mateusfreira

I wanted to learn rust deeply, and it would be impossible to do so if I had not started NunDB. On Nundb, I can work 10 hours a week or no hours at all without any problem. If I have one hour to code, that is enough for me to do something on NunDB, it requires much more coding than my other two activities, and I still only have a hand full of people using it and only one single critical application, so there I can experiment, learn, have fun.

A big part of learning is making mistakes and learning from them. As you grow in seniority, mistakes become more expensive in money and or stress. Trying new things on stable products in big companies is hard. So how do we keep learning? How do we get updated? How do we try new stuff to be seniors on it five years from now? Run a side non-commercial project.

Why no commercial? I will get deeper into this soon, but if people are paying for it, downtime, bugs, and instability are not quite acceptable. While learning, you probably have all of those, sometimes multiple of them, at the same time.

After reflecting on an incident with my friend for a long time, I came to realize that taking days off every once in a while is not enough, and what maybe have saved me from burnout all these years is my habit of taking time off every day.

I have lots of activities out of work, for example, going to the gym three times a week, writing this blog, making Youtube videos, running my farm fishing business, reading consistently, and running my own SaaS and Open-source projects. Those are all self-imposed restrictions to get out of work on time and put my mind and body into different activities. Every day, I do something out of work for at least 2 hours, and I restrict work for the time it needs to be restricted. Once I started doing that, my productivity increased drastically even tho I started working fewer hours.

Worth noting that all my other activities outside of work are not time-sensitive, which means I can do them when I have time, and if I need more dedication for something, I can easily make it fit into my agenda. For that, I use the 2 days rule (I am allowed to skip any of that activity once but not twice in a row). This is important because having a hard agenda can increase your chances of burnout. The only hard activity I have in my schedule is to work 8 hours 5 days a week. The others I can move to best fit my needs that week.

My life hack to do it to Have a daily “Hour of something.” Having a personal routine helps you achieve goals out of work on a daily bases. I recently introduced two new routines in my day.

One hour of cleaning where every day. For this hour, I will clean or organize something in my house. This one hour helps my digital detox and cleans my mind. I liked the cleaning because it is practical and infinity and it gives me a sense of compliment, as a side effect my house is cleaner and neater.

The next, I am still incorporating, but I call the “hours of reading,” and it is 30 minutes at the moment. After lunch, I take 30 minutes to read a book instead of jumping back to work. This moment is when I calmly sit in the middle of the day and turn off my mind not to think about work; with that, I can keep up with my reading and learn something new.

These two routines grantees me at least 1:30 hours a day of not working and gets my mind and body back to a normal state. I usually do my “cleaning hour” after work, so I use it as the commute back home time. Since I work from home, it takes me 30 seconds to disconnect from work, and I do not want to bring to my personal life any stress I collect over my day of work.

I think it is very challenging to get this good on an app, and I try to use other apps with no success multiple times. Vim wins year after year

These friends are also coders tho. They don't have interests (neither do I at the moment) into became part of the business. I told them openly in case I died, they could open-source the project or take over the project. Passwords I keep with my wife / direct relatives so they can contact them to just take control of the project.

However, open-sourcing would probably be enough for some of my customers to run the system by themselves. With the code and getting the access by contacting my relatives, these friends can potentially take the project and continue supporting my current customers.

I just blog about stuff I am doing or reading, some rust some js other stuff

Unfortunately, we end up not moving forward with it because we need new ingestion to be available super quickly. I hope to see new versions improving that too.

Thanks for the list of competitors. I will take a look at them

Agree 100% on the "Best docs before tests before code"