My journal is now running on a new site that's pretty much the same on the front-end, except for the fact that it has a chronological list of my journal entries in all their glory (they are paginated 10/page). But at the back-end everything is stored in an SQLite database.

Source code: https://github.com/kevquirk/journal/

It's only later that I realized that the problem was not with the world, but with me. I let extremely toxic companies dictate what I should be thinking about and distract me from what is good for me and the people I care about.

About consuming too many content and junk.-content on social media:

The analogy with physical health is great because the remedy is exactly the same: you have to exercise. [...] The best way to exercise your brain is to write long texts and to spend time developing your ideas. [...] How to proceed? Don't overthink. Open any text editor and let your thoughts guide your fingers.

Si je crois fermement que les "Leads produit" d'une organisation doivent cultiver leur capacité à naviguer dans le flou, c'est-à-dire accepter un changement permanent, c'est bien à eux que revient l'obligation d'apporter de la clarté dans ce flou, une direction, une vision.

Et il y a un outil nécessaire pour ça : l'écrit.

Les articles sur Eventually coding permettent de se constituer un patrimoine, de prendre du recul, de mieux partager l'information dans une équipe distribuée sur plusieurs pays et donc asynchrone.

Toute personne à partir de Senior doit être capable d'écrire pour articuler document de design, stratégie et vision.

Les documents de design: l'ensemble des descriptifs sur un sujet. Ce sont des documents concrets qui décrivent l'usage actuel d'une technologie dans notre contexte.

Les documents de stratégies (ADR, RFC, Roadmap). Ce sont des écrits qui sont là pour clarifier, pour donner un guide de conduite par rapport à une technologie. Une stratégie est souvent le résultat de discussions contradictoires qui a vu l'équipe s'opposer. Une stratégie est là pour mettre en lumière les compromis et une décision. Le document exprime donc une opinion, à l'inverse des docs de sign.

Les documents de vision (North star document, engineering principles, manifesto, technology radar, engineering blog posts, ...) pour montrer une direction à plusieurs années dans le futur.

Stratégie ou vision ? Parfois la frontière est fine. La différence porte bien souvent sur l'échelle de temps. Une stratégie s'exprime pour les 6 prochains mois, une vision, c'est pour les prochaines années.

Comment démarrer?
Commencer par écrire plusieurs documents de design sur l'existant; puis regrouper les documents de design par thème, détecter les questions ouvertes et les contradictions, faire émerger des stratégies; enfin regrouper les stratégies par thème, projeter les impacts dans le futur.

Le Story telling:
L'enjeu c'est de trouver les problèmes à résoudre et de proposer des solutions. Les documents mentionnés ci-dessus ne vont pas suffire, mais, s'ils sont bien faits, ils vont vous permettre de créer le storytelling nécessaire pour une bonne promotion, et plus tard pour une bonne conduite de changement.

TILs (Today I Learned) are useless, have terrible signal-to-noise ratio, create FOMO.

True, but they are not meant to be the best raw material ever made. They are made to add some randomness in your feeds (or way your consume news or content). They are personal. They don't share or are structure as a lesson. Most of the TILs I read are on Mastodon, toots shared on the fly because someone learned something. The tag Today I Learned is missing, but it remains a TIL nonetheless.

TILs are a way to discover things. Why on earth do you need some random facts to spark your interest in something?

Good point.

There are other advantages to the TILs. They can be read on the fly, in public transportations. They don't need focus or immersion as a fiction book needs.

I think in between: a majority of TILs is undesirable, a few can be useful. A balance is healthy. It is sometimes convenient to put your concentration aside, and distract yourself while reading something short.

Key points

• Writing is a way of thinking. Write early and often and always.
• Write in plaintext to concentrate on writing rather than formatting.
• Keep a work journal to help focus your thoughts at the beginning of each day.
• Keep standing files, such as "someday/maybe", to capture far-off tasks and keep your main to-do.txt file lean, clean, and relevant.
• Write a personal manifesto to help define yourself.
• When creating drafts of your work product, focus on content and structure, rather than formatting.
• Use the lightweight markup language Markdown to provide basic structure and formatting hints to your drafts.
• Use a really good text editor, such as Sublime Text, that keeps your hands on the keyboard, for efficient writing and word processing.
• Backup and revision history are important. You don't want to lose anything.

Ban some words: beholder words, lazy words, salt and pepper words (meaning nothing) and generic adverbs.

The passive voice hides information. We want however to convey concise and efficient information in a technical paper. The writings should avoid the passive voice.

Given the volume of submissions to top peer-reviewed venues, there will always be more than enough technically correct papers to fill the venue. The function of peer review has become to decide which true things are worth knowing. In that sense, peer reviewers are the guardians of the scientific community's most limited resource: our collective attention span. To market a paper, the author must make a compelling case for why her idea deserves access to that resource.

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)
4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
5. One should never generalize.
6. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Sentence fragments? Eliminate.
9. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
10. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
11. Who needs rhetorical questions?

Tout écrivain, Saint-Exupéry le premier, vous le dira : l’art de l’écriture, c’est de supprimer, de trancher, de raccourcir le texte pour lui donner de la puissance.

Dans mon entourage, les gens l’utilisent pour envoyer des dossiers administratifs. Alors, est-ce utile ? Non, c’est juste que ces dossiers sont complètement cons, que personne ne va les lire et qu’on utilise des outils cons pour gérer des problèmes à la con qu’on se crée soi-même.

Un outil et non une solution:

Comme le dit la linguiste Emily M. Bender, on ne demande pas aux étudiants de faire des rédactions parce que le monde a besoin de rédactions. Mais pour apprendre aux élèves à structurer leurs pensées, à être critiques. Utiliser ChatGPT c’est, selon les mots de Ted Chiang, prendre un chariot élévateur à la salle de musculation. Oui, les poids vont faire des va-et-vient, mais va-t-on se muscler pour autant ?

aphorisme: « tout le monde peut écrire, l’écrivain est celui qui ne sait pas s’empêcher d’écrire »

Bruno Leyval dessine tous les jours depuis qu’il est tout petit. Il dessine tout le temps. Il s’est transformé en machine à dessiner. Cette sensibilité de toute une vie ne pourra jamais se comparer à un algorithme générateur d’images.

À propos de l'IA qui génère du code: On cherche à optimiser la « création de logiciel » tout en oubliant la maintenance du logiciel et de l’infrastructure pour le faire tourner.

Currently, we're envisioning:

• Novel Writing Month - 50,000 words
• Novella Writing Month - 20,000 words
• Short Story Writing Month - 5 stories of at least 2,000 words each
• Poetry Writing Month - 1 poem per day
• Blog Post Writing Month - 1 blog post per day
• Graphic Novel Writing Month (maybe?) - a 50-page graphic novel
• …or, of course, a custom goal.

An awesome talk about how to write effectively.

A blog post version for developer is available in another shaare: https://shaarli.lyokolux.space/shaare/gNfmPg

#todo link my notes

The person who thinks everyone can write does the same because they do not understand the importance of written communication. They dismiss the importance of clear and concise writing and overestimate their own skills.

What make things interesting are personal things.
It is liberating. There are always topic to write about.

Maybe someone else will find joy in it, maybe not. It doesn't matter.

A lot of resources about writing

It has advantages:

• works on any device
• easily stored and transported
• easy to backup
• searchable
• secure (enough)
• extensible

A feedback about a daily journaling since 3 months

• recall in the last 48 hours. Afterwards the memories get lost.
• journaling slowed time down
• experiment is working! Constantly experimenting

Reason to write:

• share information
• learn about something
• side-effects such as help to establish your credibility

How to write for developers?

Consider the clarity, personality and the uniformity of content. Each medium has it scale on these three.

The physical act of writing? Start with notes and expand. Just start writing. A similar approach is reported by Finding comfort in the chaos: How Cory Doctorow learned to write from literally anywhere.
The point is to have something, then iterate.

The writing and designing guidelines for the Australian Government.

1. La méthode Cornell
2. Mind Mapping
3. Les Grandes Lignes
4. Les bulles
5. Tableaux
6. Sketchnote
7. Cases
8. Symboles
9. Phrases
10. Zettelkasten et les étiquettes
11. Le Labyrinthe inversé
12. Kwik Notes