Steve and I seem to be in the same head space these days. I've subscribed to his vlog and newsletter "Woodworking for Mere Mortals" since the pandemic because I have aspirations to be a hobby woodworker, and lately he's been on a journey of thinking about "what does this all mean, really?"

From his last newsletter...

We’ve built a culture that treats paid work as inherently more legitimate than unpaid passion. It’s strange how the things we often value most, like our art, our music, and the objects we craft with our hands, are the very things we feel we have to apologize for unless they turn a profit. We’ve been conditioned to believe that if something doesn’t earn income, it doesn’t “count.” Whenever I mention my writing or my art, I’m frequently asked if I make any money from them, or what my plans are to monetize them. As if the natural progression from passion is income. But maybe what counts most is what brings us alive.

Maybe our mid-life crises are lining up or something, but this feels very relevant. There are things in my life that I love and want to make more time for, and then there's the stuff that I do in order to support myself and my family. There's some overlap, but they're mostly two separate spaces.

The root problem is that, for the first time in human history, our brain is the bottleneck. For all history, transmitting information was slow. Brains were fasts. After sending a letter, we had days or months to think before receiving an answer. Erasmus wrote his famous "Éloge de la folie" in several days while travelling in Europe. He would never have done it in a couple of hours in a plane while the small screen in the backseat would show him advertisements.

(link)

I'm currently reading two different books now, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, and Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.

I don't always read two books at the same time because it's easy to get whiplash between different tones, but the library opened up a copy of Humankind while I was in the middle of The Sun Also Rises. The blend is interesting because the central thesis of Humankind, people are for the most part kind and altruistic despite what we see all around us, isn't the vibe of The Sun Also Rises at all. However, using that lens, you can kind of see how Jake and the other protagonists care for each other in their own broken ways.

The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a book about organizing software projects told in the format of a YA novel. The sequel The Unicorn Project is more dev focused, and both have good insights on the craft, and how to tie business value to engineering concerns.

The main lesson that sticks out to me about The Phoenix Project is the idea that there's four types of work: Business/New Features, Internal/Tech Driven, Operational Change (Deployments), and Unplanned Work.