1. You need as many environmental reminders that you are doing work as possible:

• dedicated work place where you don’t game or browse or do chores and taxes on.
• dedicated work time where you are allowed to do work.
• dedicated non-work time where you won’t work and don’t get to feel bad about not working on the project and avoiding negative emotions associated with the work.
• I have a dedicated work shirt only worn while at work
• figure out your attention sinks: music/podcasts/YouTube w/e and apply them strategically to signal that you are or are not working

2. Plan. Identify as many tasks as possible ahead of time and figure out what is motivational an demotivational. Motivation takes a nosedive once the low hanging fruit runs out.

• make sure to front-load the boring stuff and keep motivated by anticipating the fun stuff later. Please, Start out with the tests. TDD is a hack for ADD
• Ration your creative sessions. Once you feel you are plateauing force yourself create some novelty in the project.

3. Want and grit. At some point you’ll have to grit it out. You have to make it clear to your brain that you want it. Make it personal. Want it not the way you want to have a cookie after dinner, want it the way you want to breathe. Don’t even want the project, but want to prove to your brain that you are a rare capable human, able to start and finish a creative endeavour independently.

4. Make work time scarce and urgent. Having a child has done wonders for my creative output. I used to splurge 6 hour sessions kinda working on something…now I get maybe 40 minutes a day. An hour if I’m creative about it. But heck, does that hour get applied like nobody’s business.

Hope this helps, best of luck!

Theres like a whole class of “Stuff you have to relearn every time you have to use it”: XPath, JMESPath, cron, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, PostScript etc… REGEX might be king of those :p

Also works for cron jobs, shell scripts, SQL queries, HTML layouts and the odd mermaid diagram

A single race condition is a tragedy. A million race conditions is eventual consistency.

Okay, I love these features individually. I loved it when moving from java to kotlin. However, I’m conscerned that these features create multiple ways to do things correctly in C#. Having one way to do things, has been for me one of the best features of C#. It makes it easy to read colleagues code accross generations and easy to onboard new guys.

I do hope we see these adopted quickly, but I hope the C# folks dot start shoehorning in new syntactic sugar for no good reason. The language is starting to get a bit arcane.