Taking a quick rest in my bed one evening, I suddenly remembered about my time letter. Back in 2008 I decided to write a letter to myself that I intend to open ten years later. I quickly searched for the letter in my computer, and opened it for the first time in a decade.
July 13, 2008
I learned a trick in life, and that is to do what you don’t want to do. Picture this: you wake up one morning and its time to go to the gym. You look outside and saw that it is raining hard. The air is cool and you want to go back to sleep. Finally you decide that you don’t feel like going out right now and you will just go tomorrow. Sounds familiar?
We all experience times when we plan to do something but a minor inconvenience happens and we suddenly feel like no longer doing it. Oftentimes not doing the things we plan does not affect our life significantly. But it may influence how we view obstacles in the future.
One day at work I noticed that emails were taking much longer to be sent out from our app. I narrowed down the problem to our background queue which is responsible for sending out the emails. The solution prompted me to write this DelayedJob “survival guide”to help others who may encounter this issue in the future.
Asynchronous processing/background processing is an important part of a web application. This ensures that running code is not blocking the rest of the process if that code does not need to run synchronously. Common examples are sending emails or code that depends on a third-party API or service.
One night after a few bottles of beer, a friend asked me about finding your passion or mission in life: “Do you search for it or does it just stumble towards you one day?“. I said to him that I think it will eventually stumble on you, but in order for this to happen, you need to keep moving.
Steve Jobs once said in a speech:
In my first job we used Emacs as our main text editor. However, I have no idea how to use it properly so I just used it more like Notepad++ than Emacs. In our team there is one person who refused to use Emacs, instead he was using vi (without the m!). To be honest, it looked painful watching him edit code with no syntax highlighting, no line numbers, and no plugins whatsoever. We tried constantly to convince him to use Emacs but he always refused and stuck to using vi. I thought the guy was crazy.
Fast forward 12 years in my career. I was attending a Ruby conference with my peers and one of the speakers (Brad Urani) demonstrated zshell, vim, and tmux and how he does development in his machine. It looked cool! Some of my peers also uses vim and tmux so its not a new concept to me, however I always decided to use gedit all these years. This time, they probably thought I was crazy.