But handcrafting html is inconvenient to do frequently, so for more ordinary posts I write in markdown and use some custom scripts and pandoc to generate html. For me this approach is more fun than using a static site generator and less annoying (because I spend less time figuring out why an upgrade randomly broke something, or how to make the SSG do things I already know how to do manually). But the only reason it hasn't devolved into a full hand-rolled SSG is that I don't need/want much consistency across pages: there's no shared nav bar and I don't try to keep the styling or layout of older pages in line with newer pages.

Committing myself to publish posts is, in part, sort of a motivational hack to get me to do the polishing. The possibility that someone else _might_ read it and judge me for it pushes me to put much more effort in than I would if I kept it private. (I wrote a short blog post on this: https://brokensandals.net/personal/reviews-as-notes/)

I probably wouldn't see this as a sufficient reason for blogging if I believed that _literally_ nobody would _ever_ read the stuff I post. But it is a significant benefit that's available even if I only have a very tiny and sporadic audience.

Empathy is crucial for motivating people to give to any cause, and it's a crucial part of why I'm involved in EA. If someone's first/main exposure to EA is along the lines of "you should ignore this cause which touched your heart, because numbers", it's not going to resonate. I want people to be excited about the good they could accomplish by donating to EA-aligned charities, not feel like I'm trying to press some distasteful obligation onto them.

Also, it's not a zero-sum game in practice. People can be inspired to increase the total amount they give (so giving more to effective charities doesn't necessarily mean giving less to other charities they care about).

- The mere possibility that someone will see it pushes me to put more thought and effort into what I write. Sometimes this reveals weaknesses in my ideas that I would have glossed over if I were just writing private notes for myself; sometimes it leads me to actually change my opinions. It also means the blog posts are easier for me to understand / get value out of than notes are if I come back and reread them years later.

- It creates opportunities for people to connect with me which can pay off at unexpected times. Occasionally people have reached out to me to say a post helped them or resonated with them, or to give a thoughtful reply or ask a question. Those sorts of interactions are really satisfying even if they're rare. (One time, I was interviewing for a dev job and the interviewer asked a question about a post I'd written on the philosophy of John Rawls, and how it could connect to software engineering. I found that absolutely delightful.)

- It's just nice to have an outlet when I feel like writing about something.

- pursuing romantic interests that I knew could get complicated

- reaching out for emotional support in ways that made me feel embarrassed and vulnerable

- confessing suicidal thoughts to my doctor

- quitting my job and taking >1 year off work

- moving across the country with no job lined up and no long-term plan

I've never regretted any such decision; I think it's always had a major positive impact on my life. Because when I'm trapped in my routine the world can start to feel very small. To shatter that illusion and remind myself how wide the possibilities in life really are, it's often necessary to behave in some way that violates inhibitions I normally have.

So... taking a break from coding could be a great idea, especially if you can build up some savings first. It doesn't have to be forever (I took ~15 months off then got another software job). You don't have to plan the rest of your life - find a direction that looks promising for the next year or two, and adjust course again as needed after that.

I disagree, a sense of shared suffering can be really helpful in building close and meaningful friendships. Connecting with another miserable person who understood what I was going through - and plotting with them about what each of us could do to try to change things - was one of the key things in getting me through one of the most depressed periods of my life.

> Meetups in my area were also only tech-related.

No book clubs or discussion groups or political action or volunteer groups? Maybe you need to move; there should be a lot more than tech going on in any decent-sized city. Even if it's such a tech-focused area that lots of the attendees happen to work in tech, you'll see other facets of them at those events; people have passions outside of their careers.

> It's been a couple months and I have achieved nothing.

At my first software job it was said that a new hire typically wouldn't be a net positive for the team until they'd been there a year. You wouldn't necessarily have even been given a real task in the first two months, let alone gotten it shipped. Big companies have bureaucracy and gatekeeping (for good and bad reasons) and operate on timescales of months or years. By design, a new person can't unilaterally be productive. It's possible that investing the time to empower you to be productive just doesn't seem urgent to them right now - dealing with the fallout of a manager leaving may be much higher priority. You're on the payroll, they know you'll be around for them to utilize when they need you...

> If I can't work in the tech industry it would completely upend my entire life.

Based on what you've said, this fear sounds very unlikely to come about. Even if this company is dysfunctional and you need to move on, you have a history of being able to get tech jobs, and it sounds like you've made a positive impression on many coworkers in the past, so I imagine they'd vouch for you. And there's a ton of demand for developers right now, and a wide variety of companies to choose from!

It's a really tough tendency to fight. One thing I think is helpful is to acknowledge failure as early as possible. If meeting the deadline would require me to work faster than normal or make some heroic last-minute effort, I've already failed, even if that deadline is still a long way out. Admitting that to myself and others now, so that expectations about the future can be adjusted, is a much smaller blow than admitting it weeks or months down the line. And it means I only have to feel a little flaky and underperformant, rather than super flaky and underperformant and also dishonest.

[1] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/depression-anxiety-i...

If you’re just looking at the top reviews for a book it’s more questionable; they tend toward the extremes: enraptured encomiums about how beautiful and important and bold the book is, or insult-laden rants where the book is a whipping post for the reviewer to show off what a biting sense of humor they have.

There's a whole successful social network (Goodreads) built on people's desire to talk about books, frequently in the form of effusive praise. I think being able to trace the product to a single individual (e.g. a book's author) helps make it particularly appealing to leave that sort of feedback: we know it feels great to hear that someone values a thing you've created, and we like the idea of giving that pleasure to the creators of things we like.

If you just tell people what your love language is, but don't learn to show love in their love language, they still won't feel cared for. You may even be reinforcing the message that you don't care enough to adapt to them.

If you tell people to call you out on being late, but are still routinely late, it will feel like an empty apology.

We all have flaws and have to deal with each others'; for all I know this person is a fantastic manager. But I'm skeptical that this kind of document is a good way to start a working relationship. It's very personal to the author but impersonal to the recipient, giving the impression that all responsibility lies on the recipient to deal with the author's issues. I know the document tries to emphasize that that's not the case, but until you have a real relationship with the person you don't know which parts of that to trust. (Most people see themselves as being open to honest feedback, but that doesn't mean they actually are.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24030483

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23940960

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[1] https://brokensandals.net/

Obviously, that won't catch all potential problems in the file, but it's a low-effort way to catch some.

"Better than nothing" is pretty much what I'm going for here. Almost all my personal data stored in cloud services falls into this "corner case": I only have indirect access to the source, it's important enough to me that I want to do some level of checking, but it's not important enough to spend the huge amounts of time it would take to inspect every individual datum.