Februrary 2021 Review

Another month in quarantine. It looks like there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and earlier than I had previously thought! Despite everything, the US has been by far the most effective country at getting shots in arms. Here’s hoping that Fauci’s right when he says that the general public will start getting vaccinated by the end of April! On to the review:

Goal Tracking

• 🟢 Get 1% faster. Training’s been going pretty well—I’ve set a couple PRs in training! I’m running a 100m and 200m time trial next week which should tell me a lot about where I am. The only danger I see on the horizon is injury—I’ve got a mild case of high hamstring tendinopathy what I’ll have to be careful to manage properly.
• 🟢 50% less discretionary spending. Despite big spending for Valentine’s Day (hotel, dinner, gift), I still managed to come in well under the bar I set for myself here. My February discretionary spending was 70% lower than my average monthly spend in 2020 (but significantly higher than January).
• 🔴One hour of solitary free time a day. Once again, I haven’t managed to make time for this during the week. I haven’t even been tracking this goal! In March, I’ll make sure to keep track of whether or not I do this every day in Roam.
• 🟢 Twice-weekly live conversations with friends. 4/4 again in February! It’s been great to catch up with some people I haven’t talked to since before the pandemic.

Track & Fitness

• I managed a 660lb hex bar deadlift this past week. That’s a 60lb/10% PR since last September! I’ve tracking pretty close to my goal for this season of 700lbs. I might need to buy some more weights first though!
• I ran a 2.94s 30m fly in 41 degree weather, which equals my second-fastest time ever and is by far the fastest I’ve run in sub-50-degree weather. Using the equation I derived in my blogpost about temperature and speed, 2.94s is 0.14s faster than expected for 41-degree weather! (For comparison, my PR of 2.93s, set in 64-degree weather, is just 0.10s faster than expected.)
• My hamstring tendinopathy isn’t getting better. I’ll have to manage it with more active recovery and less sprinting and deadlift volume.

Writing

• Boise
• Midlife Crises
• Programming Like a Pianist
• Measuring Bundle Sizes with Next.js and GitHub Actions

Reading

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• The 4 Hour Workweek
• The Prince
• The Art of War (Machiavelli)—I bailed on this one. Maybe in a different setting I’d be interested in a treatise about medieval warfare, but it just isn’t for me.

Projects

• Tufte-inspired [[roam/css]]

Links & Quotes

Software engineering/Startups

• Creating Company Culture
• Mistakes I’ve Made as an Engineering Manager
• How Levels Does Meetings
• Engineering Productivity Can Be Measured - Just Not How You’d Expect

Track/Health

• A Brush With Greatness: The Puma Shoe That Upended the 1968 Olympics | Sports Illustrated
• Nicotine · Gwern.net
• Track and Field - Training Energy Systems Chart
• An Exclusive Look into Usain Bolt’s World Record Warm-up
• The Great Arms Race

Other

• The Scholar’s Stage: The Framers and the Framed: Notes On the Slate Star Codex Controversy
• Is the Western way of raising kids weird? - BBC Future
• What Went Wrong in Texas? - The Atlantic
• Slate Star Clusterfuck - My New Band Is
• In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics - Slow Boring
• The days are long but the decades are short
• Tagging is Broken - Forte Labs
• Codus Operandi