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I’m on PTO for a few days because Iggy had surgery on Thursday and because it was high time I took some vacation for myself. I want to enjoy my time off, but also I really struggle with how productive I should be when I’m out of my normal day-to-day. Work productivity is unaffected and not something I worry about — The Man is a well-oiled machine and already has mechanism in place for planning what to do with my wage-labour. I’m more worried about the labour I do in the remaining “free” time. I was raised on capitalism, so my habits are bad and my sense of what feels “right” is out-of-whack.

From time-to-time I revisit David Allen’s Getting Things Done — I think I own several copies at this point over various forms of media — and today I followed the advise of one Wheezy Waiter to try the summary of the book on Shortform. I’m not done with the first fifteen minute summary yet but already my head is abuzz with what one word implies: “everything”. I have to track and organize “everything”? This book was written in 2001, when “everything” entailed a lot less, even less so if you were an adult at the time and not raised on the Internet. “Everything” for me is sifting through archives of data — probably mostly useless data — and figuring out what’s relevant to what I want to get done. Allen details a very algorithmic approach, but unfortunately that approach runs in linear time (O(n)) and that type of time complexity doesn’t scale well for people. After all, that’s why we have computers.

And is “everything” realistic? I understand the goal of tackling “everything” is having confidence to not lose track of things, and therefore feel safe to jettison thoughts from the brain. My problem with that is obviously the aforementioned scale of “everything”, but also that ADHD will jettison things for me whether or not I want it to. So keeping track of “everything” is as much for me a stress-relief mechanism as it is a survival tool to get anything done at all.

Recently one of my friends created a group calendar for us to organize events we want to go to and ones we have already committed to, and let me tell you: I AM EXCITED. I thought it was worth mentioning here because having that calendar element is crucial to the GTD way of doing things, and was something I used to survive college. I would put every rehearsal and gig in Google Calendar and it was how I could be a successful musician despite not having the discipline to practice. I would also put in work shifts and deadlines for homework.

I still use a personal calendar to organize when I go to scheduled events, but I will admit its usage has withered a bit during the pandemic. So while I’m starting to flex the personal calendar muscle more, I think it’s a good idea to put in personal project deadlines too and block out time for me to work on things. After all, that’s what I did when I rehearsed music, and it’s what basically do when I go to work!

So yeah — I think I’m gonna give this GTD thing another try, and make use of that Todoist subscription I’ve had since forever. I’ll try to muscle past the first part of the book I’ve reread a dozen times — it’s about filing reference items and honestly it’s really boring. I wanna focus on new projects, and those don’t even really have reference items since they’re so new! And everything is digital now so how do I consolidate items from so many different places?

I used to joke I’d write a business book with a bunch of obviously stupid metaphors like “Sea of Despair” and it’d sell really well and that’d be how I make my fortune. Still not ruling it out, but I always think about it any time I revisit a book like GTD.

I had such a fun time with this game. I heard about it being an April Fools’ game but not much else, but it was really a nice, short little free game that had my attention the whole time. It’s mostly a point-and-click murder mystery with a sonic minigame thrown in every now and then when you need to “think” and come to a deduction. There are also accessibility options to make this minigame as easy or difficult as you want / need it to be.

I’m re-visiting indie game dev and this was a satisfying part of that journey. I also recently went to a Bit Bash event this weekend. I’m starting to feel that passion I felt when I quit my cushy software job in 2014 and looked into what it would take to make indie games. I’m excited to see where I end up this time around.

Before the Pandemic, I once saw Chipzel play Bit Bash and it was phenomenal. Since I don’t really know much about writing chiptune music, I did some research and found out she uses Little Sound Dj (LSDJ) for some of her more recent stuff. And also a longgggg time ago I messed around MilkyTracker. So I don’t really know what the point of this post is other than to post some resources and reflect openly about how I want to write video game music. Should I compose it like I’d compose for a music theory class? Should I record some instrumental licks and go from there? I have no idea what I’m doing haha

• Download Little Sound Dj https://www.littlesounddj.com
  • Currently messing with BGB as my emulator
• Milky Tracker https://milkytracker.org
  • I didn’t need a Gameboy emulator when I used it but the interface is similar to other Chiptune programs
• Flat https://flat.io
  • I used to use Sibelius and Finale way back in the day but this is basically the modern version of that

I haven’t been blogging a lot — since the pandemic, really — and my posts have been more focused on the technical rather than on the details of my life. But given the recent collapse of Twitter, I revisited the notion of self-publishing. This blog post made the rounds on Mastodon (yes, I’m on Mastodon), and I resonated with the following:

You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control – and sometimes ownership – of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.

Scott Hanselman, Your words are wasted

As if the Universe wanted to reward me for scratching that itch, I recently regained access to my Flickr account that had all of my old blog photos, and I found my blog backups that in theory should date back to 2005 — the year I started this blog.

Now that I’m older, I know I don’t have the same appetite for “being online” like I did when I was 16. But I want to attempt to re-unify all of the parts of my online presence, even if it’s just gathering the pieces for myself and not publishing them back out to the world.

Growing up, New Year’s Eve used to be an annual tradition of code updates to my blog. I don’t have the same drive that I did back then, but I did get a chance to update my list. Below are the fifty resolutions I want to tackle in 2022:

1. Rock climb more
2. Workout regularly to lose weight
3. Learn Cantonese
4. Learn drums
5. Play more double bass
6. Write more
7. Learn SketchUp
8. Fantasy football site
9. Get new glasses
10. Publish a video game
11. Learn Godot
12. Learn Blender
13. Learn Procreate
14. Practice guitar
15. Learn mandolin
16. TI4 rules app
17. Fix record player
18. Königsberg for a single language
19. Catalog books
20. frame and hang the posters
21. Raspberry Pi project
22. Become a home inspector 
23. Finish movies on scratch poster
24. catalog board games
25. Finish CS masters degree
26. Get a Real ID + renew passport
27. Teach Iggy ASL
28. Practice tarot regularly
29. Re-learn piano
30. Play mahjong regularly
31. Get really good at Excel
32. Revitalize your blog
33. Create a budget!
34. learn a fighting game on a fight stick with decent netcode
35. information radiators for the office
36. Bike more (ebikes or your own)
37. Author a children’s book
38. Get good at using the sewing machine
39. Get good at solving math contest problems
40. Write a D&D campaign 
41. Arduino project to monitor plant soil humidity levels
42. Grace Lee Boggs learning project
43. Start a software co-op
44. Start cooking again
45. Write sheet music regularly
46. Eat healthier
47. Set up Hubitat
48. Learn how to make chiptune music
49. Contribute to civic open-source software
50. learn data viz (https://flowingdata.com/, https://www.kaggle.com/, etc)

It spans from simple to ambitious and everything in-between. We’ll see what sticks!

Told @jcajindos I’m going to “set 50 new year’s resolutions and see what sticks” so now I’m actually making that list hahaha

— ho ho ho mr bass 睿雄 (@HeyMrBass) December 15, 2021

My list is currently at 32 — when I get to 50 I’ll make sure I don’t have any repeats and then probably rank them or something.

One of those items is to give this blog more attention. I’ve written even less in 2021 than I did in 2020, so 2022 could be a great time to turn it around. And even just knowing that I’ll probably use this space to write more tech posts instead of the emo posts of yesteryear — totally fine by me. If anything, it’s a perfect example of narrative documentation that can later be compiled into something more… expository? Is that one of the writing forms we learned in middle school? I swear most of the crap we learned growing up we had to unlearn later because it was taught incorrectly or without the correct context or nuance. Or it was just flat-out racist. (There’s all the obvious “X was omitted from history class” ones but check out just how many tunes you know are actually minstrel songs you never learned the full history of!)

I have the next few weeks off so might do a follow-up post before the end of the year. But if I don’t, have a good rest of 2021 and see you in 2022!

I bought David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) oh so many years ago (I think when I bought my first Kindle!), but I never finished it. I’m sure a big part of it was getting distracted — there’s no denying that — but I think I’m also a bit hesitant to revisit it. “Productivity” is a scary word for me, and I think part of that is its abuse within the framework of capitalism.

I think I’m ready to revisit it now. When I was learning from Manager Tools, I was just beginning my drift even further leftward from my already liberal identity. During that time, I was cognizant of the primary audience being business owners, managers and stakeholders — not the stumbled-into-managerial-role I had at the time. I have a feeling that something similar will hold for GTD, and therefore I need to have a similar approach to learning from it.

So I’m deciding to try out the audiobook version of GTD, which will give me the guide rails I need and also give David Allen’s updated version a chance. I don’t expect him to even mention capitalism, but I do expect a bit more self-awareness. Probably Elizabeth Warren-levels of awareness.

I think my own environment and context has changed significantly enough that the concepts I’m currently tackling — productivity, equity, mental health, neurodivergence, Left ideologies — are driving me to unify them in some way or another. I don’t expect something neat and tidy here, but — in the tradition of Grace Lee Boggs — I think exploring how they’re related will push me to a greater understanding of how we can continue to evolve and push for change.

I recently hopped to a new company a few months ago and am now an individual contributor. And while I’m glad I no longer have to manage people for the time being, I know it will be something I revisit down the road, at either the behest of the company I now work for or my own renewed desire, or perhaps both. I also continue to reflect on how well I managed my teams over the last few years, which is what has prompted recent reflection as well as this blog post.

In 2018 I became a manager for the first time. My boss at the time — who also happened to be our team’s architect, my mentor and now my friend — sent me to Dallas for the Manager Tools Effective Manager and Effective Communicator conferences. It took place over two days, and I learned a lot about how to approach leading and managing a team. Mark Horstman broke down a lot of the myths of management I had inadvertently steeped over time, and expanded upon a lot of the intuitive lessons I had learned but not yet grounded in rationale or experience. His talk at USI gives a good taste of what it was like to not just listen to him, but work with him on management and communication.

In the talk he goes over the four behaviors that matter, and the tools his company developed to enact those behaviors. I’ve listed them below, with the latter in parentheses.

1. Know Your People (One on Ones)
2. Talk About Performance (Feedback)
3. Ask For More (Coaching)
4. Push Work Down (Delegation)

I’ll be honest — I haven’t thought about these in this way since Mark first taught them to me. And for better or for worse, a lot of those behaviors were enacted by the org structure we had at the time. Here’s how my boss fared with these behaviors with me as his direct:

1. He was excellent about doing 1:1s with me and getting to know me. He did them consistently and knew about my interests outside of work as well as how well I was doing with schooling.
2. 1:1s help facilitate this, as did his involvement in our sprint retros. He also filled out and discussed quarterly reviews with me. Each of these feedback loops (weekly, bi-weekly, quarterly) helped me learn from my mistakes.
3. This didn’t happen often, but I would seek out coaching during 1:1s and I remember when I had to have a talk with one of my directs and he challenged me to take that on while stepping outside my comfort zone.
4. Work was naturally pushed down because he was involved with planning our sprints.

At the end of 2018 I got a new boss — a remote boss, an overworked boss, a boss with no prior history working together. During that time I didn’t reflect on these behaviors, but looking back I notice something scary:

1. He was not consistent with 1:1s every week. It took over a month to get them started, and he only started after I kept pushing it. He also frequently canceled 1:1s if he had a meeting with me at some other time during that week, figuring that was a valid substitution. (Narrator: it was not.)
2. Outside of spotty 1:1s, he was not involved with our sprint and therefore had little context for our sprint retros. We had quarterly reviews that were based on a list of accomplishments he had each of us write up and send to him. Then these would be hastily written up and discussed before they were due to HR.
3. This sometimes happened, but instructions were vague and expectations were never set.
4. Work was only pushed down when someone was breathing down his neck. And it never aligned with what our team was doing or with what product wanted, so getting it into a sprint was a mess.

Going back to Mark’s talk, Mark spells out the two most important responsibilities of a manager: results and retention. The first boss did both of these things; the second boss did neither. Which brings me to my next reflection: how well I did as a manager. Without going into another breakdown of the four behaviors, for each of my directs — relationships are with people, not teams! — I can tell you that I was focused so much on retention that I papered over a lot of the bad that my own boss was doing to make my job impossible.

Retention was most important in my eyes because we were bleeding a lot of people in 2018 (both those let go and those looking for greener pastures) and HR wasn’t doing a damn thing to help us hire good candidates. Mark even mentions it — hiring the wrong person is worse than hiring no one at all. But we as a company weren’t trying to do more with less, we were doing less with less with the expectation of more. It was devastating.

Towards the end of my time at that company, I started to focus more on results when I realized that retention of my people wasn’t enough to combat the lack of retention in the rest of the company. That first boss I mentioned — the one who did everything right — was eventually stretched thin and chose to leave, along with most of the other architects in the company. And I soon learned that other teams were bleeding people as well. We got a new CEO halfway through 2019 but by then we had lost a lot of blood and it was going to take time to close the wound and begin to heal. And that’s when I decided to leave.

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I don’t really have a happy ending or anything here. I’m still working through the details and reflecting on where I was and where I am now. I should probably get my copy of The Effective Manager back and maybe even purchase a copy of The Effective Hiring Manager.

I also know it’s two in the morning, so I’m not going to make good decisions right now, especially purchasing decisions. And I’m not currently a manager — I should be focusing on being an effective IC. Which probably means getting better sleep, eating healthier, making sense of my Todoist tasks and sticking to a budget. 🙂

I had a long day at work but because I made a large batch of congee yesterday, I was able to put on Snoopy in Space as soon as I got home and work on getting this blog setup. It runs on Ghost — a version of the blogging software that is much more advanced than the last time I used it. And yes, once again, I’ll eventually move all of my old posts over to this blog.

Edit: I moved to WordPress instead. Something about not being able to do indented Markdown lists and also no POST endpoints for API fun.

Things I'm proud of making in 2019 — my own post-Thanksgiving congee pic.twitter.com/KinKF5iRCi

— 20matchbox20 睿雄 (@HeyMrBass) December 9, 2019

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll write about. I really just know I want to write again. A lot has happened since my last post, especially professionally — I now have a much healthier relationship with my job! And I know that over time, I’ll find my voice again. In the meantime, you’ll just have to get used to me figuring out how to use words again.

Today In-Summary

Today I accomplished:

• Caught-up with an old friend
• held and used a knife correctly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z_d0soK1cI)
• started and finished The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up
• made fried rice I’m really proud of!

More about that fried rice…

The other day I purposefully made more rice than I could eat so I’d have leftovers for fried rice. My mom also made a ham for Christmas and gave me some of it, so I used that for my protein and practiced my knife skills cutting it up. The veggies were frozen. I used soy sauce and oyster sauce and even threw in some butter as advised on “Basics with Babish” (still used a wok, though!). I even thought about how the salts and fats came together in this dish — that’s about all I know since I’m still in the middle of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.

More Generally

It’s 2019. I was thinking about how the year change is arbitrary, but having the time to reflect is still real. Because of Christmas, we’re encouraged to take time off and regroup. I was also reading about the history of the weekend and in summary I just want to say that even though the year-change is arbitrary, the desire to improve is continuous and the act of talking about it now is coincidental.

During my senior year, I set some goals for myself that I wanted to accomplish. I remember how useful it was to frame that year’s projects and reflect on what I was doing. I hope to do something similar this year with completing my thesis, working as a developer, and being healthier with what I eat and how active I become.