Rambling while ambling
In this week’s episode, I take a light-hearted approach to discussing the physics of productivity. I’ll highlight some of the more popular rules that govern us and how our awareness of them can improve our work
Show Notes:
• Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)
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Photo by Roman Mager on Unsplash
In this week’s episode, I talk about the need to understand relative impact. From seat reclining and font sizes to access ramps and viral infections, I discuss how empathy is an effective tool in understanding how things that aren’t a “big deal” to us can be huge issues for others.
“Being a calming voice in a sea of panic is one thing. Being reductive and dismissive is another.”
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In the latest retrospective, I share my latest experience with equipment failures abroad and how rewards/punishment have been affecting my weekly commitments. Whats a bigger motivation, 500 burpees or apple pie and ice cream dessert?
Show Notes:
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I’d love to hear from you. Reach out with comments, feedback or show ideas on Twitter or Instagram
I’ve had to learn to become more comfortable with the ending of things.
I haven’t always gotten the endings that I’ve wanted.
I’ve often tried to keep things going just to avoid an unpleasant ending.
I’ve also returned to situations I should’ve left alone in order to “fix” the previous ending.
But that’s not how things work.
Some things end on a high note. Some things end in a messy way.
But regardless, they’ve end.
I’ve had to accept the fact that sometimes, the last conversation I had with someone is the last conversation I’ll ever have with them.
Sometimes, it’s because it’s not possible to have another conversation.
Sometimes, it’s because there’s nothing left to be said.
But I still had to move on.
There’s always another ending to face.
Until the last one.
And getting comfortable with that may be the hardest thing.
At Monterrey waiting for my laptop repair when I saw this sign at a coffee stand. I took the photo because it’s only the 2nd one I’ve seen in my time here. As I took the photo, a woman and her friend approached me and asked me to explain it. It’s one thing to have a conversation about the weather in Spanish and quite another to try to explain crypto currency and digital wallets. I explained that I don’t currently have any and she jokingly replied that she’d let me know how it works out for her. 🤣
#everydayconversations #hablaespañol #medellin #paisas #meencantalagente #bitcoin #cryptocurrency #colombia
I often meet people who struggle with ideas when trying to create passion or side projects. As someone who has the opposite problem, I’ll share some of the techniques I use to come up with ideas in the latest episode.
Show Notes:
You can listen to the Cocoa Nomad Podcast on the following services:
I’d love to hear from you. Reach out with comments, feedback or show ideas on Twitter or Instagram
My uncle coached youth baseball for a number of years and he left a huge impact on the way I handled myself and players when I started coaching. In this episode, I talk about how that influence has impacted my work as well.
• Give yourself the time and space to learn. There are enough stress/distractions on the playing field (i.e. at work). Kids are hearing their teammates, their parents and the opposing team. Likewise, you’ve got the voices of all of your responsibilities vying for your attention. All of these voices create a significant amount of noise and it’s very hard for signal to get through.
• Proper practice makes you prepared. The more preparation done in practice, the less there is to think about on the field. This preparation includes not only focus on technique but contingency plans and working under duress. The reason teams practice hurry-up offense and audibles is because the conditions won’t always be ideal.
• Leave the judgement on the practice field. Mechanical thinking during game time is counterproductive. My biggest flaw in golf was that I was overly focused on position during play. Instead of simply trusting the process that I’d established in practice, I was judging myself as I was doing it.
• Have fun at practice. The time you spend honing your craft doesn’t have to be dour or onerous. I grew up with coaches yelling at us with colorful language but we also had fun even as we were working hard. Make sure that you make room for that in your practice. Balance is key.
You can listen to the Cocoa Nomad Podcast on the following services:
I’d love to hear from you. Reach out with comments, feedback or show ideas on Twitter or Instagram
In the latest retrospective, I share my excitement about the launch of my YouTube channel, how fun it’s been to build a SwiftUI app for Menus Del Día and my progress with doing training in Spanish.
Show Notes:
You can listen to the Cocoa Nomad Podcast on the following services:
I’d love to hear from you. Reach out with comments, feedback or show ideas on Twitter or Instagram
I came across a post on Facebook, in which you’re challenged to provide the “correct” answer. Normally, I would bypass these as I don’t have much time in the day-to-day work to engage but I had a build that was particularly slow so I “play”
“Which one has two zero and two four?”
I’ve recently started taking formal Spanish lessons again to improve my public speaking and I looked at the question a bit differently. As I started thinking about the solution, I was taken back to my sophomore year of college at the North Avenue Trade school, when I changed my major from Computer Engineering to Computer Science. That summer, I stayed in Atlanta and took a pivotal class, CS1411. It was there that I met 3 of my best friends. It was in this class that I started learning about parsers by way of building an operating system over the course of the class.
Let’s break the sentence down or in compiler-speak apply a lexical analyzer, parsing the components (tokens) in order to make sense of it
“Which one has” – this is equivalent to a query/filter command, returning a single result similar to:
• “SELECT TOP 1” in SQL
• “.first(where: )” in Swift
The correct answer is “It depends”. Let’s look at the ways in which we can interpret the remaining components
The most common interpretation (based on responses) may say that the words TWO, ZERO, TWO & FOUR each represent a LITERAL value. We will also state that AND is a concatenation operator, meaning we simply combine it with the preceding value(s)
With this interpretation, we get “2024” and B is correct
Let’s now say the first number represents a COUNT operator and the following number represents a LITERAL value. We will maintain the rule that AND is a concatenation operator, as above.
“Two Zero” would be interpreted as COUNT (“TWO”) followed by a LITERAL number (“ZERO”) meaning “2 of the literal value (0)”, which results in “00”. Similarly, “Two Four” would be interpreted as “44”
With this interpretation, we get “0044” and C is correct
Imagine that our AND did more than just concatenate, which makes sense as it feels unnecessary in the prior examples. The values can simply be returned, negating the need for the AND (Think “me llamo Alondo” instead of “me llamo es Alondo”)
Instead, consider AND behaving as switch operator, moving between modes of the LITERAL and COUNT/LITERAL interpretations.
• COUNT/LITERAL “2 of the literal value (0)”
• AND (switch modes from COUNT/LITERAL to LITERAL)
• LITERAL(“24”)
With this interpretation, we get “0024” and A is correct
For me, this was a simple reminder that there are often more than “2” sides to something and that the “correct” answer is usually context dependent. It’s important to pay attention to the factors that impact interpretation and therefore resulting outcomes.
