Ask HN: The low-information diet for software engineer

mickelsen · on July 30, 2019

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/

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.

tjadowski · on Aug 1, 2019

Thanks, I will check it

muzani · on July 30, 2019

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 · on Aug 1, 2019

Great piece of advice, thanks!

vpEfljFL · on July 31, 2019

> 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 · on Aug 1, 2019

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/