When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
Viktor E. Frankl
Many of us, after a long hard day of work, seek to “unwind” by doing mind-numbing things: watching videos online, playing games, or endlessly scrolling social media. Our jobs and our work do not provide us with a deep sense of meaning, and so we crave distraction at the end of it.
What a bold statement, especially coming from someone who makes his living around programming.
Decades in the software industry exposed me to many hype cycles. No-Code solutions, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, and most recently the rise of Large Language Models (LLM) and AI technology. But in contrast to the earlier hype, something feels different this time.
I love Rails. Most of it I truly appreciate as a developer, but there are some aspects that I do not like. The most heinous of these from my perspective is default_scope. I dislike it so much that I was even compelled to write about it!
In Rails, you use scopes to define commonly used queries, such as getting active users, archived posts, and so on.
I think women are not born with the innate ability to be mothers. But when the time comes for their motherhood, they do their best to care for their offspring. This is often done even without the benefit of prior training or education. They suddenly get thrust into this world wherein the baby that they delivered is now fully dependent on them. And because of this dependence, they had to let go of certain aspects of their lives: their free time, their career, their social life.
This blog is named “Technology and Financial Independence”, but lately there have been no posts related to either. For the Financial Independence part, there is good reason: the fundamental concepts on investing have already been laid out.
Back in 2015, I was engrossed about the topic of personal finance. Coming from a family of modest means, I wanted to build a better future for myself. I read books about finance and investing, followed articles from financial independence bloggers, listened to podcasts, and built my own tools to manage my money. I was sold on the philosophies touted by the Bogleheads and the simple but effective teachings of JL Collins.