2025-04-09
Day One: My Journaling Journey Begins
A fresh start - I will journal every day. This time for REAL! Every single day I will write my thoughts, express my feelings and document my progress. No excuses! And my journal is not going to be the boring one where people just share what they did during the day, list their wins and losses, complain, rant or use it as a therapist. My journal will of course have all this but it will be with a style! Walltopia's marketing style! It will be a unique journal where I write my thoughts, express my feelings, celebrate my wins, acknowledge my losses and much more. This journal will improve my communication skills. I will be more precise and will explain my thoughts concisely. I will explain complex technical ideas in simple terms that is understandable to different audiences. I will have less misunderstandings with people around me. For this reason I will journal, read out loud whenever I read books and engage in more conversations. Occasionally, I will use chatGPT to help me improve my writings but instead of copy pasting information, I will read, understand it and write myself. This will be true for all the things I read.
Exercises and practices to improve my communication skills:
- journal every day and read out loud what I've written, then record it
- write summary of ideas that I've learned or read about
- reading books out loud
- record myself explaining ideas
Focus: My Greatest Enemy in The Past Year
I start to work or study and then boom! I scroll through instagram, check my phone notifications, open a new tab... All the progress gone, I'm OUT of the zone. And time flies so quickly when I'm OUT of the zone. When I work or study it is much slower - looking at the Pomodoro clock it is as if it's frozen.
I've realized that the trick is not some magical productivity hack or tool (though Pomodoro certainly helps and I will use it). The real trick? Catching myself during the act! Acknowledge that I'm being distracted and do not act on this distraction.
Because here is the thing - once I'm in the zone, I'm unstoppable! Keep pushing it. Once I get it rolling, it rolls by itself. It's a simple flow once I've started it. Hardest part is to start - so don't loose to meaningless distractions.
Use Pomodoro to set and measure goals. Use focus times for focusing!
That's the game!
Focus, flow, reward...
Repeat!
The Long Overdue Plan
No more procrastination! No more delays! Time to execute. Jira tasks are created, planned and estimated. Sprint planning is on and I'll track my progress. Timelines are set. To the moon and beyond!
AI: Engineer's Threat or Hidden Opportunity..
Layoffs, layoffs, layoffs. No need for junior software engineers. AI can do everything a junior can do. Efficiency, cost-cutting, recession. These are all the buzz words I see on LinkedIn, hear from colleagues and what state-of-the art AI owners talk about. Will AI take our jobs?
That I don't know. One thing is sure though - AI will change our jobs. Software engineers, applied scientists, quant researches none of those jobs will be the same. AI brings one of the biggest automation in day to day responsibilities for tech practitioners. Whether it will be able to replace or not, I think it is not with high probability. But this is just my opinion, other people have different take.
What I know is that these are VERY EXCITING TIMES TO LIVE IN. It is the biggest opportunity for developers to increase their productivity by a factor of at least 10. Companies will hire people who are able to use AI and be hyper productive. More people will built more products more efficiently. We live in times where things will move even faster! The task of being able to tell the computer what you really want is even more important. AI can output only what you require it to output!