Give me the chills

This is a place to share learnings, from technology to life everything can be interesting.

Category: Thoughts

  • Opinionated vs Not Opinionated

    Opinionated vs Not Opinionated

    You’re maintaining a project that is going to be used by other people, think about a library or a set of components. One of the key elements is to choose whether you want that project to be opinionated or not opinionated.

    Opinionated means that you have a vision, you care about that vision, and you adapt to the goal, so that you get closer to what that vision is. That vision could be a set of values, of ideas, or of constraints that you will place onto anyone using that library.

    On the other hand, if you want it to be non-opinionated, then it means that you’re targeting a wider audience, you’re trying to reach a bigger audience and your project needs to be able to support different activities, different interfaces, or whatever that is.

    The point, though, is that when the project grows, being opinionated could become harder and harder. There are trade-offs between the two ways of working.

    Taking decisions

    When you’re doing non-opinionated, sometimes taking a decision can be hard, because who am I serving?

    It’s kind of building a product, after all: you’re serving a customer type.

    Whereas when you’re opinionated, you’re serving yourself first, or your needs first, and it’s easy to take a stance and say: yes, this goes in, this doesn’t go in. You’re, after all, clear on what should be done and why.

    Keeping the stance

    Now there’s another thing that’s important: when it is opinionated, keeping that stance might be harder than it seems once the project grows.

    The “opinion” belongs to the person who had the vision, and as humans we tend to (or at least that’s the way I see it) create new rules, and think that those new rules are the new opinion.
    But those are just rules, not values, not ideals. They might come out of values as a way to make those values tangible, but that is not a guarantee.

    Being opinionated means, to me, that you want to continue passing down that initial opinion with full intensity, instead of diluting it. You want that concept, use case, ideal or simplicity to be passed down with no exception, so that your product is expressing the need or your idea.

    I think building that type of product is easier when you’re the main user, and it’s harder when you’re looking at it externally, because the more you’re the target customer/user, the easier it is to keep that opinion true to its roots down the line, as opposed to following rules that are synthetic to some level.

    Instead, when you’re building something that is not opinionated and aims to reach a wider audience, you’re facing all the challenges of how should we build this and how should this be implemented.

    That’s something you could compare to products that are wide-ranging, aiming to reach a bigger population, as big as possible, that are generic and broad, and nailing down the user type and the user need becomes the job.

    You’re searching for opinions, opinions that you can serve and include into the use case to advance the product itself.

  • It’s Never the Right Time, Yet It Always Is

    It’s Never the Right Time, Yet It Always Is

    How many times have you thought, “I’d really love to take this trip right now, but I have work, I can’t afford it.”

    Or, “I’d like to have a child, but my life is too messy right now, I wouldn’t know how to handle it.”

    When is the right time?

    When does that mysterious alignment of planets, events, things, and people happen, where everything is in its place and the only choice you have to make is handed to you by what we might call fate, ready to be seized?

    Does such a moment exist?

    A moment where we have the clarity to see that everything is perfect, that it is THE moment, and that only then should we make the choice we need to make: the trip, the children, changing jobs, changing lives, moving away, traveling, getting lost, starting over from scratch.

    I waited for many things in my life. I too waited for there to be a green light in front of the choices I wanted to make, but sometimes that green light never came.

    Just like with having children, I decided to have them even though I didn’t feel ready, even though life wasn’t as it was supposed to be, even though there was something that could have been done better.

    Looking back, I think: I did the right thing.

    The point is that there are two problems behind waiting.
    The first is that it’s not possible for there to be a green light.

    Life doesn’t make room for you; you make room for it.

    The world doesn’t adapt, it doesn’t know what you want. The world around you evolves in ways you cannot predict or imagine.
    So that astral conjunction you desire so much? Forget about it. It will never come.
    It will always be an imperfect choice, with an imperfect outcome, and yet still beautiful.

    The second point is that maybe there are cases where the world does prepare itself for you.

    Where the clearing’s leaves part to let you through
    In those moments, in the frenzy of today’s world, would we even be capable of seeing such a miracle?

    Or would our eyes quickly pass over those displaced leaves, ignoring them? Labeling them as something ordinary, when instead they were part of an immense design that we were incapable of seeing.

    So when is the right time?
    In the end, I think that if you’re asking yourself the question, maybe that is already the right time.

    Because ten years ago you wouldn’t even have asked yourself.
    It wasn’t on your radar.
    But now it is.

    Maybe you won’t be ready, maybe something will be missing, maybe you’ll make a mistake, but the point is that now you have a doubt you didn’t have before.
    And that doubt is the first spark, the first desire that writes in your heart what you want to do.

    You can ignore it and think that you need a whole world around you to justify it, but in reality that small glimmer, that doubt, so frightening and unfailingly beautiful, is enough to justify it.

  • Giving Your 100%

    Giving Your 100%

    Today I saw a recital from my kid. There were children of different ages playing different kinds of music and songs in this mid‑year experiment they did around music.

    What was interesting to me was watching how these kids approached the challenge, because each of them experienced it differently. You could easily spot the kids who were perfectly capable of doing the singing, the clapping, whatever was assigned, but who were bored because it wasn’t challenging enough. You could also see the ones slightly below the required capability, yet so passionate that they lit up the scene. And then there were the kids who didn’t believe in what they were doing and performed with no enthusiasm.

    What fascinated me most was how they looked when you watched them. The task was the same for everyone.
    Some were clearly more capable than others. Yet, from the outside, the kids who truly believed in what they were doing, who were passionate and put 100% of themselves,imperfections included, into the task, really shined.
    They stood out on a completely different level. You could also spot the ones who didn’t believe or trust what they were doing; their output was below average even though their skills were above average.

    While the results of those slightly below average in skill might not have been exceptional, their energy and passion made a difference. They were more entertaining, more interesting, more human than those who didn’t put in the effort.

    As adults, when we grow up, we tend to step back. We hold ourselves back from fully expressing ourselves. We push less, show up less, and sometimes do the bare minimum.
    We may have similar reasons, but one common issue,at least for me, is the fear of being judged as stupid, overly enthusiastic, or out of place. Yet that’s exactly what’s valuable: seeing differences, seeing passion, seeing what each of us brings with our unique capabilities, skills, emotions, feelings, and the knowledge we’ve gained through life.

    It’s perfectly reasonable to say, “This doesn’t interest me; I don’t want to put my 100% into it,” whether at work or in life. That’s fine.

    But if something is valuable to you and you’re still not showing up fully, it’s reasonable to ask yourself why. Is it not motivating, not interesting, not challenging, not fulfilling? Do you not believe in the mission? Whatever the reason, build awareness around what’s valuable and what you need to get to the point where you’re not just on stage doing the bare minimum to pass the test, but showing what you’ve got and believing in it.

    Every time I think about this, a post from Derek Sivers comes to mind about followers. In the post, you see a person dancing with full energy.
    At one point someone joins, and then it becomes a movement. You need both the follower and the leader, but both of them must give 100% to the world, to fully work and build a movement.

    It’s not important who you are in that story.
    What matters is understanding what drives you and what might be holding you back from giving your full 100%.

  • Nature and us

    Nature and us

    It’s hard to put into words how beautiful nature is, even harder to describe what you get by being immersed into nature.

    I think it’s even more amplified when you don’t have any choice but to surrender to it, when the cellular connection is not working, when there’s nobody to talk to, and you don’t have anything else to do.

    In those moments, locked into nature, you’re only left with that old need to just enjoy the moment, to live through those boring and seemingly useless minutes and hear/see/smell life itself through nature.

    Couple of years ago I did a family trip to a place I knew very well, close to home. It’s in the mountains, the cellular connection is unstable and there are some small walkable paths in the forests. Some are easier, some are harder.

    We intentionally chose a time when there would be almost no one walking around.
    The cool thing about traveling to somewhere where you already know everything about the place is that you don’t need a schedule.

    You wake up and figure out the day. You can walk around, do some light trail walking, or just chill.
    There is no need to do something, plus having the smartphone hardly usable made it even more valuable to me as I was enjoying those boring times when I had nothing to do but wait.

    And yet, and still, there’s something that fascinates me from the contrast I feel from how, as humans, we build stuff in nature. Even more so when I’m standing alone in front of them.

    The photo from this post was taken in one of those moments, coming back from a walk with my family, and the 5G towers were standing silently in front of me, at the top of the hill.

    Looking at that photo now, I can’t help but thinking back to the “Electric State” book, from Simon Stålenhag, but with less robots.

  • The space between things

    The space between things

    The waiting in front of the traffic light, looking at the motionless pedestrian stripes that await our steps.

    The void before our turn comes at the post office, between one number and the next. In the silence amidst a thousand different voices, each with its own thoughts and its life that rushes away like a swollen river.

    Today, these waits seem heavier than ever, as if the space between them has become unbearable, as if waiting were a problem. As if the void, which has always existed, is now an uncomfortable housemate, one we neither want to see nor hear.

    Everything must happen immediately. And if it doesn’t happen, we absolutely must have something to do, to act, to get something in return: endorphins, joy, sadness, excitement. That void cannot just be empty, it must have a purpose or satisfy us.
    As if we were in control of a direction, even when the direction of what we see and listen to, of videos of strangers on the other side of the world, depends on others, on algorithms shaped by our hunger, algorithms that mimic the color of our desires.

    What is it about that void that scares us? Of that silence that welcomes us when we are alone where the world moves around us, with people walking, talking, thinking, and acting, each with another world, a broken heart, a fear of being seen and accepted, with a scream hidden under the skin that just wants a hug but in the end it’s easier to scroll past another raw news story, another funny reel, another exciting photo.

    To be elsewhere so the void doesn’t exist, so that the moment where we are entirely alone, with ourselves, forced to be in the world, is annihilated. And everything becomes a continuous flow, a Panta Rei but without awareness of it, without presence, flowing cuddled by a river we did not choose, watching a sky whose colors we do not recognize.

    I don’t know if this applies to everyone. I know that sometimes, in that void and in that silence, I am afraid of feeling everything.
    All the complexity of the world and of my feelings, which overflow and blur together, preventing me from understanding what is happening. Hate, joy, fear, emotion, affection, loneliness, their borders disappear and become a loud, powerful orchestra whose sound speaks to me from the depths, but whose words I do not comprehend.

    And the temptation to scroll again is always strong, the temptation to lower my head and look at another story, read another news item, watch another video. To lose myself, to not feel, to not listen, to not be there, in that moment.

    And yet, I remember.

    I remember myself, waiting on the rough sofa of the house, and the scent of the schiacciata in the oven taking shape and flavour with the oil, and how sweet that wait was.

    I remember waiting for a friend’s visit, and how that void was full of infinite energy and emotion, of trepidation and anxiety.

    I remember watching the streetlights on winter evenings, with my breath fogging the glass, watching the car lights as if I could distinguish those of my mother’s car, and waiting, counting them, and then running to hug her and smelling the fresh scent of winter mixed with the smell of smoke on her long, dark coat.

    Since when did these voids lost the emotions that accompany every wait? The trepidation for what will happen, that potential energy that reminds us that anything can still happen and that the void is just the prelude to another, beautiful, new beginning?

    The space between things is still the same. The void and its molecules have not changed. But we… we did.

    (this is the translated version of my original Italian post)