Smiling Sisyphus

Smiling Sisyphus

Sisyphus was a wise and cunning man, whose crime is that he went against the ancient gods of Greece. Whether or not his actions are justified is another story, but in the end, he was prosecuted by those in power and judged through their laws. As punishment, he was tasked to push a huge rock towards the top of a hill.

The rock isn’t an ordinary object though, as we are talking about ancient gods here. The real punishment is that once he reaches the top, Sisyphus always loses his grip and the rock falls back down into the bottom. He then has to carry the rock towards the top, and the same thing happens over and over again for all eternity. Continue Reading

Live According to Nature

Live According to Nature

I heard an anecdote about someone’s experience while in college. One of their classmates, who is into Buddhism, went into class wearing monk robes. It definitely stood out because in their country, Buddhism isn’t commonly practiced. They pondered about the purpose of wearing the robes in a place where it is not the norm. What do they want to accomplish by standing out?

Epictetus, in his letter On the Philosopher’s Mean, writes about this exact thing. Continue Reading

Shadow DOM

Shadow DOM

Our team was tasked to create an embeddable script (widget) that displays functionality from our web application. When released to the public however, we found that the interface was not looking right in some cases. It turned out that some pages that embedded our script was able to affect the styles of our widget with its own CSS declarations.

Our resident front-end guru recommended that we use the Shadow DOM for the widget implementation. This will essentially shield our widget’s styles from being overridden by the page that embedded it. I have not used Shadow DOM previously so this piqued my curiosity. Back in the day, we would use iframes to implement something like this. Continue Reading

Be Irrational

Human beings are rational animals. Our scientific name, Homo Sapiens, literally means “thinking man”. Being a logical thinker is part of who we are. An irrational human conveys something negative in our minds.

We think logically in order to solve problems. To make this complex world easier to understand, we label things in black or white instead of different shades of the same spectrum. Continue Reading

How to get more time

How to get more time

More than seven years ago, I wrote my experience about the mirage of free time. In that story, I thought I had all the time in the world to do the things I needed to do, but I basically did nothing in the end. It was a confounding paradox that always proved true from my experience then on.

I find that the more my day is restricted, the more I was able to do the things I needed to do. And the more the day is laid out for me like a blank canvas, the less productive I become. Continue Reading