
Ask HN: The low-information diet for software engineer - tjadowski
Hello HN!<p>I&#x27;d like to implement info my life a low-information diet as it&#x27;s described in 4HWW by Tim Ferriss. In this book author wrote that hi consumes only two magazines a month (one economic and one industry related).<p>I&#x27;m a software engineer, web developer (backend) and devops.<p>What kind of valuable, low-level information resources are you recommend to keep an eye on?
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mickelsen
I think a lot has changed since Tim wrote that book, but a low-information
diet is always wise to minimize distractions.

I find it hard to stop reading HN or getting news from my twitter feed. You
can try the Hacker Newsletter for the first case:
[https://hackernewsletter.com/](https://hackernewsletter.com/)

For Twitter since it's mostly fluff, I just delete the app and restrain myself
from touching the web at high demand times. Probably people do the same when
they close facebook.

You could also leave your favorite sites in a bookmarks folder, then consult
them all just once a week for an hour or so, on weekends or any downtime. A
set, scheduled, timeboxed one of course.

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tjadowski
Thanks, I will check it

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muzani
I think the key is to be proactive, not passive. Narrow focus and go deeper.

Identify what you want. For me, my goal is to just have code that represents
what it's trying to do as closely as possible, minimizing design patterns.

Yours might be something like trying to minimize latency as much as possible.
It can change, but pick something you're excited about.

Now find books related to this. Hack apart some open source to see how it
ticks. Indulge in related subreddits and communities. Find some academic
papers on the topic. Set up a code sandbox, try things, break things. Maybe do
something ridiculous.

After a while, you'll get bored of it. Pick something else, and focus on that.

This week I've been trying to optimize user experience during loading times,
which led me down the path of CSS based loading dialogs, modals, empty states,
messing with the loading order of things, such that it seems like the page is
loading faster.

Next thing might probably be trying to build a CRUD dashboard as quick and
elegantly as possible.

~~~
tjadowski
Great piece of advice, thanks!

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vpEfljFL
> What kind of valuable, low-level information resources are you recommend to
> keep an eye on?

I'm mostly using weekly newsletters about frameworks/languages I'm interested
and I read tech books as well. Also, I allow myself to check HN once in a
week.

Don't use any social services except GitHub and messenger (not FB) :)

My quality of life is definitely better because of absence of any
"breaking/fake news" and I find myself to be able to focus more during the
day.

One think though I need to figure out some ways of another entertainment
activity, maybe I should try to install some games or find fiction books I
enjoy. Will it count as a low-information diet?

tl;dr try to live couple of weeks without social media / news and see how it
goes

~~~
tjadowski
I don't follow any news and any social media (I have only one of them, FB but
only for a very specific technical groups/forums and I only browse it on a my
computer with kill newsfeed add-on). Anyway social and news aren't my problem,
my problem is "technical social" one :).

When I reread this chapter about information diet in 4HWW I recognize the same
pattern as Tim's described.

I have a habit to read and bookmarks a lot of technical information which
aren't relevant to any tasks I'm doing in this moment. It's a strong habit and
I start to remove it. It's trigger when I lost focus or I stuck with work and
I don't know what next.

But when I'll only focus on "useful" information, I can easily lost my pulse
of current trends. From the other side, "knowledge" without practice is
useless in my opinion.

So, I'm looking for a healthy balance :).

And you are right, a good newsletter, like Fronted Focus[1], is the best
option.

[1]: [https://frontendfoc.us/](https://frontendfoc.us/)

