This is the second post in a series of four articles
about how I came to appreciate software technology watch
as part of a tailored-made self-education process,
deemed bearable with regard to mental health
in the context of my line of work since 2009.
The first and previous article is available online.
TL;DR - Technology Watch ought to be addressed methodically
so that one’s mental health doesn’t go out of balance
before being fully compromised .
In this article, I provide some answers in response to three questions.
Approximate reading time : 8 min
Readers I had in mind when drafting:
craft·wo·men longing for life - work balance ⚖
Overall progress in this series: 2 / 4
🟩🟩⬜⬜
Tags: #MentalHealth #Toolbox #Watch
For quite some time now, I've wondered how remote friends and close acquaintances
take care of their casual but nevertheless serious technical watch
and so far i really can't tell that I've always had one-hundred percent
non-ambiguous replies for each of the following questions.
Please let me try to answer those questions
so that I could ask you to return me the favor a bit later 🙏🏼
What tricks and heuristics in picking sources (of information)
evolved independently by former colleagues, friends, acquaintances, organizations, would one most naturally tend to subscribe to
(via blogs, newsfeeds, watched release notes, newsletters
to quote a small partition of them) either by
accessing public events logs 🪵,
watching video recording 📹,
browsing tables of contents of seminal books 📚,
reading journals papers' conclusions before their abstracts 🗞 or
by attending online hubs, webinars, IRL-conferences and meetups,
which are never going to rest anytime soon
…in the vein of some of the next prolific platforms perhaps?ActivityPub-based federated networks like
Mastodon, and the fediverse in general 📡,Communities’ shaped conferences, local-sized events ☕,
Proprietary platforms like Twitter or GitHub Discussions 🐣,
Chat rooms built on matrix or
libera.chat most recent IRC-resurrected ramifications 🚪,Streaming channels like Discord, Twitch or YouTube
(even better when revisited by human providers) 📺Other promising niches like manyver.se 🐚
What tools do feel the most intuitive to you?
I'm happy to share that Atom syndication format,
and RSS feeds still work like a charm up to this day 😌
and on top of them, Thunderbird ⚡🦅 is still wonderful at providing
an excellent offline client reader even though
I do not totally fail to see how web-based successors like Feedly
show numerous additional pros as well. 🕸
Although, I have to confess that
I could not see past late-G RSS Reader yet. 🪦
Having endured Internet Explorer hegemony for a slice of years
and so calledclone warsbrowser wars 🐑🔥🦊,
led me straight to alternative aspirations :
I feel today that we could do better than
chaining ourselves to nonfree software ⛓,
shutting ourselves in walled gardens 🧱 and
cutting ourselves from collective capabilities
of using open communication protocols like XMPP long abandonned
by major tech players in spite of
a plethora of not even that hardly-decipherable
hence somewhat valid reasons 📡.Newsletters became trustworthy go-to quality contents curation source again (that is to say if this solution ever got old 🧓🏼),
especially since the GDPR laws came to pass in Europe
and reliable contents producers became all of a sudden legally bound
to providing means to subscribers to be effectively removed
from a mailing-list with a simple click, redirection
or in some of the most simple cases
by letting your favourite email client send an email on your behalf.
From a practical standpoint,
guriosity.com covers French companies blogs articles
in a succint way once a week while
Blogging For Devs offers similar service to its readership.
I’m grateful for having been told about the existence of
this treasure authored by Monica Lent,
who shows amazing data-driven initiatives, skills and habits
(I’m certainly a big fan of her work even though
reading her on a regular basis gives also
a feeling of lagging behind a bit 😅 Who cares though ?
Learning is most certaintly the way to go).
Ari Bajo Rouvinen told me about her as early as december 2020 🙏🏼.
That’s why, to prevent feeling overwhelmed
by nigerian princes backstories or token minting vultures
(read scammers and spammers),
following each of the never-ending sequence of private database hacks notably referenced by HaveIBeenPwned.com,
I went from a state of mind where:
I’d be multiplying virtual email accounts as many on-topic folders (by combining gmail addresses' and + suffixes, by relying on filters, which are of a big help in structuring ideas with trees of directories, or labels) for follow-up on topics, that I grew to be interested in,
by using a native desktop app like ⛈🪶 Thunderbird (yes that one again)
to the following next habit of:
closing aforementioned "free" email accounts one by one so that
I could favor using personal custom domain names, filters
applied to subjects and origin filters,
and hosting plans (at gandi.net or scaleway) allowing me
not to overthink all the things related to
secondary destination addresses similar to self-describing directories only they would not be lying on a fragile local hard drive
or some remote foreign cloud.
Encryption eventually makes for little trouble in daily routines
after getting used to PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) with tools like
mailvelope, keybase CLI application, OpenKeychain for Android,
K-9 native application (which recently joins the Thunderbird family 🤗) also for Android-based phones, FairEmail again for Android 🤖
or autocrypt now deeply rooted also in… as you might have guessed,
Thunderbird ⛈🐧 and fully integrated within email-based chat client DeltaChat, which design sobriety grew on on me over the years).
Learning how to develop a robust, simple, small (who said stupid?) system of fruitful habits turns out to show rapidly compounding effects over the years without the need to keep everything considered useful, pleasant, joyful, or even simply funny in mind at all time.
Why?
As some of you may know by now,
I've been curating tweets since 2015
💆🏼 for allowing myself to feel more relaxed
💎 while seeking industrial intel to leverage,
⛰ not to miss something too big whenever organizational ,
🛞 or technical decisions are to be made in work-related contexts.
Not unlike the Parcae,
which myth might have inspired a crude depiction of the Crones
(🚧 this link might not be safe for work depending on who you ask,
but it could be worth circulating among game characters designers 🕹)
or Cleon’s cloned brothers in Asimov’s Foundation,
Fear, Uncertainty and their sister, Doubt are shapeshifters,
induced by stress and poor information landscape.
😵💫 Indeed, who ever wants to feel in distress
🐘 because of an elephant-sized chaotic butterfly 🐒🦋
🚪twisting in a room which doorknob is far too easy to grab,
🚇 a room usually entered only by mistake and
🤥 certaintly not our own
😱 with only escape route a narrow path to a panic room
🦸🏼where we’ll have to wait for some specialist to arrives.
🎺 In spite of all efforts and good will
🦻🏼 in preventing deafening emergency alarms from being set off
🚧 while we were barricading ourselves up
🦖 after facing the aforementioned ominous trumpetting animal,
🧘🏼 would not one wish for more serenity in the slightest way? 🪔🧞♀️
By the way, in a newsletter distributed out by codeworks last month, Christophe Thibault ingeniously suggested we could rename bug to something far less upsetting like feedback,
which already feels more butterfly-shaped and definitely looks smaller than an elephant in a room.⚠ There are so many traps one can fall into
whenever we're ready to jump to conclusions,
involving new lines of whatever code far too often already.
Those lines might feel reassuring
when piled up on top of fragile structures
or inserted here and there as surgically as possible
as sole reinforcement means ultimately.
Code structures mirror people organizations according to Conways’s law I’d argue that we owe to ourselves to work against
these automatic and natural reflexes
of jumping head-first into (code) sources
by doing literally anything else before instead,
like asking on-topic questions to interlocutors or
by figuring how to identify legitimately-willing-to-talk counterparts
who actually know something about the business and
some of the reasons why systems were built in some way,
while writing down questions or thoughts onpaperboards 📃,
whiteboards (with erasable ink 🥲),
sticky whiteboards,
blackboards always with long-enough chalk crayons 👂🏼,
screens (preferably by using a keyboard ⌨ 🤭),
sticky notes 📋 or even,
sticky notes temporarily stuck on a forehead 🦰
(damn! that’s certainly narrowing it down)
Some of these suggestions might feel easier
for those eager to become receptive and
more accustomed to written words listening
while also having the benefit of being persistent.
🗣🙉✍🏼🩺🙃👀
🐞♻️🪲😮💨
Captain obvious here has this intuition there is this secretly incrementing counter
being a strong derivative of the number of potholes and traps,
we might encounterslowing down decision making and
propagating stress on the count of technology choices on the rise out there,
growing bigger and faster for each new unit of time passing by
Fortunately brains appear to be adaptative and
being sharded beings might help on top of that (or not 🤔🙊).
That’s quite enough for this time 👋🏼
Many thanks for reading!
Hope to hear from you soon,
/Sioukam·Thierry
If you’ve enjoyed this article,
you might want
to connect via LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/thierrymarianne/
to have a conversation via Twitter - @thierrymarianne
to get in touch via the fediverse and mastodon - @sh4l@mastodon.cloud
to subscribe to this newsletter by sharing your email with me
(low volume as “in twice a quarter“ from now on)
This was the second post in a series of four articles
about how I came to appreciate software technology watch
as part of a tailored-made self-education process,
deemed bearable with regard to mental health
in the context of my line of work since 2009.
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