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Wanting to be emo

Once in a while you get this feeling that you want to be sad. And perhaps it’s because of years of therapy, CBT and RET or Buddhism or mindfulness or what but I feel like I’m more aware of those times. I know there’s a bunch of people who say you should let yourself feel shit. But I think it’s often wallowing in self pity. We want the attention, we want the sympathy, we want to feel self entitled to the attention.

While I’m not saying you should pretend those kinds of feelings aren’t there, I don’t think giving in to them helps. You can accept that the feeling is there. No necessarily try to sho it away or anything, just accept that it’s there and carry on.

That being said… It’s often easier said than done.

Compassion for people who were hurt

I’ve sometimes found myself being hurt by folks who clearly have had some trauma or really shitty experiences. I know I want to be compassionate to them and yet, I often will feel hurt or attacked and I find it really hard to be compassionate.

I feel like as a society we also do this at a wider scale. Many of the folks in my circles us are for restorative justice and rehabilitation instead of punitive justice. But it’s mostly in general sense. When it’s not an actual incident. When there is an incident, it seems many folks fail to stick to their beliefs and become vindictive.

Perhaps it’s something we should be reminding each other of when we’re in the moment.

On the impact we’ve had on people

I remember, in first year university, I had recently been diagnosed with depression and I was working on some homework in the evening on the lawn in front of residence (Leblanc) and I saw one of the community advisors.

I’m not exactly sure how it came up. But he talked about how he left university for a semester because of depression. In that moment, I needed to hear this. I needed to hear someone else talk about depression, I needed to hear that I wasn’t alone, I needed to hear that maybe it wouldn’t always be like this.

I don’t remember if I ever thanked him…. and to be honest I don’t even remember his name. (Maybe something like J-P) (edit: found him and thanked him!)

When I left Automattic, I got inundated with messages about how I had impacted folks. It made me feel so warm and fuzzy and to this day I have those notes, along with others I’ve collected in a google doc. I’m not sure if people realize the impact those notes had / have on me. I go back and read some of them when I’m feeling down.

For myself, I’m trying to be more diligent with letting people know the impact they’ve had on me. I know how much it means to me to know the impact I’ve had on others so I’m trying to be more diligent about doing it consistently.

Being pulled back in the real world

While reading Buddhism Without Belief I couldn’t help but notice how, while reading the book, I was more aware of certain things.

I’m aware of my surrounginds, I’m aware of how I want to act, how I want to change certain patterns. I have compassion for others. I notice the world around me more and appreciate it more.

But, just as it comes, it disappears. I get pulled back into the “real” world. I get pulled back into ruminating on things. On how person X is terrible and playing out conversations in my head where I let them know how shitty they are etc.

It’s interesting because they talk about it in the book. It seems you can only stay into this place of awareness, of appreciating the non-duality of ourselves and others for brief moments at a time before getting pulled back.

Hopefully I’ll be able to extend those moments slowly but steadily.

Context is key when buying a car, in digital government or in PHP

I often find folks in tech to be very dogmatic. “Framework X is the best “, “Java is a terrible language”, “pineapple doesn’t belong on a pizza”, etc.

There seems to often be a lack of context when we throw out thoughts like that.

It’s a bit like someone asking you what’s the best car and you tell them a Ferrari. So they go and buy a Ferrari and they try to use it to move their family across the country.

I saw a talk by the creator of PHP Rasmuf Lerdorf looking back at the 25 years of PHP. If there’s one thing that everyone who’s been using PHP with version 4 knows is that register globals was a terrible idea.

For everyone didn’t code PHP way back in the day. Previously, if you had a GET or POST parameter such as ?test=random_string a variable called $test was created automatically with the value passed in. No sanitation etc. So if you had some code that let’s say checked if a variable existed, well an attacker could basically inject any variable they wanted. I (and pretty much everyone) always thought this was the dumbest thing.

In his talk Rasmuf talks about register globals. And one thing he mentions is that, when this was created, JavaScript didn’t exist….. That blew my mind. In that context it made much more sense! A whole attack vector just didn’t exist when it was created. Now I’m not saying it was a good idea even considering that but just learning about the whole context was mind opening.

I find that searching for the context behind decisions is at times missing in digital government. I’m working at CDS and when working with partners there are often technology decisions that will make people’s eyes roll (I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this as well).

I think those kinds of comments don’t help anyone. They certainly don’t help us understand the context in which these decisions were made.

It’s easy to shit on tech work in government, what’s less easy is really trying to understand the context that lead to these decisions. The constraints people were under, the requirements, the available resources. All those things we might not know about. Only after we’ve started to build a shared understanding of what the current context is can we, together, find a better solutions to serve people better

Mindfulness is Buddhism without religion

I’ve been re-reading Buddhism without Beliefs and I strongly recommend it. It’s a short book and I’ve been trying to not read more than a chapter a day to make sure I can focus on it.

It was written in 1996 and reading it, I couldn’t help but notice how what it advocates for is now basically referred to as mindfulness. A sort of religion free version of Buddhism.

Don’t use SMS for 2FA

I’ve been travelling recently and it’s ridiculous how many banking or finance app will use SMS as a second step for login.
There are 2 big problems with this:

1) Usability: If you detected that my IP is out of the country, what are the odds that I’m not using my local SIM card?
2) SMS is super not secure!

Let me use an authenticate app or check if my machine has already logged in from my home country or something.

How to convert currency quickly

You can get about 23 Baht for 1 Canadian dollar. So if you see a price like 850 to get the CAD amount you divide it by 23 right?

I don’t know about you, but figuring out 850/23 is pretty slow…

So don’t do that.

Here’s a trick one of my former colleagues (and all around great guy) Klaus showed me:
Instead of doing divisions, do multiplications!

So let’s say I have 23 to 1, instead multiply by 4. Now where the heck did 4 come from you may ask. To get 4 you take 100 and divide it by 23. And yes, that’s not exactly 4, but for our purposes (figuring out roughly how much that coffee costs) it’s close enough. So you take 850 *4. In most cases you just need to take the most significant digit, in this case 8 and do *4. Boom 32$.

(Now yes, it’s actually 36, but it took so much less time and it’s accurate enough for most cases [and yes you technically need to divide by 10, but usually you know if something will be 3,30 or 300$ instinctively so you can skip it)