HackMake

Links have been piling up over the past month or two as my life has been in transition. Here’s a collection of them for your enjoyment and then hopefully I’ll be able to get back to regularly scheduled programming soon.

Conduct Experiments

Leo at zenhabits:

See decisions not as final choices, but experiments.

Working at a startup (which is probably not that different from work environments anywhere) had me making decisions quickly, often with little data or reasoning to support it. What I learned was to always make the smartest decision you could right now and be open to changing it later if there was new information or learnings which meant you could make a new smarter decision.

Matryoshka Hardware

A great post from Seth Brown about packing gear in a smart way.

Knowing your gear is to trust it

Uri Friedman from RedTeams in a similar thread to my post about the life cycle of gear, on trusting your gear:

Simple tools can be used under stress as well, or when speed is key. So, instead of choosing your next tool based on the number of features it can provide try to check what is the tool’s purpose, what does it offer as it’s most relevant feature and whether it does this the simplest way possible. Build your tool’s arsenal based on this.

One Thing Well

And the same way great tools do one thing well, Chris Gonzales:

There are a lot of apps in the world that are renowned for doing “one thing well.” They’re often seen as the best in their respective fields, because the developer focused on a single problem and simply nailed the hell out of it.

Why not apply the same principle to ourselves as artists?

I struggle with this a bit because I see myself–for now at least–as a generalist. My skills vary and I don’t yet have a focus on what it is I do. I think that will come with time as I spend more time doing several things and learn which area I want to focus my artistry.

The Flexible Mind

Leo, again:

The root cause of frustration, irritation, anger, sadness is an inflexible mind — one that wants to hold onto the way we wish things were, the ideas we’re comfortable with. When things don’t go this way, we are then frustrated, angry, sad. […]

It’s about developing the ability to cope with change, to be flexible, to simplify.

It’s also about managing your own expectations.