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.
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.
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.
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.
Friends are the spice of life. They are our rampart in times of distress, the confidante to our innermost thoughts, and reinforces us in times of weakness. Of all the people we know throughout life, there are only a few that fits the bill. An even rarer find are your true friends; those that do not leave you even when things get really tough.
What makes someone a friend? How do they stand out from the rest of our acquaintances? Seneca, in his letter On True and False Friendship said that the crucial element is trust.