Random Insights, Ah-has & Re-has

Hacking on stuff — especially stuff that I might use while travelling, at a PAX or FIRST event — is a rabbithole where I can sink hours on tinkering and trying new ideas. I’m a sucker for trying to come up with a 'solution' to these kinds of situations that I think I’ll encounter in the future. It’s definitely a personality quirk that can frustrate me. Seeing this as a labour of love, and a way to broaden my skills and familiar with more building blocks, may help lessen that self-judgement.

I have a lot of what I'll call labours of learning - they're fun as long as you feel like you're learning new things and increasing your mastery.

2021-04-02 - My main priority right now is to be a great husband and dad, and to get better at both of those, and this has been a really rewarding and satisfying experience for me. It helps to see and know that I'm getting better at these things.

2021-04-02 - When I look back at my time in high school, and to some extent during university and past that, I often put mental energy into trying to fit in with people who, even 5 years later, I've never thought about.

I think this constrained me, and prevented me from feeling comfortable in my own skin.

It's probably worth asking: Am I doing something similar today?

The more time we spend around someone, the more we tend to take for granted the nice things they do for us, and conversely we get exponentially more annoyed by the frustrating things they do.

There are a lot of books that I've read, which I can't recite or clearly remember much of, but which have still shaped who I am and how I operate now.

Having those memories isn't a really indicator of whether they will stick in some part of my brain.

The biggest killer of buying cheap, potentially low-quality parts or using cheaper vendors isn't that you have to buy the more expensive thing eventually. It's the hit you take to your schedule, both to replace the part in your design, and often to find out about the failure in the first place.

There can also be timeline challenges with integrating the cheaper parts, due to poor documentation or reference designs.