October 2021 Review
October 31st, 2021October was my first full month in Atlanta since May—but I still found a way to get out of town for a couple of weekends. We have more travel upcoming in November and December, which is exciting but also maybe a bit too much.
Goal Tracking
- 🟡 Get 1% faster. I tweaked my hamstring—time will tell how long I’m out, but it seems certain that my training will be affected for at least a couple weeks.
- 🔴 50% less discretionary spending. October’s discretionary spending was 19% under 2020’s average, buoyed by the couple travel weekends I had—a wedding in San Antonio, a weekend in Clayton, and upcoming travel to New York.
- 🟡 One hour of solitary free time a day.
- 🟡 Twice-weekly live conversations with friends.
Track & Fitness
- I ran a couple Freelap-timed 150s in 16.82 and 16.85 (with 15 minutes in between). It’s an exciting preseason performance—the only comparable I have is a hand-timed 16.7 in college the season before I ran a 7.06 60m on a bum hamstring.
- I strained my hamstring the week afterwards (yesterday). It seems pretty minor, but it’s still really frustrating to hit a roadblock after stringing together a few good months.
- That’s two hamstring injuries, to the same leg, within a few months. Something clearly has to change—with technique, training, or both.
Writing
Reading
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan
- Foundation and Earby by Issac Asimov
- Foundation’s Edge by Issac Asimov
- The Penguin History of the World by by J.M. Roberts, Odd Arne Westad
Links & Quotes
Software & Tech
- Starship is Still Not Understood
- Lambda School’s Job-Placement Rate May Be Far Worse Than Advertised
- Apple’s M1 Pro, M1 Max SoCs Investigated: New Performance and Efficiency Heights
- Speed up your ClojureScript Webapp
- How to Evaluate Startup Offers - A Beginner’s Guide
- Why I Hate Frameworks
- How Tech Companies Should Compensate Their Remote Workers
- How much slower is remote work?
- A comprehensive guide to managing secrets in your Terraform code
- And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep
- Memcached vs Redis - More Different Than You Would Expect
- Boyd’s Management Model
- 20 Things I’ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer
- Looking for Tether’s Money
- Where’s the 69 Billion Backing the Stablecoin Tether?
Track, Fitness, & Health
- The Difference Is in the Start
- Does Covid Cause Significant Brain Harm?
- Analyzing the Olympic 100-meter sprints
Personal Development
- Beyond Smart
- Willingness to look stupid
- Getting Unstuck
- What to learn
- Pursue High-quality Leisure
- Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity
Other
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