• Thursday, 08/03/23 ** 18:18 The most beautiful part of life and work are the compounding effects of everything.

The more code I write today, the more useful that code will be because of how useful it continues to be in the future. Other people will be able to use it to build upon their own work as well.

The more exercise I do today (within reason), the more fit I will be tomorrow. I'll be able to do more and more and more in the future.

Even if the concrete work doesn't pay off - say I leave the company, lose the laptop, or have a health crisis - I'm still able to extract generalizeable value from those experiences. I've learned how to write the code once so I can do it again, the next time more seamlessly, honing future intuition for making applications more and more beautiful. I can eat as well as I was for fitness to maintain the rest of the body I have. I can cook a better meal tomorrow than I have today, even if I'm in a different kitchen with different ingredients. If my clothes are all lost in a fire and my synthesizers melt, I can buy new clothes with the accumulated knowledge of my experiences and regurgitate new music with what I've learned.

Make sure the interface to your world is modular at all levels of experience and specificity. Understand that learning about HTML tables is generalizeable to tables, but try to learn how fucked up default table elements are and understand how overcoming them can be used to inform better UI frameworks. Understand how approaches to a poor black box can be used to develop other unintuitive software conventions and frameworks. Learn to approach problems of all kinds by sketching out documentation and prodding live systems to hone your understanding. Accept that some things in this world are historical mistakes and that you might be better off ignoring them.

There is no way to replace the compounding effects of the work I can do today if I don't do it. Everything I do today is worth so much more than what I do tomorrow - demonstrably more. My actions tomorrow are probably worth logarithmically less as they descend into meaninglessness in very old age. I think that's beautiful. I I I. I can't wait to get back to work.