Category Archives: Personal

Swimming to Focus on a Problem

Yesterday, I wrote about how I use Swimming as Meditation. The extreme solitude afforded by the sensory depravation and the rhythmic repetition of strokes, kicks and breaths keep my mind in the present. Usually I try to think about nothing, but sometimes I decide to use the time to solve a problem.

I start the swimming session with a question. I will keep asking myself the question over and over. It’s similar to Natalie Goldberg’s suggestion in Writing Down the Bones to start your writing practice by repeatedly finishing the sentence “I remember…” She is using this as a prompt to keep you writing. I am using a question as a prompt to generate ideas.

One I use often is “What should I blog about today?” The last time I swam, since I am trying to learn German, I asked myself to name German words I know. The questions that work best can be repeatedly asked and answered—meaning, they prompt me to make a list. It’s hard to have a complex string of thoughts that I can remember without being able to write anything down.

Because I can’t write them down, if I have any good ideas, I have to just keep repeating them to myself until I am done swimming. I try to come up with mnemonics that will make sure I remember them. I number them and incorporate them into my stroke counting. That’s usually good enough to keep it top of mind until I can get to my phone.

It seems like it might be hard to swim and think, but actually it’s easier. If I am doing a 30 minute swim, then I will definitely think for 30 minutes. There is literally nothing else to do.

Swimming as Meditation

I don’t have a regular mediation practice, but I’ve started to think of my swimming sessions as one. When I go into the pool with this frame, it gives the meditation more purpose and the exercise extra meaning. I have intrinsic motivation to do each, and it gets combined.

Before swimming, most of my meditation has been guided by an app. I learned how to do it with Headspace, and then moved onto the Apple Watch Breathe app for lighter guidance. But, I do need some prompt to direct my thoughts. Swimming has that built-in because I need to refocus on the parts of my technique constantly.

Whenever I notice that my thoughts have drifted, I count my strokes, kicks, or breaths—or concentrate on their polyrhythmic interplay. I have a cadence of each I am trying to meet, so counting them makes it more likely that I will do it correctly. I also have a target stroke count per lap, so counting is already a part of my swimming. It incidentally keeps me in a meditative zone.

It also helps that the pool is a sensory depravation chamber. I wear non-corrective goggles and earplugs, so my vision and hearing are dulled to start, and being in the water gives me nothing to see or hear anyway. It’s the only workout I do without any distraction, and so I have been avoiding underwater headphones to keep it that way. This may be the only waking part of my day with extreme/literal solitude.

I picked up swimming again because it’s the central metaphor of my book on tech debt. This meditation frame also applies to coding. When I’m in a coding flow, I must stay present to extend it. Like swimming, the interplay of the purpose of my work and enjoyment of meditation makes me want to keep going.

Applying Program Language Learning Techniques to Learn a Foreign Language

I’m an “expert” in learning programming languages. Just counting languages that I have worked with professionally for at least 5 years, I know more than a dozen and I am 4 years into adding TypeScript to that list. But, I only speak and read one non-programming language, English, proficiently.

Learning traditional languages has not been easy for me. I learned French in school just enough to pass my statewide tests and didn’t retain enough for practical use. I tried DuoLingo for Spanish a few years ago, but felt like I got caught in a rut of naming farm animals.

But now I am planning on going to Germany for vacation this year, and I would like to know more than I do now. I know a little tourist-level German from having to travel there for work regularly in the early 2000’s. Not enough for even a simple interaction, though

Since nothing I have done has ever worked, I want to do something different this time—perhaps building on my programming language learning experience. The easy thing to see is that put serious time and energy behind learning a traditional language. I don’t have that problem with learning programming languages. I usually spend several hours a day using them when I want to learn them. Also, I have external motivation: when I got a .NET job with 0 .NET experience, I needed to learn C# fast, but I was paid to do it.

My motivation will be to have fun experiences when I am in Germany. Most of the time I will be able to use my phone to translate written text (e.g. a menu). If I need to know something quickly, it will likely be because something is being spoken to me. I might want to interact a little better with people in hotels, restaurants, and other tourist attractions (where taking out my phone would be awkward). This means more of a focus on listening exercises.

Finally, when I learn a programming language, I usually start to make something practical early into it. I can do this because I can program already, but for novices, I recommend starting with whatever canonical language book was written by the designer and to generate focused exercises that use only what you know. I’m a novice, so that’s the approach that I think I should take.

So, here’s the skeleton of my plan

  1. Allocate serious time to it.
  2. Convert some of my random YouTube and podcast consumption to German audio content.
  3. Find or generate exercises beyond DuoLingo so that I can practice remembering more vocabulary.

January 2025 Blog Roundup

In January, I posted every day. Here were the themes:

I brought my podcast back. I kept it in season 4, which is about the lessons I’m learning while writing a book about tech debt.

Writing every day is part of my marketing strategy for the book. I outlined that here:

I wrote a bunch of articles about Code Review. I had written If code reviews take too long, do this first in December. Here are some follow-ups.

I did a series of 3 posts about how to triple the number of posts you write:

I wrote a few posts about AI

I’m also proud of this toot:

Post by @loufranco@mastodon.social
View on Mastodon

Which I thought of while revisiting We Keep Reinventing Injection Attacks

I’ve been getting interested in helping entry-level developers more. These posts are what I think about it:

The Lorraine Hotel

I’ve been to Memphis twice, which means I’ve been to the National Civil Rights Museum at The Lorraine Hotel twice. The first time was in the early 90’s and the second time was in 2022. My memory of the first time was that it was just the Lorraine Hotel and walking through it was a fairly short, but powerful experience. After seeing a retrospective of MLK’s life and the 60’s era civil rights movement, I watched a video of his “Mountaintop” speech where he seemed to predict his own death, and then walked to his room, and then to the exit. Everything was quiet. We were within a few feet from where he was shot. I just stood there and let all of it overwhelm me as it should.

A photo of the Lorraine Hotel. There is a flower wreath at the spot of MLK's death. The hotel has been preserved to what it looked like then with two cars from the time parked outside.

A Tale of Two Blogs

I have a blog here (the one you are reading) and another at App-o-Mat. This one is on WordPress, and App-o-Mat used to be a Django site, but is now a static site generated by that Django app, which I run locally. I had to do this because my hosting company sunset their support for Django, and I didn’t want to pay for better hosting.

So, for this blog, all I have to do to write a post is login, tap the “Add a Post” button and type type type until I am happy with the post. For App-o-Mat, I have to do a bunch of steps I forgot to write down. I think I could figure it out—it was something like:

  1. Run the Django app locally following the steps in the README (this will have a side-quest of getting Python environments figured out again)
  2. Go to the Admin and add a post entity to my DB
  3. Use curl (I think) or maybe wget to crawl the whole site and dump HTML
  4. I should probably diff this against the site to make sure it worked
  5. SCP the changed files over to my server

Now that I have written this down, I actually feel like I should write a new post soon because this is the most momentum I have had on this site since I had to migrate it last April. The change before that was to migrate from Bootstrap to Tailwind. I do more futzing with App-o-Mat than writing. But, whenever I change the site, I write about it here, so I am using my waste.

I’m not always prolific on my main blog, but that’s not the fault of the software. I was thinking about this earlier today, and now there’s a post. Whenever I have ideas for App-o-Mat, I forget them before they had a chance to exist.

Do Software Developers Need a Brand?

When someone hears that you are working on something, your brand is what they think will happen. So, the question isn’t whether or not you need a brand, because you already have one as long as people hold some opinion of your work. The questions to ask are (1) what is the brand, (2) how consistent is it, and (3) how widespread is it.

The most important thing is that the opinion people have about you is generally positive, but there are a lot of options for what that is. It could be that people generally believe you are highly skilled. Or they could believe that adding you to a team is good because you help teams jell. Or perhaps adding you to a startup is a good idea because you have a large network of peers to recruit from who like to work with you. Or maybe you know a domain on a deep level. Each of these are examples of a positive brand, and they all can work well (or even better in combination). Whatever your brand is, it is built from your visible accomplishments.

So, in addition to accomplishing things, if you want those things to be part of your brand, make them visible. If the work can’t be public, then you could still make sure your team understands your contribution, ensure your manager understands it enough to use in a promotion packet, or talk about it on an internal blog. If the work is public, then having some public explanation of the benefits of that work is worth adding to it. If you use LinkedIn, I would say that this should show up in your headline, summary, and job history section. There is no need to make posts for this, but I do think having a trickle of LinkedIn activity is helpful to help people remember you or get them to look at your profile.

A positive brand is always helpful, but a consistent one becomes more important as your career progresses. You can’t always control exactly what you work on, but you can improve how that work is understood by using emphasis. I have done this on my LinkedIn profile and when applying for a job by making custom resumés and cover letters.

For most of my career, I concentrated on doing good work and having positive interactions. But it’s easier to communicate this by fitting that work into a narrative. I emphasize the parts of my career that are more likely to result in relevant work, and I expand it in direct conversation if it makes sense.

I’d like to think that this was all intentional, but it wasn’t really. This narrative is something I found after the fact. There are alternative brands that I could use, but don’t, like “FinTech Engineer” or “Mobile Engineer”, which are positive but not consistent with what I am trying to do. I don’t want to be hired to do those things, so it’s only important to talk about them if a specific engagement needs that in addition to what I try to sell. But, to get the job at Trello ten years ago, I emphasized the “Mobile Engineer” and “Startup early engineer” narrative and downplayed my management experience.

But when developers ask whether or not they need a brand, I think they are mostly asking about the “widespread” part. In that case, the answer is easy. No. You do not need a widespread brand. My career has been successful without one, and I think I’m the norm.

I am not well-known outside of my network. This is true even though I have written a book, spoken at conferences, been on some podcasts, written for tech publications, and worked on a fairly well-known app. To the extent that these things touched people outside of my network, I don’t think it resulted in a widespread brand. But, I do think the people that know me have a positive association with me in a way that is consistent with my narrative.

The more important thing is that your positive and consistent brand be widespread within your communities: inside your current employer, among your ex-colleagues, and among your clients. If you participate in developer online communities, then in there too. To the extent you are on social media, then among your followers, no matter how small a list that is.

Rather than working to grow your brand to strangers, I would first recommend you grow it within your network. The best way to do this is by doing good work in the way you want to be known. Then, build a consistent and widespread brand by tying it into the narrative you want people to have about you when they hear your name.

Books That Propelled Me in 2024

These three books did the most to help me make progress in 2024

1. Nonfiction Alchemy [affiliate link] by Jordan Ring

I already finished a draft of my book before I read Nonfiction Alchemy, so I learned some of his lessons the hard way. The biggest change I made after reading it was to my title. I had been using a more literal “promise” based title, but wished it was pithier. His description of how he came up with his title and why helped me come up with Swimming in Tech Debt, which I think works a lot better. The subtitle will do the work of conveying my promise.

The new title is more visual and communicates my main metaphor of using your encounters with tech debt as a trigger to make progress—“swimming” rather than “drowning” in tech debt.

I wrote more about this in Titling a book and Book Title as Visual Metaphor.

2. A Philosophy of Software Design [affiliate link] by John Ousterhout

So many gems—it should be required reading in any CS program. Ousterhout’s target is complexity in software, which is very related to technical debt. My book is more about any code that resists change, which includes well-written, simple, easy to understand code that just can’t be changed in the way you need it to be. This book is about understanding the sources of complexity and fixing them.

3. Slow Productivity [affiliate link] by Cal Newport

This is Newport’s latest book in a continuing series about his approach to work and life. If you haven’t read Deep Work [affiliate link], I would start there and move onto Digital Minimalism [affiliate link]. This book shows how to make big things at a slow pace. I worked on my book in my marginal time: a hour or two a day. But writing hundreds of words a day, a thousand every week, builds up. There were edits, restarts, rewrites, etc. But the pace was sustainable, and I owe a lot of that strategy to this book. (Also see The Four Disciplines of Execution [affiliate link] — which is referenced in Deep Work)

Make Spaces for Things to Track In Your Journal

In Make a Space For Each Day in Your Journal, I wrote that I was more likely to journal every day when there were pages pre-printed with the date on top of them. If I missed a day, I would see the blank space and want to fill it by recreating the day from whatever other sources I had.

This also works on the daily page itself. If there’s something you want to do every day, then pre-printing that on the journal page will keep reminding you to do it. This is one of the reasons I think you should make your own custom journals, because it will be hard to find one that is pre-printed in the way you want.

In 2025, my pages are blank, but I split them in half. The top is meant to be used like a bullet journal. The bottom is a food log. I have found that the biggest impediment to me reaching my fitness goals is not eating as well as I could. In 2022 and 2023 I scribbled my food log in the margin. There wasn’t a lot of room, so I only put the major meals, but it’s the snacking and details that are causing problems for me.

So, by keeping a thorough food log I hope to make it more likely that I will be more intentional in what I eat. Back in 2012, I wrote that you should Take a Picture of What You Eat because just that simple act will influence you—I know from personal experience that having to write down that I ate junk food stopped me from eating it.

Of course, you can do this even if you have something that you want to track weekly or on specific days. In The Four Disciplines of Execution [affiliate link], the third discipline is to make a scoreboard that tells you if you are winning. One way to do that is to pre-print it on your weekly retro page.

In general though, I think it’s more important to have a labeled space than a specific template. Over a year, you might change your mind on what to track. I’d rather have a blank “Scoreboard” area that I am compelled to draw than a rigid one that might go out of date.

Aspirational Plans for 2025

On this blog, when I talk about my annual plans, I am talking about aspirations. The vast majority of my time is spent on living my normal life: work, home, cooking, travel, time with wife, family, and friends, etc. When I look back at 2024, I see what I can do with my marginal time—an hour for fitness and a couple of hours a day to either write or work on my own software added up to a lot.

So, this year I hope to apply that lesson to marketing my finished work better. My strategy is to create content that supports it. I will toot, blog, post on LinkedIn, and email my list — but try to make the content useful in of itself (not promotional). I also want to podcast and YouTube too, but that’s a stretch goal. The written posts don’t take very long—but podcasting and videos are much harder for me.

For fitness, I am going to swim at least twice a week. My apartment has a pool, but I rarely take advantage of it. I need low-impact cardio alternatives anyway, but this will also remind me of my book (Swimming in Tech Debt) and my general 2025 theme to “Just Keep Swimming”. Another advantage to swimming is that it’s very hard to listen to something while doing it, so I have 30 minutes with just my own thoughts—it’s very meditative. It’s an analog hobby that affords solitude (like in Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport [affiliate link]).

My work since the late nineties has been mostly in developer tools or tools for productivity, and even the startup I’ve been working on is in this general area (personal productivity). I want to expand on this. I have ideas for tools that support the themes I write about, and I want to explore those in 2025. To play on my book title and theme, the ideas are fins (to help you go faster) and goggles (to help you see debt better)—I wrote about Tech Debt Detectors on this site and in my book, and these ideas are variations on that.

I’m going to apply The Four Disciplines of Execution [affiliate link] like I did last year, which I’ll write about later this week.