I have a spine of a toddler when it comes to losing countless hours to distractions. While I wouldn’t say that I have focus issues, I have noticed that I can easily spend hours on non-essential sites that don’t bring anything to my life. Social media has been one of them. I have always had a pretty weird relationship with social media. A long time ago, I joined Facebook and Instagram because many of my friends and family were already there.

I have always enjoyed reading about other peoples productivity hacks and their workflows, in general, when it comes to whatever they might be doing. I often stumble upon reading on how people manage to maintain an extravagant lifestyle with dozens of different hobbies, interests, and passions with ease. So it makes me wonder how they manage their time to maintain a healthy level of participation in their interests without burning out.

Since the discussion about artificial intelligence has become mainstream, I have started to ponder the possible impacts AI might have on our day-to-day lives. While I work in tech, I come from this “culture and arts” background at least a little bit. I did some theatre when I was young and also have worked with music in one way or another for most of my life. This kind of background has got me thinking about how AI could affect these fields.

Code reading has always been this activity that I’ve just done without really giving any thought to it. But despite this, now, when I look back at this habit, I see it is immensely beneficial. This habit caught my attention when I was reading Peter Seibel’s book Coders at Work, in which there is a section where Peter asks about code reading from his interviewees. It tended to be unanimous amongst his interviewees that code reading is very beneficial.

I’ve lately started to ponder the repercussions of this trend of extravagant architectural choices in the tech industry. Mostly these kinds of options seem to be prevalent in this current era of cloud computing. At least, I seem to stumble upon these regularly when I work with a wide variety of different distributed systems as a DevOps/SRE consultant. Great examples in this kind of trend are various Kubernetes setups in projects where you could easily manage to progress without it or some data infrastructure solution that feels like a sledgehammer for hitting a small nail.