed to smells in their lives, including the bad ones. So, they started looking for new strategies to sell Febreze and eventually began reading up on experiments about cues, rewards and habits.

A cue is the signal that triggers a routine, like using Febreze to clean your house, in order to get a reward—a house without bad smells. The bad smell was supposed to be the cue to use Febreze but it wasn’t working because, how the hell do you sell a product to remove smells if people can’t notice such smells exist?

The smart folks at P&G went back to interviewing customers, trying to find a way to make the product a part of their lives, and, to their surprise, they found a few who loved Febreze. One of these was a woman in her forties with four kids. She used Febreze as part of her normal cleaning routine and always applied a couple of sprays as a final touch. “Spraying feels like a little mini-celebration when I’m done with the room,” she told the interviewers.

Febreze’s cue, routine and reward loop was missing an important element: a craving to drive it. Cleaning a house is tedious work, but anticipating that little mini-celebration with Febreze at the end of her routine made this woman go through it. This critical discovery made P&G change its marketing strategy to focus on pleasant smells and good cleaning habits. Febreze was relaunched in 1998 and sold more than $230 million within a year.

That’s how you build the habit of getting things done: by developing a craving, by making your brain anticipate the reward after successfully completing the task you are avoiding—the one at the top of your list. Interestingly, some of these tasks might not be as difficult or time-consuming as you expect.

Well, why don’t you try it? Here a few suggestions:

Have to complete a boring report for the higher-ups? Write it like a professional business person and go back to crafting your sci-fi novel tonight.
Have to take care of a bug in an old software library? Fix it with well-thought-out code and continue with your Python AI experiments in the evening.
Have to deliver a mockup for your client’s new but still cluttered website? Design it with finesse and return to the clean, efficient interface of your solo project at the end of the day.

Yes, I’m suggesting more work as your reward, and that’s because I firmly believe you have an extra supply of energy reserved for your ideas. You can take a night or two a week to see who Rick Grimes is going to whack, play Overwatch or—because I’m not a cold-hearted lizard—spend some quality time with family. You’ve earned it.

The ultimate goal

We are all guilty of burning time reading silly tweets or googling for the perfect GIF to compose that witty response in Slack; I admit it, it can be a lot of fun, but it doesn’t compare to the sense of accomplishment you get when completing real work—especially when it’s your own stuff.

Being able to tame procrastination is a super power, and it feels fucking good to be able to say “yes, I did that all by myself, and it only took me six years.”

The Death of Sarcasm

2016-12-10T18:40:00-05:00

Recently, I’ve been reading comments like this on way too many online discussions: “if any one company knows what’s best for humankind, that’s Weyland-Yutani.” /s.

Ok. I’m not reading exactly that, and my point is not the content but the XML-esque /s at the end. Any earthling moderately familiar with this Internet thing should know by now that this is the way of marking an expression as sarcasm.

Please, don’t do that. You’re killing sarcasm.

Sarcasm, to work its magic, needs to be subtle, even mistaken for a fact. Good sarcasm lingers in your mind. Effective sarcasm makes people think, wake up, react. Want to be sarcastic? Respect your part of the deal and do it correctly.

If everybody starts marking sarcastic expressions as such—some dudes have even proposed irony punctuation—I predict a dramatic increase in the number of lazy, I-just-saw-the-headline skimmers, a group that’s already dangerously growing.

Don’t you think we’ve already got too many motherfuckers regurgitating other motherfuckers’ opinions?

Are the sarcasm markers of the world in a quest to protect those who are offended by everything, everywhere, at every time? That crazy, sensitive bunch can’t take jokes anymore and we’re going to let not only sarcasm but also wit die because of them? Hell no!

Perhaps it’s time to put more pressure on Weyland-Yutani to hurry up and bring those admirable creatures to our cities. To our cozy living rooms and kitchens. I’ve read the most recent report and the possibilities are limitless. Can’t hardly wait.

Dockerizing Django

2016-12-25T10:14:00-05:00

I plan on writing more about automation for web applications, but as I just finished with my first attempt at dockerizing a Django stack, I wanted to share my progress.

Most of Zinibu is currently running off Amazon Web Services with a few EC2 instances and I manage most of the configuration and deployment with SaltStack, which I enjoy using, but I intend to switch to a container-based setup with Docker to bring my local development environment closer to what’s on production.

I’ll be happy to answer any of your questions.

Amazon Web Services Documentation on Your Kindle

2017-06-21T10:11:00-04:00

This may have been there for a while but I just noticed it today while looking up a few details about EBS volumes and snapshots: Amazon Web Services now offers Kindle and PDF versions of its documentation.

Take a look at the two icons at the top of any documentation page, next to the language selector.

Now you can go to bed and absorb some juicy AWS literature before being embraced in the arms of Morpheus.

New York City’s Summer of Hell: Time for a Revolution

2017-07-31T20:06:00-04:00

On Monday, July 10, 2017, New York City woke up to what Governor Andrew Cuomo had described as “summer of hell.” An eight-week period of train track repairs at Penn Station in Manhattan, expected to cause reduced service across the Tri-State Area.

I couldn’t think of a worse way to start the season or a better excuse to discuss remote work so I turned to the New York Times to have a better gauge of the situation.

Let’s see.

“Being herded like cattle and squished in”

An interviewee suggested “some behavioral adjustment to reduce the demand at peak hours,” an exquisite way of uttering: “What you’re gonna do? We are all doomed.” And some lucky folks said they planned on changing schedules to work from home or timing vacations for July and August, but most simply expressed “hope for the best.”

The Times article also included expressions of angst from a couple that will lose time with their children—nothing says I love you better than burning three hours a day on a train while little Billy and tiny Carol watch ten hours of TV—and frustration from a 41-year-old man who had fractured his ankle and will be driving four hours every day to avoid being “trampled or even shoved down the staircase” because he’s going too slow—I can relate: fancy humans, especially those infected with New Yorkitis, care more about their fast, coffee-and-phone walking than about useless turtle people with disabilities.

A brave New Jersey lady shared her plan to set the alarm for 4 a.m. and drive to her friendly train station to catch the 5:43 a.m. to Penn Station before the line starts diverting to Hoboken. “It’s going to be tough,” she declared. To hell with that! Tough? That’s no way to live you life.

If one word can sum up what I found, that’s resignation. Everybody seems to accept that commuting is just a part of life. As long as you are in good physical shape, have no problems with abandoning children, and enjoy the 4 a.m. summer breeze, you’ll be fine. Stop whining, grab that hot latte and gallop.

I’ve been to many offices in New York City—even spent a few days trying to work at some—and seen not only programmers, designers and writers but also managers and sales persons glued to a phone or a computer all day. Do all of them deserve the E train experience of “dripping wet, packed up against the window,” as one mannerly woman described her trip? Do all of them have to leave their houses to do their jobs? I don’t believe so. Too many still do.

We are having tough conversations here

But then I had a glint of hope when I read that some bosses were talking with their employees and considering alternative arrangements such as working from satellite offices outside the city or from home. And this is the crux of the problem: companies—or rather the people running them—need to change, be pragmatic, and adapt to more efficient ways.

We’re still not there, though. Some sadistic masters told their servants that they could leave earlier for a couple of months to catch their packed trains—useless generosity that won’t be enough to help the human resources employee from Long Island who needs to be in her Manhattan office to use some files. She makes $20 an hour and just one train delay a week—bet there will be more—will put her in trouble. That’s exploitation. Surely there’s a way to access those files via a secure connection.

Employees and the self-employed have to push companies to embrace remote work; the system has to be altered from the bottom. And yes, it is true that many workers lack the self-discipline and organizational chops to be productive away from the office—a topic I intend to discuss at another time—but that doesn’t mean you are incapable of learning. You are a flexible, smart person, aren’t you?

A quick aside, if you are bombarded with calls and emails from recruiters—sorry, talent acquisition business partners—ask them if that amazing opportunity they are selling you permits full-time, remote work. You may not hear from them again, not a big loss, and will be stating a powerful message: I’ll work from wherever I want. Eventually, the masters may pay attention.

You should be ashamed, Big City

Summer of hell has already revealed the precarious situation of New York’s transportation system. A slight change in commuters’ behavior, too many transferring to some line or waking up late, or an unexpected event, a furious storm or an accident, guarantees chaos across the city.

Even without major surprises, you can be one of the hapless ones who misses a connection and suddenly has an extra hour to stare at the mass of confounded travelers, or to read—good thing you always carry a friendly book, right? You can’t trust schedules anymore, delays are routine, and there’s no sensible plan B for most routes. Play that game every single day and you’ll start questioning the reason for your existence. It took me just two trips a week in one month visiting a client in the Upper East Side to get to that point. Call me weak and idealistic but I refuse to throw away my time like that.

Penn Station was built between 1963 and 1969, after demolishing the original structure constructed in the beginning of the twentieth century, and it’s clear—after the rash of derailments, malfunctions and delays in recent times—that it wasn’t designed to handle the more than 1,300 trains and 650,000 riders passing through it every day in 2017. Add to that the century-old tunnel under the Hudson River and the equally ancient subway system and the conclusion is evident: The busiest rail hub in North America is collapsing.

One of the first things you learn when you write software to be used by many is that it has to be scalable (capable of being easily expanded on demand) and resilient (tending to adjust easily to misfortune or change). I expect the same of a city. People should be able to take any train or bus at any time, any day, without creating a bottleneck and breaking the system. The city should adapt to its citizens, not the other way around.

New York—never sleeping and so full of itself—is supposed to be the financial and media capital of the world, the leading Internet hub and telecommunications center of the planet. If the way humans work is to be revolutionized, it should happen here. It’s no longer a matter of policies or preferences: New York can’t handle the load and needs to go remote.

Here, burn it all, modern-day life

I’ve worked remotely all of my life, hence I’m familiar with the benefits, but I hadn’t seen the other side, the dreaded way of the commuter; that is, until I started visiting clients in New York. Then I realized how much money, time and energy everybody is wasting.

Pay $60 to park your car for the day, or $260 for a month of train rides; consume four to five hours on the road; and get back home with just enough juice to grunt at your family, thaw your meal, and hit the hay. Repeat for the rest of your life while trying to extract something meaningful out of it. No wonder why so many people are always in such a bad mood.

All. The. Freaking. Time.

I know that many activities still require to put a human body at some location, and I know that certain innovation-related endeavors have better chances of success when a group gathers, and that’s all right, but there are still plenty of jobs that can be performed remotely and nobody should burn their life away if they don’t have to.

I like my jobs like I like my islands: remote

“If we’re still seeing these delays after the repairs,” a woman told the Times, “then I’ll be angry.” Ma’am, being angry won’t do much to improve your work conditions.

It doesn’t matter how far technology reaches, if companies keep thinking that workers needs grumpy bosses breathing on their necks to be productive, and nobody dares to demand working from wherever they feel more comfortable, there will never be a change.

So do that: If you know you are up to it, be bold and whether you already have a job or are interviewing for a new one, ask to go remote full time. You’ll get many nos but keep on it, you just need one yes to start your revolution.

Remote work is the next best thing; it can transform your life, help you achieve more and, if you are the type who cares, even make you happier.

We all can have a positive impact on society, our cities (yes, you too New York), and the environment, and it all starts at home.

The Era of Automation and the Lone Orchestrator Has Begun

2017-08-17T10:14:00-04:00

Let me tell you how I did this website thing in the old days—that’s the mid-1990s, kids.

I cooked a bunch of HTML files, with plenty of hard-coded URLs sprinkled in, and seasoned the mix with a bloated style sheet; launched an FTP client, preferably one with buttons to click on; and then uploaded my beautiful goop to a directory on a web server—that was all I needed and could afford.

Then the web hosting company performed some black magic rituals and the universe—OK, just me—marveled at my creation.

You can still play that game, that is, if your name is Timmy and the website belongs to your cat, Lassie, but if you intend to run a website where other adults do, you know, important stuff, as loyal Tank would say: “Timmy, that is loco.”

Everybody loves to fill their days with error messages, right?

These days, real-world web applications must be resilient and perform well; may involve multiple web servers, efficient caching mechanisms, and a host of other services; and have to query classic relational databases, NoSQL storage, or both.

For more involved configurations, you’ll need tasks queues, extra development libraries—no, not that version, the other one—and access to a myriad of software components and web services.

Oh, and did I mention that everything has to keep running if any part breaks? I’m sorry, Timmy, there’s no room for you and your cat in this, but we’ll keep you in our thoughts (no, we won’t).

If you are down with setting up an architecture like this by hand, expect to burn countless hours typing tedious, prone-to-error commands and watching messages scrolling down all night, like a disappointed Cypher. I guarantee you plenty of silly mistakes and constant suffering. What? You like it that way? Stop reading and go back to your basement.

Waits for masochist visitor to close the browser.

Still here? Cheer up, there’s a better way to spend your crammed days: You’ve got to automate and orchestrate.

Don’t repeat yourself, I repeat: don’t repeat yourself

Automation means describing a task, usually a single one, to run without human intervention. Any task that makes you repeat the same steps every time is a candidate for automation: launching a web server, refreshing configuration files, adding a back end to a load balancer.

Orchestration, on the other hand, refers to the arranging and coordination of all the automated tasks. It’s a workflow, such as running a test suite after a commit, deploying the latest code to production, or syncing data with staging. In human speak: Orchestration is the conductor waving the baton to get the best out of the musicians.

There are many tools to help you with this, and the ones I like are mostly open source. I used to set up my local development environments with Vagrant and its provisioning system but then I was lured to the containers world by Docker and now I see whales everywhere.

I also keep a couple of configuration management tools in my arsenal: SaltStack and Ansible, both written in Python. The original version of Zinibu used a set of Salt formulas I wrote to run my Django stack, but I’m moving to Ansible soon; I like its simplicity and agentless approach.

Pay attention to the tasks that you find yourself repeating every day, especially those where you always make mistakes as they are the perfect opportunities to introduce automation and orchestration. Yes, you will spend extra time at the beginning but will save effort and headaches in the future.

Ideally, you shouldn’t communicate directly with each server or service to perform repetitive tasks, and just one command or—even better—a triggered event should suffice. If you get there, you may want to take the extra step to continuous integration but that’s a story for another day.

To infinity and beyond?

You can go as far as you want building your architecture but don’t get carried away trying to make it perfect; remember you still have a website to run. I like to automate and orchestrate just enough to launch, deploy code, and achieve high availability, and then I continue working on other parts of the project knowing that I can return later to teach new tricks to little Skynet.

Don’t fret about leaving a few things to the experts, such as scaling Elasticsearch or maintaining a Redis cluster; instead, focus your time and energy where they are the most effective—let’s say, writing software or content. This is critical if you are running a one-person operation.

In sum, you are in charge: make your software work for you.

What’s that, Timmy, you just started writing your own Ansible playbooks? Beautiful. Now get rid of that silly cat and join us in Zion.

Photography and the Writing Process

2017-08-20T12:14:00-04:00

As a reader, I enjoy finding an article with a photo that makes me wonder: “Is that eel laughing at me? What’s she trying to tell me?” Whatever my answer is, it may not be what the author—or the eel—originally tried to convey. And I suppose that’s all right, if just a couple of neurons spark inside my skull, the photo’s job is done and the stage is set for the words to follow. I’ll probably keep my mind’s eye on that eel’s smile as I read.

But I’ve always wondered: How do you deal with photography if you are the writer?

Before Zinibu, I didn’t use to spend much time digging through pictures to accompany my text. I just poured my ideas on a yellow pad—I’ve renewed my bond with pen and paper, will tell you more about it someday—or into a text editor, and then searched for any snapshot to portray an obvious connection with the topic at hand.

So I’ve decided to change that and make photography selection one of the initial steps in my writing process, right after coming up with a concept and a headline. Now, I don’t think of a photo just as an ornament or a clue for the reader—which it certainly can be—but rather, as a guide, as a beacon for the writer.

Take for instance the subject of this article’s photo: Chelsea, Barbie’s little sister. Let’s say I imagine she’s waiting for her train to New York, tired of living in the shadows, eager to start anew and make a name of her own as a writer in the City of Dreams. As fantastic as it sounds, I can relate and use that to set the tone and keep the focus while I write.

I may already know what I want to say, and may have an outline or a draft jotted down, but the right photograph can inspire me to better describe the angst of commuters or the useless endeavors of procrastinators. You don’t want photos vying for your reader’s attention, though; keep the images bubbling in your head, subtly interweave them with your message, and use them to keep you on track when telling your story.

Remember: To write is to roam so prepare for the never-ending journey, grab your favorite backpack, fill it with your precious tricks, and pick as many as you need along the road.

Before I go, I have a confession to make about Chelsea: I didn’t know the name of the little lass so I had to browse my copy of Forever Barbie and consult the list of Barbie’s friends and family on Wikipedia. There. See? I take these things seriously.

The Genius of Imperfection

2017-11-07T21:45:00-05:00

There’s a scene in Kill Bill: Volume 2 in which Budd’s boss says to a young, lady employee, “take a hit, be somebody, baby.” I love that scene.

Many a doubtful souls among us may find the idea of being somebody, whatever that means, enticing, so I’d like to start with the obvious public service announcement: a line of cocaine isn’t the way to go. That’s just Tarantino messing with the weaklings.

So which way then? Why, of course, be the best at whatever you do, right? That’s a fair assumption—be the smartest and be the fastest, because only by being perfect and creating perfection you’ll guarantee success. Right again, aren’t I? (And I expect you to be high-fiving the screen by now.)

The end? See you in the next article?

Hold it there.

I have my doubts about this perfection business; in fact, I…admire imperfection.

I’m not going to get into the topic of success today—I’ll get back to it in future pieces—but I’d like to talk about the relationship between perfection and the road to expertise. And to help me illustrate my point, ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles.

Just a bunch of ordinary guys

In the early 1980s, John Barrett, a young engineer at Abbey Road Studios—where the Beatles recorded most of their albums—was diagnosed with cancer and started chemotherapy. He wanted to keep his mind occupied and Ken Townsend, then the studio’s general manager, suggested him to listen through every Beatles tape and write down the details. Barrett produced such an incredibly detailed catalogue that when he passed away in 1984 the studio was determined to publish his work. A few years later, Mark Lewisohn took over Barrett’s project and penned The Beatles Recording Sessions, a fascinating book that every music technophile who’s spent their life rocking out with the Liverpudlians should read.

The Beatles were not only a group of musicians; they were four guys with a rare combination of traits. They were honest, they were optimists, and they were down-to-earth jokers who knew when to laugh about themselves, especially John (“I’m Eric”). They were sharp and articulate rule breakers, yet they were not perfect.

Lewisohn’s book includes a candid interview with Paul McCartney in which they talk about the band’s songwriting and recording process, their songs and how they saw themselves. “Yeah, the Beatles were a pretty good group!” Paul admits. “We knew we were good. People used to say to us, ‘Do you think John and you are great songwriters?’ And I’d say ‘Yeah.’” But later he mentions recording a song in which they invited a guitarist friend to play an arpeggio because “only people who are trained to play can do that. Ordinary guys like ourselves can’t do that!”

That’s one of the most successful composers and performers of all time calling himself ordinary, a classic corollary to the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Experts know that they are good at certain things but don’t let that cloud their judgement. And they can also see the spark in others.

Paul remembers John turning up at the studio one day, “‘I’ve got a new song.’ I said, ‘What’s the words?’ and he replied, ‘You know my name look up the number.’ I asked, ‘What’s the rest of it?’ ‘No, no other words, those are the words. And I want to do it like a mantra!’” I’m listening to it as I write this line. Extremely catchy.

To become an expert, you must be willing to face obstacles and learn from every experience. In Tune In, a closer look at the Beatles’ story, Lewisohn tells us about a young John and an even younger Paul learning to compose songs without having a way to record their creations. They didn’t have the equipment and didn’t know how to write music so they just scribbled the lyrics and described the melody (“ooh, ah, angel voices,” Paul jotted down). They forgot many of their creations the next day so they decided that if a song wasn’t memorable then it was just crap. And crap they didn’t make.

From frustration to inspiration

The Beatles’ seemingly imperfect creative process and their constant struggle between getting it right and keeping a playful attitude had a lot to do with the magic in their songs. In 1968 the band were back in Abbey Road to work on their eponymous album—the White Album—and spent the first half of July focused on what’s now considered one of their most fun songs: “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

They recorded around sixty takes—an unusually high number, even for them—and tried quite a few ideas, such as overdubbing a piccolo that was later wiped by Paul. The sessions for “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” were the first time the Beatles recruited musicians and rejected their takes.

Robert Lush, the second engineer during many of these recording sessions, recalls: “They spent so much time doing each song that I remember sitting in the control room before a session dying to hear them start a new one.” According to Lush, when you thought they were done with one song, “they’d come in the next day and do it again in a different key or with a different feel.” They were always trying to come up with something better and, as John and Paul had learned in their youth, were never afraid of tossing their crap away.

After five nights of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” everybody had had enough. Paul had conceived it as a much slower tune and kept playing it that way until a frustrated, and very stoned, John Lennon showed up, “went straight to the piano and smashed the keys with an almighty amount of volume, twice the speed of how they’d done it before, and said: ‘This is it! Come on!’” That’s the distinctive, upbeat introduction that went on the album; that’s the version we all know and love today.

Even if Paul wasn’t very happy with the remake—a few more versions were taped—he realized they weren’t going to improve the song any further and decided to keep John’s version and focus on the finishing touches. It’s here where the all-familiar ho-hos and laughs were introduced and Paul sang “Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face” (rather than Molly), a mistake that the other Beatles liked and decided to keep.

See? Imperfection all around but genius nonetheless.

The Beatles split in 1970, two years after the White Album, but many observers believe the conflicts started during these sessions. Tempers were lost so frequently that at some point Ringo quit and Paul had to play the drums on some tracks. Isn’t it remarkable that amid all the tension and confusion these four blokes managed to create not only a great song but one of the best albums of all time?

Creativity can overcome difficulties and show up unexpectedly; sometimes you just need to dismiss planning and aiming at perfection. Yes, just let it be and next time you feel stuck or out of ideas, keep calm, listen to the story of Desmond and Molly Jones, and carry on.

Go get the job done

Our idea of perfection is flawed; we expect genius to involve precision and complexity, and sometimes it does, but it’s not evident in plain sight.

How can somebody using simple, everyday words be a better writer than the professor dispensing obscure, elegant-sounding prose? How can a three-chords Beatles’ composition be a masterpiece? And what about those xkcd stick figures? The magic of creators reveals itself in subtle ways; it just disappears to leave us with an unforgettable book, a beautiful song, or an amazingly clever comic.

Perfection is overrated. Always do your best to get the job done but don’t obsess. As Joe Williams says in Style, his guide for writers who care about the craft but keep reality in mind: “Perfection may be the ideal, but it is the death of done.”

Learning and creating takes time and effort—lots of both, a life of them—and the road to expertise is full of mistakes. If that’s not your case then you’re not doing it right, or you are a genius and I have no idea why you kept reading until this paragraph.

Be imperfect. Be somebody. Be you.

Feed Me Your Human Children

2020-01-12T18:40:00-05:00

When I was seventeen, I only cared about devouring 1950s science fiction books, strumming an old, out-of-tune guitar, and tinkering with computers. I hadn’t envisioned my great plan for life yet. Three decades later, I still haven’t. Life isn’t that simple.

Like most youngsters, I didn’t know better and just went with the flow, so I applied to a university (this was in Peru, where there’s no distinction between colleges and universities) to pursue a traditional education.

You may have gone through the same, or are about to, and in most cases it’s your safest bet: When you go to college, a university, or a trade school you expect to be told what to do and how to do it. If you care to ask, they might even explain why.

Institutions are supposed to give you structure and a set of rules to follow; provide you with the knowledge and skills to become a productive member of society (whatever that means); and hand you a diploma to demonstrate that you are equipped for the wild world.

That’s exactly what I was hoping for in the early days of September, 1990. Go ahead, you can chuckle now.

Welcome to the machine

According to a 2016 press release by the U.S. Department of Education, adults with a bachelor’s degree are less likely to be unemployed and earn 66 percent more than those who only finished high school. “A high-quality postsecondary education is one of the most important investments a student can make,” declares the department.

If you suspect high quality is just another way of saying outrageously expensive, you may be right, especially if you study in the United States, where education costs more than in almost any other country.

The diplomas you can obtain—should I say buy?—from some of these places are akin to catnip for company folks, both masters and minions. I’ve heard people going into high-pitched voices in fancy offices of New York, from old-style museums to trendy startups, while reading résumés. “Oh, she’s got a Columbia MBA!” they utter, not caring much about actual skills or experience.

It’s a machine that presses society to be fed and works so well that 65 percent of all jobs in the United States will require postsecondary education or training by 2020 , pushing those who aim at a better future to pay for ever-costlier colleges and universities. This is a machine supported by governments, educational institutions, businesses, and—in a twist that won’t surprise anybody—even your mom and dad.

Oh, yeah, they all play the machine’s game.

Show me what you’ve got

We’ve all met them. People with impressive-sounding titles and degrees who jump from meeting to meeting, boss around all day, and ask obvious questions to smarter subordinates while earning praise from their superiors. They move through life and work interacting with peers in never-ending back-patting. “That was an amazing presentation, Taylor. I loved the dancing koala!” Sure, congratulations, hotshot, you powerpoint.

They are not only the most refined product of the machine but also proof that there’s no clear relationship between what you spend in education and what you get in exchange.

Said bluntly, those with the money to purchase access to the highest places aren’t necessarily the smartest or the most skilled. What’s worse, many lack empathy and just contribute to dehumanizing an already brutal world.

Don’t tell me you haven’t met somebody like this without wondering what the heck is so special about them.

But it’s not just the honchos, the machine extends its arms at all levels. I had this client, a nonprofit, that hired a software developer with great credentials—or so they told me. Let’s call him Hutch. Hutch had the precious degree and had worked for a well-known Internet company. He seemed like a nice, young fellow, and I couldn’t wait to hear about the crazy stuff he had created. “What did you build over there?” I asked him. “Oh, they told me what to do and I did it every day, for about a year. Was kinda boring.”

Bored Hutch had followed the standard path, spent the time and paid for it, but he hadn’t been in the trenches solving problems on his own. Left alone, without supervision, he was always in trouble. He couldn’t even write two sentences of good English.

Not being able to write well in your own language, if that’s not a sign of a broken system I don’t know what it is.

It’s very easy to recognize those who can’t stand on their own. Just listen to how they phrase their achievements; there’s either a plural noun or pronoun (“My team ran the operations,” “We developed an application”), or a vague verb (“I coordinated the launch,” “I oversaw the construction”). They just were around when things happened; they didn’t cause those things to happen.

Cut the crap—tell us what you know, tell us what you do, tell us what you learned.

I hope you fail

How can you learn, how can you evolve, without the freedom to make mistakes and solve problems in solitude?

Sure, there are experiences you can’t gain alone, like testing that weather-changing device at a bond-esque corporation, but still, you must become self-reliant—life is full of obstacles and you can’t expect others to help you every time you stumble.

A traditional education may give you some tools to start the journey, and working for the big boys may offer you a sense of purpose, of belonging, a safety net, but your real life starts when you go solo, fail, and try again, picking up chops along the way.

This is a machine that won’t prepare you for a life as an individual, but it will collect its fee anyway.

Those who have the means to get it will be handsomely rewarded by their education—many with cushy jobs. Everybody else will be punished, widening the gap between the rich and the poor. This is absurdly evident in America, where you can’t go for a stroll in Fifth Avenue without encountering ladies with Louis Vuitton bags yakking and walking by the homeless. Once again, the United States win in a category where being first isn’t good.

Community, identity, stability? No, thank you

But my quarrel with the machine stems from something else: It promotes a world where every person learns the same way and is after the same goals. It conditions you to be an Alpha or an Epsilon even if you are just Bernard.

I refuse to embrace a world that only welcomes those who know how to smile, chitchat, and follow orders; a world where obtaining riches and being content are considered having a good life. Life is much more—sometimes, even the bad parts are worth it—and can’t be dumbed down to money and laughs.

Back in 1993, I was a lazy, undecided, and insecure kid—I’m still all of these things, except a kid—and I couldn’t afford a university anymore. Had a good time, made a couple of friends, and learned some guitar tricks, but that’s it. I didn’t get a degree and I never showed the machine I was its worthy son. Soon after, I stopped caring and moved on.

The knowledge and the skills that helped me carry on with my journey, those, I got them somewhere else, but that’s a story for another day.

Catching Up With a Sinking Sun

2020-02-13T18:40:00-05:00

In Pink Floyd’s “Time”, Roger Waters writes, “Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time.” It’s a statement that hits you harder if you are over thirty but still relevant to everybody at every age.

Waters wasn’t just commenting on the apathy of the English society in the 1970s. He knew that all around the world, beyond England, people were “hanging on in quiet desperation” all the same. He was warning us about letting time slip before it’s too late, before it’s all gone.

We all keep preparing for that day, that future event to relaunch our lives, without realizing we are already in the middle of it. This is it. Today. That’s your life.

It’s not an original thought—seize the day. Eckhart Tolle repeats it often in The Power of Now and he’s got a very good reason to do so: you keep forgetting about it.

But it’s not all your fault (a big part it is); they’ve been training the masses for centuries and have convinced us all that time is no longer ours.

Let’s explore how we got here.

I’m not paying you to lounge around

Time has been present at every moment of your existence. Run or you will miss the bus; stand up and move to the next classroom when your hear the bell; and of course, enjoy the weekend with your kids, but first let us take four dozen hours of your life to grow our riches.

Our perception of time and how we use it, how we consume it, hasn’t always been the same. It has changed throughout history and still varies across cultures in the present.

Labor patterns before the second half of the eighteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of machines powering large-scale production, were irregular. Agriculture, building, transportation, and most other activities could be disrupted by bad weather, but as long as these operations ran in a domestic, small way they didn’t require synchronization among large groups or accurate time budgets. Task orientation was the norm and actions rather than clocks guided people’s lives.

Edward Thompson, the British historian, relates in his fascinating essay Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism how primitive people measured time in relation with “familiar processes in the cycle of work or of domestic chores.” He talks of the Cross River natives in Southern Nigeria, “The man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted,” and the monks in Burma rising at dawn “when there is light enough to see the veins in the hand.”

“The institution of wage labor is a sophisticated latecomer,” declares Moses Finley in his Ancient Economy, where he dedicates a chapter to the peculiar relationship between masters and slaves in the times of Greeks and Romans.

Our Mediterranean forebears couldn’t separate somebody’s labor from their person and the product of their work. They could buy a piece of fine jewelry from a craftsman, produced on his time and under his own conditions of work, or they could buy the craftsman, but they wouldn’t have thought of buying the craftsman’s labor power, an abstraction, and paying for it using labor time, another abstraction. The concept of wage labor didn’t exist yet.

But by the late eighteenth century production methods were moving from hands to machines and manufacturing techniques demanded a larger degree of labor synchronization and exactitude in society’s time routines, prompting the transition to industrial capitalism. Timed labor had arrived and time no longer passed but was spent; if you were not utilizing it, you were wasting it.

In the early days of capitalism idleness was prevented by holding down wages and folks started getting used to the idea that if you were working for somebody you were not the owner of your time anymore.

This moral logic survives today and employers zealously follow it, feeling robbed when an employee is not visibly busy at all times. This is perhaps one of the reasons why so many business owners despise remote work. They relish the smell of the burning hours they have paid for.

The feeling of power bosses experience from commanding other people’s lives overcomes everything. I knew a person who did a very lousy job and was often disrespectful to their colleagues but the managers didn’t care—even when a few employees complained about him.

But the moment they found him spending time, so-called company’s time, on other projects, they fired him. Right on the spot. And nobody in that office ever spoke of him. And why would they? You don’t mess with the masters’ time.

The husbandry of time

Pray, shut up, and go to work. Suffer along the way and you’ll get extra chances to get into that bar where nothing, nothing ever happens. That’s what most religions are about.

They have promoted time thrift for centuries, deploying their preachers to instruct the flocks to take good care of time as a moral obligation and to engage in worldly activities.

And you would be right to be confused, the material world and the wheels of production shouldn’t be a concern of the guys auctioning tickets to a perfect, although imaginary, spiritual world; however, don’t forget for a second that a dichotomy like this is a major feature of every organized cult.

Boy, I could write a book about that.

Anyway.

The long-term conditioning did the trick and time is money had become a proverb when Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in the early twentieth century.

Work without a purpose

If you think that the system would be content with owning your waking hours, you don’t know the system well enough. Having you busy all the time is just the beginning, and to complete your submission, you have to spend your days—if possible your nights—on meaningless work.

This inclement machine surely knows how to crush its servants.

There are many talented people in the world wasting their skills on bullshit: designers who could create campaigns to combat poverty produce ads to sell you middle-age happiness pills; programmers who could use data science to untangle the mysteries of our biology sprinkle doggy features on spoiled teenagers’ selfies; and—the saddest of them all—writers who could compose inspiring stories fabricate speeches for corrupt politicians to vomit.

A job without a purpose or, even worst, invented to just fill time and inflate invoices—that is, make-work—is poison to the human mind.

I had a friend in Peru who joined the army very young to escape from the poor, remote town where he was born. Peru has many problems but, unlike the United States, is not a country engaged in forever wars, so I found reasonable to ask him, “What is a soldier supposed to do in a country without wars?” It took him no more that two seconds to respond, “You are supposed to be in a constant state of attention.”

And that’s how most people live—in a constant state of attention, doing nothing, waiting for others to tell them what to do next while hoping to someday break the chain and get their freedom back.

You are forgoing today preparing for a brighter future that may never come.

Face up, make your stand

But you don’t need bosses or preachers to force you to spill your time. You can be as effective on your own and without even realizing it.

I’ve worked independently for quite some years and I’ve had many clients that I’ve charged by the hour. As I got more gigs I started to count every hour I was not working as money I was not earning and I couldn’t do much away from a computer without fretting. I felt like throwing dollar bills into a bonfire every passing minute while ruining my family’s days—I had turned my life into a race against myself.

Eventually I realized how stupid this was and I started to make some changes: I fired some clients, the ones that had me running all the time while burning the most time, and focused on projects that better aligned with what I enjoy doing; I went back to having short trips with my wife and kids during the weekends and longer ones during the holidays (can’t do it that often yet but we’ll get there); and I simplified and optimized my budget to reduce unnecessary expenses with the goal of working to live instead of living to work.

You gotta stop. Today. And yes, I can hear all your excuses already but shut it, at least take some minutes to ponder about it. Do it now.

We all have to find a balance; yours is different from mine and everybody else’s, but no matter the circumstances everybody reaches a point where he or she has to decide if it’s worth it to continue sacrificing years to The Man, just to get a little more coin, instead of going after the real good life.

Waters said it best, “You run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking.”

Your time is your life, don’t throw it away as tomorrow may be too late.

Infinitely Scarce Buckets of Time

2020-02-20T18:40:00-05:00

The year was 1866 and the American Civil War was just a few months in the past when a group of emigrants from Germany gathered in a tavern to talk about the needs of their new home—a broken but still nascent country—and to engage in horological discussion. They were watchmakers who shared a love for their craft and wanted to create an organization to represent them and their fellow men.

They originally called it the German Watchmakers Society, but sixty-four years later, as members from other nationalities joined, changed the name to the Horological Society of New York.

Why am I telling you of these mustachioed, hat-wearing gents? Well, I already shared some ideas on how to avoid wasting your days and hours, so now I want to explore how people from different cultures perceive time.

This guy horologies

Our nineteenth-century watchmaking friends foresaw a future where time would be increasingly important, but I doubt they could have predicted that most lives would turn into a never-ending series of regular, constant, and repetitive actions—quite like the entrails of the clocks and watches they were crafting.

As indoctrinated members of a modern society—and I mean modern in the sense of present day—we can’t escape the fact that it would be very difficult to function without schedules. Time breaks the language barriers to make everybody run at the same fast pace as the rest of our complicated world, a world that needs to keep the engines running and fuming to feed—and to entertain, don’t forget—seven and a half billion and growing.

But do we all want to dance at the same rhythm? I refuse to believe that every healthy, rational human being would choose to asphyxiate on a crowded train—the hell I wouldn’t!—or to languish in traffic just to get to a place filled with a few sycophants and other trapped souls.

“I get bored at home. I like coming to the office and spending the day with y’all, guys (every single day for the rest of my life).” No, you don’t, model employee of the month, but I sympathize: you just feel obliged to say it.

The measurement of time is necessary, I get it, but up to a point. You can’t let it command every moment of your day. Uncertainty and randomness are vital parts of your journey, embrace them.

Sometimes bad things will happen, of course they will, but once in a while you’ll stumble upon something good. That is, if you stop watching the damned clock.

Time around the world

I’ve worked remotely for the last couple of decades with men and women from many countries and time zones and I’ve experienced our differences.

One of my readings led me to a very interesting book about this topic, When Cultures Collide, by Richard D. Lewis. It discusses how cultures can be categorized depending not only on how their members go about their lives but also on how they deal with time.

Lewis defines three categories.

Linear-actives: Those who work on one thing at a time. They plan and pursue their actions in an organized way. Linear-actives are all about efficiency; they need to get as much done in the allotted time. Germans, Swiss, Dutch, Swedes, and Americans, particularly those of the WASP variety, belong to this category.

Multi-actives: Those with a more flexible and lively attitude. They don’t worry as much about a strictly choreographed program and prefer to focus on the importance of each event. Multi-actives invest their time finishing the conversations they start and believe they get more done this way. Spaniards, Italians, Arabs, and Latin Americans are in this group.

Reactives: Those who listen before acting. They concentrate on what the speaker says, rarely interrupt, and take their time before replying. Reactives won’t usually rush to make decisions and prefer to think long term. Chinese, Japanese, and Finns can be found here.

According to Lewis, each of these groups sees time in one of three ways.

Linear time: Time is a commodity. You pay for it and you charge for it; you need to know how to utilize it and never waste it because it’s money. And you better keep moving because it’s pretty expensive too. If you’ve seen a suit striding through the city while jabbering into his AirPods you’ve seen linear time in action.

Multi-active time: Time is subjective. You can mold it and stretch it according to your personality and the events of the day. Experiences and relationships are more important than calendars and watches. People on multi-active time will observe schedules just to fit in a linear-active world but will prefer reality today over imposed timelines.

Cyclic time: Time keeps going in a circle; it never runs out. You will vanish but the universe will go on so there’s no rush to make quick decisions. Look into the past and think long term before making a move. If you let the opportunity pass you haven’t actually missed it; it may come around again and find you better prepared in the future.

These are, of course, generalizations so keep in mind that nobody fits in just one category. A writer may be multi-active while coming up with the plot for her next novel but switch to reactive when listening to readers and then to linear-active while looking for a publisher.

The right amount of everything

I can’t say that using time one way or the other is better. You can adapt depending on what you need to do—that’s what I like to do.

I currently live in the U.S., the country that blaring voices in black-and-white TV commercials used to call the land of opportunity, and I can’t blame anybody for being in linear-active mode most of the time. You need to be organized and financially responsible, and you have to carefully keep track of the hours you work and get paid for.

Save enough to make it to the end of your days, or at least leave something for those you care about if finishing the game early.

You can thank America’s broken health and retirement systems for that. You are welcome.

But beware of becoming a Starbucks-carrying, hasty robot the whole time. Take a moment to breathe, to read, to ponder about the good life. Activate your multi-active persona and finish that interesting conversation—don’t shut it down just because the agenda says so.

Fill some of your time with random and enjoyable activities. A little bit of chaos should always be welcome.

I have days that start with a software engineering problem waiting. The first things I do? Plug my Les Paul and play some metal (or distorted noise, as non-connoisseurs may call it), fight with Leafy the Cat, and write some words. By the time I get back to the problem I’ll have a couple of potential solutions bubbling in my head.

And don’t forget to take a moment to observe cyclic time.

You know you will die, right? When I was eight or nine I used to worry about death—most kids at some point learn that everything will end and freak out—and I liked to imagine someone would invent a way to live forever and I would be one of the first lucky immortals. Science may get us there someday, but considering how long the idiots in charge are taking to accept that the freaking planet is getting hotter I wouldn’t bet on it happening in my lifetime.

Yep. Surprise, I’m dying too. So I try to share and teach, doing the best I can with my portion of days and nights, in the hope that I leave something valuable to those who are coming next.

As far as we know, time is an endless river. You and I? Just specks of dust. Get over it, have fun, and carry on.

They May Take Our Hours, But They’ll Never Take Our Freedom

2021-03-07T12:31:00-05:00

Welcome to life in the twenty-first century, my fellow responsible adult, where you have to toil your way through hoping that, with the right mix of skills and fortune, you’ll earn enough pennies to afford the necessaries of life. Terrific, innit?

What’s that? You don’t like your job? Want some time for yourself? What for? Have you even considered that every second you waste on that life of yours is hurting the economy? Our economy! No, you wouldn’t dare. We’re all together on this so stop whining and get on with the plan.

That’s one of the favorite arguments of those utilizing you as a pawn to extract labor from. The rest—the sheep resigned to the grind—can’t even conceive what a good life is and will just abide. “That’s how it’s always been, what else can you do?”

What else? Well, you can start by facing reality and how you feel about it. I don’t pretend to announce my step-by-step escape plan in this short piece—I’m sure it wouldn’t apply to you anyway—but if it induces you to start sketching your own I shall be more than content.

And you, lucky bastard who already made a victorious exit, tag along and enjoy the well-deserved schadenfreude.

Bring me the numbers, Georgie

I recently read The Job, Ellen Ruppel Shell’s revealing, both depressing and inspiring, exploration of work. Ruppel Shell mentions that “fewer than half of all Americans claim to be satisfied with their jobs.” Shocking news these are not, but having seen similar figures in other places I looked for the source: Gallup, the analytics and advisory firm in Washington, D.C.

In 2000 Gallup started publishing an annual report on employee engagement. Focused on those with regular jobs, the wretches working for the Man, the reports provide extra ammo to the cause of quitting the never-ending rodent competition. I perused the data—fighting the angst and plowing through the light corporate jargon so that you don’t have to—and got some inspiration, all of it contrary to Gallup’s intentions, I suppose.

I began in 2011, a year when people in the U.S. and around the world were crawling back from the financial hole that a bunch of gray-haired, rich white men had created, as it’s usually the case in planetary-scale screwups. The report states that “seventy-one percent of American workers are not engaged (52%) or actively disengaged (19%) in their work” and “nearly one-third are engaged.”

That one-third, the engaged, is celebrated as a historical high matching 2001 and 2007. Should I pop the champagne now?

All right. Breathe, you can do this. Look, it’s sunny outside—no, it’s not.

But excuse me, we are not savages around here. Let’s start with the definitions the Gallup researchers were kind enough to provide. This is how they categorize the subjects of their studies, these human workers, according to how much they care about their jobs. All verbatim.

Engaged: Involved in and enthusiastic about their work and contributing to their organizations in a positive manner.
Not engaged: Generally satisfied but not cognitively and emotionally connected to their work and workplace.
Actively disengaged: Having miserable work experiences.

Actively disengaged, hmm… euphemism I detect. What they mean to say is that employees don’t give a flying rat’s ass about whatever they are working on.

“That’s right after the 2008 debacle, Shirley, we know things were bad then.” Point taken, observant reader, let’s pick a better, more stable time in recent history. Let me check… sorry, couldn’t find any, let’s just do 2018.

This one starts with a bombastic title—”Employee Engagement on the Rise in the U.S.”—that will pump Greg in Human Resources up. “The percentage of engaged workers in the U.S. is now 34%.” Is that it? What’s the fuss about? What’s that, Greg? Yes, sure, that is… better?

Have some more, “the percentage who are actively disengaged is now at its lowest level, 13%.” Terrific. Just thirteen out of every one hundred individuals are miserable while chilling at the office.

These 2018 experts are on a roll and coronate their report proclaiming that “the remaining 53% of workers are in the not engaged category… they will usually show up to work and do the minimum required but will quickly leave their company for a slightly better offer.” Beautiful. May I get my ticket to Finland already?

And yes, 2018 in the pandemic era feels like thirty years ago so I’ll skip forward to 2020, the year when I started writing this article and everybody forgot Corona used to be a beer name. For 2020 the numbers-loving Gallup wonks took extra snapshots, the first report, in May, sounded hopeful stating that “the percentage of engaged workers in the U.S. reached 38%,” and adding that the actively disengaged—”those who have miserable work experiences and spread their unhappiness to their colleagues”—continued at a low of 13%, and the second report, in July, offered a more realistic picture of a convulsed America. “Following the killing of George Floyd in late May and subsequent protests and riots on top of a pandemic, unemployment, and attempts to re-open some businesses, 31% of the working population are engaged.”

The not engaged continue to be more than half of all workers. “These employees put time, but not energy or passion, into their work. Not engaged employees typically show up to work and contribute the minimum effort required.”

I’ve got to hand it to them, the Gallup gang know how to regurgitate but I’m only seeing multiple pictures of the same mill here and it’s evident that the numbers haven’t fluctuated wildly in the past two decades. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel, most dislike their jobs and we are all cannon fodder, so what’s new?

I’d like to distill the reports and try to salvage something, anything, from this mess, but first, a few words for the distinguished members of the ruling class.

And for my next act

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll translate Gallupish to English for you.

“Over the past several decades, business and psychological researchers—including Gallup—have identified a strong relationship between employees’ workplace engagement and their respective company’s overall performance.”

If the minions don’t care about what you make them do they won’t sweat and it will take you longer to pile up as much money.

“The less engaged employees are with their work and their organization, the more likely they are to leave an organization.”

Buy them a ping pong table, invent something about culture, and make them think they can take all the vacation the want—they can’t, mwahahaha.

“People new to an organization experience the highest engagement levels, on average—a ‘honeymoon effect’ of sorts.”

Exploit new employees as soon and as much as you can before they realize it’s a trap and quit, or until you break them and get them to do anything you command, and then, add pressure to taste.

“Identifying and hiring top management talent can influence workers’ engagement and organizations’ business performance.”

Pay big bucks to one or more honchos with the words product or project in their titles, ideally experts in nothing, to breathe down everybody’s necks and squeeze more out of your workforce.

“Highly educated and middle-aged employees are among the least likely to be engaged.”

Don’t hire anybody smart or with experience. They are difficult to tame and cost more.

“Workers aged 30 to 64 are less likely to be engaged at work than are those who are younger or older. Workers aged 65 and older are the most likely to be engaged in their jobs.”

Find complacent servants among the young and naive as well as the old who have run out of options.

And that’s that. You’ve been doing this for centuries, so, enjoy it while it lasts.

Significant potential performance consequences

Back to you, disgusting human worker.

I believe Gallup’s reports are vacuous research not only because they recite what you already know—everybody hates their jobs—and concoct a reality that isn’t there–employers care about employees—but because they are just ads targeted to companies that need to make “engagement central to their business strategy.” It’s not about Milton and Nina being interested and fulfilled; the goal is to crush everybody under maximum control. Those suits and watches and cars are not going to pay for themselves so Gallup will help big cheese to wring profit out of low-cost, disposable, loyal grunts while keeping the illusion that they are part of a team.

Another report, this one covering the 2008-2010 period, goes on for forty-eight pages with just one mention of the word happy and fifteen of satisfied (“I got enough to procure food and secure shelter, thank you very much, sire”). Page after page the mantra is obvious: quell the proletariat spirit.

The self-employed are never mentioned in any of the reports I read, flying solo is tough and that’s a conversation for another day, but one worries, apparently in a bad year for capitalism, that the “unprecedented drop in the percentage of engaged workers has significant potential performance consequences.”

Allow me to repeat those words to you.

Potential.

Performance.

Consequences.

If they don’t send a shiver down your spine then you are reading the wrong author.

What gives?

Should be clear by now that I’m sure most reasonable individuals don’t like to labor for others. If you think I’m wrong about that then this is where we part ways; so long and enjoy your retro meeting at four.

Still here? Good. Let’s go on.

On top of the repetitive and senseless nature of the tasks that you are required to perform, you are forced to act in a certain way. No freedom to make decisions, just fit and pretend excitement about the present and future of the company. Every. Single. Day. And you better wear the swag, motherfucker, we’re watching.

It’s a system designed by and for those with money and power to diminish the use of intelligence and critical thinking, which is why the victims are the naive, the young, the uneducated, the older ones, the chronically poor; that is, anybody without an alternative. Quite a chunk of the planet’s population. And the status quo will remain while so many, from teachers and family members to pundits and babbling preachers, repeat the same old lies to the masses: that drudging is necessary and life is sacrifice.

Unless you are contributing to cure cancer, rescue polar bears, figure out cold fusion, or the like, I can’t believe you enjoy submission as an employee in return for financial compensation. You are just throwing away your precious buckets of life and confirming that something we all are good at is inventing excuses for our bad choices and unavoidable circumstances. Chances are that you are just pushing paper or crunching numbers for some vain purpose; even worse, you may be one of those in the middle—a manager.

What’s that, Georgie? What about the disengaged? Bravo for them, I say! Not giving a damn about stupid jobs should be expected conscious behavior, especially if you wish and are determined to have a better life.

The bright side

Our obsessive focus on wealth has stopped us from realizing what valuable work should be: a healthy way of learning, building character, helping others, feeling useful, and having a good time. Earning a decent living is simply a welcome consequence.

Work, real work, is freedom. The jobs Gallup, mom and the telly want to shove down your throat are not.

Ruppel Shell’s Job ends with a pinch of optimism that I’d like to replicate.

We all need to take whatever comes our way to survive and this nobody’s two thousand words aren’t going to change how the world operates overnight but I hope a spark is born. Rediscovering freedom in work is possible and starts with you. Yes, it takes wits, time and money, but possible it is.

Think, read, and educate yourself; reduce your dependency on a system that doesn’t care about you, avoid debt, and the trap of consumerism; get used to saying no to those who treat you as a tool, a resource to employ and discard. Be willing to liberate yourself from the yoke and wallow in freedom.

We all end up dead, it’s just a question of how and why.

I know. Movies. I’ll show myself out.

How Not to Get a Job

2021-05-31T12:31:00-04:00

As millions of fellow grubs in 2020, I had the fortune of losing a full-time job in the midst of what we hope will be a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic (betcha it won’t), and a couple of minutes later, after having entertained going back to freelancing and remembering how much I abhor chasing clients, I did what most domesticated adults would do: ignominiously hit the job boards for what I expected would be my last time.

I had wished that the sudden, forced embrace of remote work would uncover new and unique ways of collaborating, that both puppets and puppeteers would finally realize that there’s opportunity beyond the glass partition, and that a threatening virus would bring out the best in us. A man can dream—none of that happened, of course. We’re talking humans here, remember?

I hadn’t been on the hunt for a new master in a while and didn’t enjoy a single second of it, but at least the ordeal inspired me to jot down my thoughts, revive an old draft from my antiwork folder—yep, I have one—and compile my suggestions for how not to get a job in tech, that lazy label pundits attach to anything involving software, Internet, hustle, and billions with a b.

What follows is painfully inspired by the more than two decades I’ve spent solving other people’s problems and sprinkled with extra findings from the myriad of job interviews I endured during the COVID-19 era. So heed the advice of this idiot and I guarantee that you won’t be getting sophisticated, respectable-by-the-masses wage employment anytime soon, but instead you’ll reap something much more valuable and important—a good life.

Act one

I’ve conversed with dozens of interviewers throughout the years I’ve been an invisible cog in the Internet industry and, except for a couple of rare grumpy faces, all of them have been extremely cordial; so much, in fact, that I determined long ago that everyone was pretending. The ultra-friendliness displayed by these men and women is just a disguise—I now know that being candid and speaking up your mind aren’t common traits in this circus.

Some guy called Will once said that all the world’s a stage, and a job interview is not but another performance on such a stage. Heck, the thing you are applying for is advertised as a role; you are expected to act, Ophelia.

And if you’re willing to play your part in the charade you’ll first find out what type of serf your target company is looking for—don’t tell me: a hard-working team player, a multitasker who will perform well under pressure, and a peer who would do whatever is necessary to go the extra mile. As they push you along their conveyor belt of applicants you’d do good to ask: How hard am I to work? How many tasks should I concurrently perform and under how much pressure? Oh, and how long is that extra mile you speak of?

But you don’t ask shit and just nod and mouth something with the words dent and universe in it. Stroke everybody’s ego and, by all means, bring up the bottom line for bonus points.

That’s all fine if you’re just getting started. You don’t care; you’ve got a stomach and need the universal lubricant to put something in it—just play along, don’t ask for much and answer all the questions with the right responses, the ones parroted in so many books and plastered all over the Internet. Here’s the good news: you don’t need to be a great performer. Employers definitely know you are babbling whatever they expect to hear and don’t care; the more submissive and cheaper you are, the better. The bad news? You are hired—you are number six now.

If you understand the game you are playing, sure, take the job, but don’t stop planning your escape and beware of being gullible. Do not ever believe the tales of the mighty propertarians and plummet into the abyss of easy money, beer taps and, the worst of all, team culture.

Fetch!

From hatchery, through conditioning, and into the grind. Those in command have trained you as a puppy since the day you were born—it’s the way of the world. A world largely in thrall to states, religions, capitalism, and traditional education; all forces that demand obedience, “bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,” as Bysshe Shelley once penned.

So, be a docile peon, shut up, and do as you are told or you’ll be replaced; after all, you are just a disposable piece of meat.

I fell into the trap in my early twenties, when I met the owner of an itsy-bitsy shop selling computers out of his mom’s house. The doofus had no moral compass and was bereft of any skill but had the cash and connections to convince a few customers to part with their money and to attract two or three naive underlings, of which I was the first, to work for him. I had tinkered with computers since I was eleven and even if I’d earned a buck or two selling my nascent chops over the years, I’d never held a real job—so I sold my time and brains hoping to gain experience and learn the secrets of the trade.

In the beginning I was drinking it all in but soon I discovered there was nothing to learn from this entrepreneur—that’s how these shrimps like to call themselves—as he only knew how to close a shady deal by being a sleazy salesman and an adulator, and how to abuse the hapless bastards under him until they cracked. Just a few months in, I wanted out. It was a difficult time—as in not-able-to-buy-food difficult—and it took me a couple of years to gather enough clams to quit and go solo.

In her book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich painted a sadly familiar picture. She went undercover as a low-salaried employee in the late 1990’s America and revealed, among other dismal findings, that “most of the big hotels run ads almost continually, if only to build a supply of applicants to replace the current workers as they drift away or are fired.” Two decades later, the glorified technology powers keep luring for fresh souls; promoting a different kind of job, yes, with higher salaries, perhaps, but with the same crushing intentions.

“Finding a job is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and flexible enough to take whatever is being offered that day,” Ehrenreich concluded. Welcome aboard, sucker. Florida tourist-infested hotels of yore, New York City trendy startups today, or the pathetic swindler of my youth: they’ll all squeeze out your juice in the name of profit.

No. This can’t be the way.

Turn the tables

In the years after my first encounter with wage slavery, I came up with three principles to live by: honing my craft to the point I won’t depend on anybody, being leery of people trying to make money out of me (that’s almost everybody in a world infatuated with wealth), and bringing a smile to someone else’s face every single day, no matter how bleak the day is.

Of course you must put the time and the effort to gather experience and abilities, to get the perspective to recognize and overcome your limitations—beyond any possible Dunning–Kruger effect—and to save and invest smartly, aggressively, until you are in possession of a satchelful of the stuff, enough to survive for six to twelve months while you devise your next move. You’ll know when you’re ready to get off the hamster wheel.

Looking back at it now, I was slow to break from the subservient mindset and I overestimated the merits of those with privilege and money (that’s typically all they have) for far too long. If you are good at what you do you must know that those who buy your hours—and that’s all they should be getting—need you. If they could do what you can they’d do it themselves.

But I’m too busy having meetings, closing deals and strategizing!

Fuck off. What an empty riposte! These pigs are just after cost-effective exploitation of resources and those “resources” are dummies just like you.

No job is going to be as amazing and rewarding as that buoyant recruiter pretends it to be. Unless they are literally saving kids or dolphins or forests, most enterprises are just a bunch of opportunists getting in the middle of an inefficient-by-design process to take their cut. That includes chatty recruiters with posh accents.

I finally decided to stop mingling with a workforce after a short last stint with a firm in New York City. It was back in the Before Times and I moiled from home in Jersey but was invited—forced—to go to the place every Monday, a Midtown Manhattan office peopled with all the personages: the loud lady foaming over her sister’s boys (with accompanying coworkers’ oohs and aahs), the swaggering CEO babbling about his incredible trips to the most exotic places (it was all superlatives with this imbecile), the parasitic and obnoxious supervisor strutting out imaginary accomplishments in his charts (a real-life Komiya), and the surrounding, miscellaneous assortment of suckers. You know the place.

Sick of this travesty of a business I quit but the CEO offered me a raise and I took it (I take no shame in that), stayed for a few more months and when he found a couple of planks to replace me, then he fired me. Right at the time the COVID-19 roller coaster was about to start. Classic dick move, classic NYC CEO. Good—that was my mark to switch from auditioning for employment to picking which project, if any, was worthy of my attention.

A few weeks later I started on what should be my final salaried job and five minutes after accepting the offer I was already savoring the day I’d quit.

And that’s how, after mountains of gigs and charlatans, I’m more than ready to deep-six the stupid idea of being the right fit for a bullshit job. Are you?

Five steps to not being hired

Still here? Neat. A peculiar one you are.

Here are the five steps I recommend you follow in your future interviews; they’ll short-circuit the pretense and, I assure you, definitely won’t get you the job. Thank me later.

1. Don’t bother talking. There are tons of spammy recruiters out there firing off a boatload of canned messages (“I was impressed with your experience building impactful platforms at Crappy Corporation”) and they are desperate to catch a new peon—you—to exchange for their commission.

So when you receive that suspiciously upbeat message don’t waste time in a meeting—you haven’t been chosen because you are that lucky or that special—and just respond with an email including your résumé, expected salary and conditions. Make it clear that you don’t have the hours or the patience for long examinations with a dozen people and that a couple of conversations and proof of your experience is all you’re willing to offer.

Remember: it is you who is picking so be blunt. Back in my days of shooting cover letters I did this around the fourth paragraph so I know it works: never got a job.

2. Expose the sham. Interviewers will smile, nod, and agree with you in almost everything. Actors, all of them, told ya. Shatter the illusion by asking some simple question, “How much is your budget for this role?,” and when they dodge it yakking about values and processes and how, at the end, it’s all up to Jake, their messianic leader, cut them short. “Thank you, I know the darn drill. Pass.”

Anybody expecting you to believe they are running a bussiness without knowing how much they can spend on personnel is taking you for a fool, a fool who won’t see that these leeches are just trying to enslave idiots to extract maximum labor at the minimum cost.

3. Be honest. The best answer to the question “Why do you want to work here?” is the truth: “I’ve heard this company pays currency in exchange for the performance of services so I want to get some to avoid living in the streets.” There’s no need for empty flattery and it’s okay to say you are leaving your current job for a better salary or due to disagreements with bossy cretins or because you are bored—you can tick the three, be my guest.

4. State your conditions. They don’t care but will ask, “What are you looking for in your next job?” This is your chance to entertain your vis-à-vis with your fancy. No need to worry, they won’t hire you anyway.

“Why, just the usual, a challenging, meaningful, and worthy problem; smart coworkers; independence to make my own decisions; a fair salary with all the benefits; a 32-hour week; and no unnecessary meetings or bureaucracy. But before we continue I’ll need the contact details of a few former employees to ask them what is like to work for you.”

5. Paint your future. And here’s when they ask, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Go ahead, tell them. “I’m financially independent and I’m playing music, writing, or drinking a beer at my beach house. Every. Single. Fucking. Day.”

As Hans Landa would say, “Oooh, that’s a bingo!”

I predict with a 98.51% certainty that you won’t get the damn job. Cheer up, at least you’ll receive plenty of nicely-worded and very automated messages praising your awesomeness and wishing you luck in all your future endeavors. You can now move on with the next chapter of your life.

No more appeasing the beast

Now, hear me out: this is fine. You’ve got nothing to prove to anybody, you never had. Got the skills, got the experience, got the attitude? That’s all that matters. You are just a critical thinker and are not afraid of speaking up; both are signs of a healthy human being.

I still have traces in my mind of the last interview I took. The lad said, “I’ll give you an overview of the company and the role, then you can tell me about your experience and what you’ve been up to recently and I’ll answer any questions you may have at the end. Sounds good?”

“No. It doesn’t. I already read about the role and the company so I know you want to track everything users do online and sell their data to the best bidder (an originality contest you schmucks won’t win) so I’d prefer it if you just describe the hiring process.”

“Oh… okay (I wanted to waste thirty minutes of your life to pretend I’m doing real work). You must first complete a take-home project, it shouldn’t take you more than three or four hours so you can do it over your weekend (we don’t care). Somebody here will review it and decide if you make it to the next step. Then you’ll go through a technical interview and some coding exercises with the engineering team, a cultural fit interview with the business team, and, if you make it this far, a one-to-one conversation with our magnanimous and oh-so-busy leader. We’ll evaluate your performance against all other candidates and circle back. It shouldn’t take more than three or four weeks.” Of your miserable, expendable life, despicable vermin, he may have added, for giggles.

“Pass.”

And that’s what I call a ten-out-of-ten interview. You don’t have to explain your reasons for not wanting to be another smiling servant. If these people can’t see through their own bullshit that’s their problem.

You’ve spent years designing and writing software for others to make their fortunes while they throw a few coins your way; I’d wager that you have what it takes to get rid of the constant pressure of a normie job and to work and live however the fuck you want. You don’t need these bloodsuckers. “Oh, you want the app to be cooler and faster? Tell you what, Mr. Big Shot, why don’t you program it yourself?”

Focus your energy and your time on what matters to you, screw them all and do your thing—it’s such a liberating feeling. I know you can do it but most importantly: you know you can do it.

Kuato said it best: “Start the reactor. Free Mars.”

Finally Out

2021-06-19T10:27:00-04:00

I did it. After a decade of being on a payroll I quit what most chumps would consider a comfortable tech job.

I was sick of wearing the obedient employee masquerade in exchange for cold money while life passed me by. I’ve got better places to wander around, nicer people to be with, and plenty of ideas to shape, so here’s where I start anew.

But this is not a sudden action, I’ve been planning my return to freedom for years. In fact, I’d started working on my own long before my move to the North, when I was captured again by the nine-to-five monster. I attempted my first escape in 2018 and got some interesting clients—including one on Museum Mile, in Manhattan’s Upper East Side—but the government shutdown of 2018–2019 shook things a bit and I took a full-time gig at an early-stage startup.

I spent a year and half there, built their product from zero, and when the people running the show raised a few million bucks from some deep pockets and turned the arrogant-son-of-a-bitch-capitalist dial to the max I knew it was my time to walk out. That was early 2020 and a certain pandemic was just getting started.

Well done, contumacious rat, I realized thirty seconds later, horrendous timing skills.

That’s when for a final time—dear Satan, I hope so—I went through the standard mating rituals to get a position at another teeny startup to ride the storm, and what a storm it’s been. I did my usual best and spent a few months turning a messy codebase into a solid, production-ready application.

About two o’clock last Tuesday I resigned. Man, it felt so good.

I see dead squirrels

For the next few months I’ll focus on a couple of projects I’ve been cooking up for a while. One of them involves writing—I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with my drivel—and the other has to do with software, finances and squirrels.

I’m also setting aside some hours in case some interesting contract work shows up.

But generally I’m okay with meandering—I’ve had enough of the everyday pressure and rushing—and augur gales of merriment so I’ll keep you all updated, my three dear readers.

As for you, monkey wrenches, I’m ready, you suckers, give me your best shot.

Got a Favorite Day of the Week, Go Figure

2021-06-21T09:13:00-04:00

For most of my adult, salaried life I’ve distrusted Friday. You know why: they are sneaky, they are a mirage, they make you think that you’ve got your life back. But just for a speck of time.

You can tell there’s something fishy about the Fri when the company men and women putting the monies to buy your forty hours of abject servitude—if you are lucky—start inviting you to ridiculously named events: happy hour, fun Friday, bring your lizard to work day. “Oh, boy!” chortles the resident sycophant. “Do I love fun Friday!”

Most of these occurrences are a mixture of empty conversations, boring games, alcohol, cookies and—sometimes—ice cream.

Ice cream? Fucking love ice cream!

Beware, what comes next is something I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy—Saturday.

That’s it, stop smirking, you know where this is going.

Let’s pretend you have a life

Saturday is a bitch. You may have plans ready to enjoy it to the fullest with your tribe or, like me, you have fingers (types “things to do on Saturday near my location”). Whatever the case that clock is ticking. You better run, have fun, pronto. Oh, and allow me to remind you—that laundry won’t wash itself.

There goes your Saturday, Timmy.

And now it’s Sunday and who cares; it will just fade away. Shouldn’t even count as a real day and whoever invented it deserves to spend it in the boats. Do not google that if you like what you are eating (here, help yourself).

You won’t even be done complaining about Sunday before Monday is back at your door yelling and demanding for your total attention and remaining reserves of oxygen and patience.

“Teeemeee! Accounting needs your budget report by EOD, care to share your ETA?”

But that’s not me anymore. I have a new friend now, my favorite day of the week, and his name is Mr. Monday.

Is it possible to learn this power?

Not from a normal job, my friend. If you’ve chosen—or got no choice and must just follow—the way of the sarariman that’s how the weekends go. As the saying goes, this is your life now, adopt fetal position.

My only suggestion on this beautiful, sunny, summer Monday morning (see accompanying photograph) is plain: quit that job today.

I know it sounds easier than it is but I promise I’m releasing more detailed and practical advice in the coming days.

It’s not my intention to make fun of how much your life sucks—a lot—but to offer a glimpse of the possibilities, starting with something as simple as not hating your present day. Every second of your life, of everybody’s life, is precious, and you shouldn’t sacrifice it to the best bidder.

I’m just starting my first free week, what looks like the first great Monday of my life, and am already working on what’s important to me. I’m in such a delighted mood that I’ll dare throwing an old simile: I’m as happy as a clam.

Now, if you excuse me, I’ve got plenty of fun things to do with Mr. Monday. Oh, look, ice cream!

I’ll see you around.

Bootstrapping in a Pandemic

2021-11-12T14:35:00-05:00

It’s been only five months since I regained my independence but it feels like years. I’ve been setting up the foundation for a little project of mine, partaking in online communities, and enjoying the thrill of working at my own pace and having a purpose. I’ve got plenty to do and no intentions of going back to the stale world of normalcy.

Fancy a vicarious peek? Here’s what I’ve been up to.

The worst horse to bet on

A mere seven seconds after burning the ever fragile bridge to comfortable employment and salary, I panicked. Even knowing I’d got the chops and experience to make a living out of designing and writing software, I fretted about running out of money. So, with the bleak memories of a servile past hanging over my head I spoke with a couple of acquaintances to entertain the idea of raising funds. As a pawn in the startup game for years, I was familiar with its rules but had never been the one making the pitch. Brrr, just writing the word makes me tremble with disgust.

It didn’t take long to confirm what I suspected: Nobody’s going to invest in the loon who strives for a good life, despises hustle culture, and opposes showing off and licking boots. “What do you mean you don’t care about making millions? How else do you expect to pay for your espresso machines?”

I get it. Venture capitalists must bet on businesses promising to earn a trillion dollars in six months, businesses led by buzzword-spitting flamboyant dudes—or emotionless humanoids, who cares—willing to utilize whatever means necessary to snatch the attention, data and money of the feeble masses. “I want to create a simple, albeit useful, service. A sustainable, honest job, you dig?” is not gonna make it.

“That’s a lifestyle business, motherfucker!,” they’ll cry aghast pointing their manicured fingers at you. “Phyllis, tell security to remove this piece of garbage from the premises and get me an expensive salad.”

That’s the end of my peek into the world of high finance. On to the interesting bits.

No, not show you, show me the money

I’ve tracked every cent I’ve earned and spent for the past two decades and, like most people who do this, I started with a spreadsheet and then switched to specialized applications, both free and paid. Eventually, I settled on GnuCash.

GnuCash is solid and free open source software that has served me well for years but I find the interface antiquated and I’d like to simplify how I run my numbers so I’m building my own solution, an application to manage a budget, my budget.

My goal is not only to streamline income and expenses tracking but also to answer questions such as can I afford a mortgage, which credit card should I pay off, or when is a good time for the next vacation. I’m also interested in knowing how my magic coins (wink) are doing. Nothing new, nothing spectacular, but it’s an experiment I want to run nonetheless.

If you aren’t chained to a payroll—you are an artist or an independent knowledge worker—and have similar requirements I’d like to enlist your help in a future beta. And that’s all I’m going to say for now, it’s way early and developing good software takes time.

Even the score

I’ve put hundreds of hours into this project, scraping the time over late nights, holidays and weekends as I sold the bulk of my productive days to cheap merchants and marketers, but now that I’m free I want to do things the right way and at my own pace for once. I didn’t get out of one trap to fall into another of my own making—to hell with the arbitrary deadlines, the constant pressure and the disorderly rush.

With no more middle managers interfering or big shots shifting plans whenever their golf buddy sputters jargon heard on Bloomberg, I can focus on what’s important for my application and its users. So far I’ve completed the basics for a scalable and reliable infrastructure, a suite of tests, and a simple but secure user authentication framework, and now I’m working on the initial design and data visualization elements. There’s a ton to do and I’m taking all the time I need to produce a useful piece of software that I can be proud of.

Security and usability are my priorities now that I no longer have to put up with the individuals at the helm of scrappy operations for whom those are an afterthought residing at the bottom of delusional nice-looking roadmaps. “You can do that later when we get more money and people but today we need to get customers and show something, anything, to investors. Fake it till you make it.” I won’t be a part of such charlatan schemes anymore. Why would anybody use software that not even the creators care about?

I want to make a tool that saves you time and money, that does exactly what it says it does, and if I can’t do that I won’t release anything at all. No gimmicks. You are already swamped by too many services with opaque agreements that nobody reads handing the history of your life to the highest bidder. “Get out of debt with a loan from our shark—we mean, banker—friends.”

Bootstrapping and going solo is risky, taking all the time you need to do it right, even riskier, but I prefer it over the forty weekly hours—if lucky—of interactions with incompetent cultish sycophants for whom turning a profit and appeasing the masters are the ultimate goals.

Doing it with gusto

I’m not banking on this project to sustain me; hence I have the luxury of taking detours to learn and explore—it’s work but not a job, just how I like it.

One of these detours got me deeper into the NFT world. “You mean the jpegs that sell for millions but you can right click to save?” Exactly, and if you have to ask you are probably in the wrong place. Those who follow me on Twitter should have noticed the shower of acronyms and copious yakking about vampires, space bears, and colorful—some may say, wonky—charts. I had been delving into blockchain software development for some time but joining the crypto and NFT communities brought back the fun of being online. To make it clearer: IYKYK.

“Oh, like Slack with my stiff coworkers?”. Such a joker. No.

It’s now evident that even if old white males who never seem to die continue to accumulate money and influence, the blockchain has already broken many barriers. Those in control of centralized industries are crying variations of “somebody do something” to their daddies in power while designers, programmers, writers, musicians—crafters and artists with brains and passion—realize that they don’t need the complex apparatus of money suckers and inefficient institutions to make a living.

It all reminds me of the early 1990s when just having a modem gave you access to a future that few forsaw. What happened with the Internet back then is now happening again but at a much faster rate.

My other detours have to do with writing and art so I’ll let those tell the story later.

And that’s my 411 so far.

Bereft of any obligations to follow some curmudgeon’s inane wishes, lest they tell accounting to hold my paycheck, I’m just chilling and I regret fucking nothing.

Fear Not the Age of the Blockchain

2021-12-11T16:11:00-05:00

The Man is scared. The machine that pushes commuters into the guts of blocky edifices every morning and every day is marshaling its hordes to oppose a revolution that has no face, no headquarters, and no intentions of stopping.

The soldiers of the system are doing what they usually do best with their limited reasoning skills and abundant numbers: parrot whatever their commanders utter. Will it continue to work?

“So it is like magic money?” “a rock, the actor?, a drawing of a rock for a million?” “a bubble, it’s a bubble!”

And their favorite these days: the environment. Of course, Mr. Big Oil and Bank, you’ve always worried about that, haven’t you?

No. This goes beyond magic, rocks and bubbles. This is about who’s in control, this is about us and them.

The age of the blockchain has only just begun.

We, uhhh, lost some people this week and we sorta need to play catch-up

Remember when COVID-19 first hit—the year is in the name—and a part of humanity thought they were going to work from home at their own pace while their kids played around? The way of the future had finally arrived for a few lucky ones. Ah, good times … for about two weeks.

“Hello?, oh, yes, hello, sir. You need it stat? OK … of course, not a problem. No, no, I wasn’t sleeping. Good night, yes, yes. Night, sir.”

“Who was that?”

“Nothing, don’t worry, go back to sleep. I’ve got something to finish.”

“But Steve, it’s three-fucking-A-M!”

The powers that be were quick to snake their way into lunches, bedrooms and weekends everywhere and didn’t take much time before declaring that remote work was a failure—and you too, online education. As usual, the opportunity to try a different way was rapidly discarded; soon after, the sheep began returning to their barns.

But not all of them. A few of us had spent years exploring our options at the intersection of software, cryptography, anarchism, and economics; we were just waiting to break free at the earliest sign of a crack.

This was it.

Shouting Ponzi from the rooftops

Scroll today’s news and you’ll find one more story about Bitcoin plunging—it’s usually Bitcoin as that’s what ignorance likes to do, putting everything and everybody new and different in the same bag.

Can’t the mass media see the irony of being so slow that by the time their dramatic reportages reach the audience any dip has already passed? It doesn’t matter; the stories are designed to soothe the gen pop as the status quo is always favorable to those who dominate and those barely making it feel good with everything staying just the same, lest they have to make an effort to adapt.

It’s in the nature of an absurd number of humans to attack what they can’t understand and reject the activities in which they can’t participate and thus the opportunity for those who dare to break ranks, who take the time to study and understand instead of maniacally regurgitating what the pundits feed them.

Nietzsche once said that “to the mediocre, mediocrity is a form of happiness,” and unfortunately everybody wants to be happy. Or, as the Controller said in Brave New World: “People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.”

Non-fungible what?

A blockchain is software that keeps a list of transactions grouped in blocks, each one cryptographically linked to the previous one. It’s also a network of computers replicating this digital public ledger around the world so that no single entity has full control. A decentralized system designed to be fault tolerant and guarantee the integrity of its data.

Many blockchains can can also store and run applications, called smart contracts, and this is where glimpses of the revolution come to light. Don’t get confused by the word contract as it has nothing to do with laws; it’s a contract in the sense of “if you do this then I’ll do that,” which is what software programming is all about.

An NFT is a record created and stored in the blockchain. We call this record a token and the process of its creation minting. An NFT can be transferred to an account and that account becomes its owner.

What’s special about NFTs is in that second letter. Unlike money or stocks, which are fungible, hence interchangeable for any other of the same type and value, a token that is not fungible is unique and distinguishable, like a collectible stamp or toy, so if you own token #69 of an NFT collection nobody else can own it.

Each NFT may include a set of attributes (properties describing what it stands for) and a representation that can be a small image stored on-chain, any type of media in off-chain storage, or even a physical asset.

NFTs are not just about their representation—although many of them are and that’s just fine, that’s a great looking sneaky vampire, by the way—-but also about transfer mechanisms and proof and history of ownership, all without the intervention of third parties. Everything that happens, happens between one account belonging to one person and the blockchain.

Oh yeah, there are plenty of reasons for bankers, realtors, insurers, car dealers, all kinds of in-betweeners, and even governments, to be scared. Entire bureaucracies and industries are at risk of losing their victims. Isn’t that beautiful?

This is just my rudimentary summary but there are resources online with much better explanations of how a blockchain works and what an NFT is so please do your own research and only jump in when you have a clear understanding of what you are getting into.

Never gonna make it

A few days ago an article was posted on The Telegraph, aptly named for the occasion, that resulted in Pak describing it as how to NGMI 101.

If you don’t know who or what Pak is and what NGMI means then you have a lot more learning to do, as has the author of that piece. She doesn’t mention anything about ownership, decentralization or smart contracts, and I’m not giving her the benefit of the doubt—she’s definitely trolling.

The world has seen so many iterations of the same story that I find it astounding that most are still so slow to react when change is about to break. In the final years of the nineteenth century the public marked those who wanted to replace horses with cars as imbeciles, in the 1940s the president of IBM predicted a world market for five computers, and in 1995 Bob Metcalfe, one of the inventors of Ethernet, predicted the Internet would suffer a catastrophic collapse in 1996.

Of course there’s an element of difficult-to-see-the-future-is in these stories—my bearded avatar had to abandon his Second Life house when I joined Twitter in 2006 as it was too early for a metaverse back then—but let’s not forget the role of the special interests with much to lose, the Buffets and the Dimons of the world, who know they are going the way of the travel agent.

Wake up, fear not, and remember: The weapons of the next revolution won’t be molotov cocktails and clubs but communities and knowledge, and those, those can crumble any empire.

Of Pelicans and Clouds

2022-01-17T12:35:00-05:00

My monthly hosting bill for running this website has hovered around $0.52 for the past couple of years. The way I do it is an example of how I’m trying to survive without a conventional job while keeping my people and the cats fed. Especially the cats.

This is a short one but it contains a couple of tips for the shrewd ones and may save you some green.

Ancient blogger on the loose

I began to share my thoughts on the web in 2004, around the time the world replaced the verb write with blog, and like most early adopters I started with Movable Type and moved on to WordPress soon after. Throughout the years and depending on the projects I was working on I migrated to other content management systems, like Drupal, and later developed a blog application using Python and Django, like everybody else into publishing and web frameworks.

Along the way I tried many hosting options, from crappy boxes running Apache at home to very expensive dedicated servers, and eventually settled for a few years on a setup running off two AWS Linux instances with Nginx and Gunicorn behind a load balancer and a PostgreSQL database for about fifty dollars a month. And it was just fine until the containers revolution knocked on my door and then I had to configure a few Docker images and put everything inside a Kubernetes cluster to get some of that automation and fault tolerance everybody was speaking of. Just like that I had passed the hundred-dollar mark in monthly hosting costs. I was content and twelve hundred down a year.

But I didn’t do all of that just to serve my prose to a few visitors, no, this has always been my playground, the space where I tried different web development and infrastructure ideas. No matter if it’s writing, making music, programming or taking photos; it’s all an experiment all the time and you must keep on learning. It’s not wasting time and money—it’s evolving and adapting.

And now that I’m using those chops and experience to bootstrap an application and continue the exploration into fintech and Web3 I’ve decided it’s time to return to the basics—and the cheapest—for this writing corner of mine.

I’m going static.

The careful management of resources

I’ve reserved the esoteric knowledge and expensive resources for my more complex projects and got rid of unnecessary complexity and migrated to a static website generator, Pelican, for this blog.

These changes have helped me to reduce the monthly cost from a little more than a hundred dollars to just around fifty cents. This is how it works.

I type all my silly words into reStructuredText, just plain text with some markup, and Pelican creates HTML files that I can preview on a local HTTP server and host wherever I want. And as I don’t need a database I don’t have to worry about caching or intricate optimizations anymore.

I’ve always crafted not just my code but also my stories in text editors—Vim for as long as I remember and Visual Studio Code nowadays—so I can use just one Git repository to keep track of content, code and configuration, and do my writing on any decent computer. It’s a very portable and convenient setup.

To make my life easier I put Pelican in a Docker image and included a Bash script to automate content generation and deploying to Amazon S3 and CloudFront. That’s cheap fault tolerance for yuh.

Do I need a little extra? Perhaps a contact form so that a friendly reader—or some spammer bastard—can hit me with an email message once every few moons? Not a problem, I’ll just throw in a little React, a short AWS Lambda function with an API Gateway call to SES and look, I got your letter.

“Yes, but now you are locked to Amazon, you idiot!”

Thank you for the comment, hostile imaginary reader. That’s right, I have to rely on the services of Jeff and company but who doesn’t? And I’m just managing a bunch of text files with very little code and dependencies so I can easily port everything anywhere (all right, all right, to Google Cloud).

As my days of working with those who just threw money at every problem are over, I have to be frugal and every penny I save is a very precious penny. I can continue sharing my gibberish with the universe and I’m still in control.

My using a static website generator to run Zinibu may not sound like much but I see it as a good example of what I’m trying to do with more demanding endeavors: use my wits and skills instead of money to get as far as I can.

If everything goes according to plan I may continue making a living answering to no one.

It better works; it’s seven already and I can hear the cats’ dirty paws scratching the door.

Faces on the Blockchain

2022-01-21T15:15:00-05:00

I’ve been collecting art, land, monsters and many other objects and creatures as NFTs on multiple blockchains for about a year now so it was about time for a first attempt at launching a project. I’d like to introduce you to such a project, a lovely collaboration that started at home.

It’s not a coincidence that this announcement comes a few days after stating my thoughts on the blockchain revolution that is already here but only a tiny group has been able to grasp. I received messages from puzzled readers wondering how I could write about freedom and anarchism and also be in favor of evil jpegs of apes polluting the planet and those questions only tell me that plenty of people have a lot more reading and learning to do; I truly hope they do that.

Today, I’m not here to retort but to share the news.

The experiment

The project is called Faces and is a small set of oil, acrylic and pastel paintings that my wife, Yesenia, created between 2016 and 2019, and that we are selling as NFTs on Tezos, an energy-efficient blockchain with low transaction costs and a thriving community of artists, collectors, and programming and economics wizards.

Yesi did all of the hard work and I just nudged her to let me grab my camera, take some shots and do some light photo editing—the goal was to reproduce them as close to the originals as possible. The collection is composed of ten pieces but the marketplace we’re using, Objkt, will list them as eleven as I made a mistake and minted one, Hungry for More, twice.

We have listed two paintings as unique editions, one as five editions, and the rest are all in editions of fifteen, except Hungry for More with thirty. The prices start at 2.5 XTZ (around $9 as of January 2022) so anybody, including those new to digital art and NFTs, should be able to catch one piece.

And what about the originals? They are safe with us but who knows, they may eventually find their way to some of our collectors’ cribs.

Pak recently said on a Twitter Space that “creators create collectors.” We hope this first experiment of ours does just that.