Lately I got myself a desktop PC with Windows.
I have been Mac user since 2008. Before that I used mainly Linux since 2001. Every now and then during these years I have developed for Windows, but usually in a virtual machine in MacBook.
I will talk about my motivation and experiences for getting Windows PC in this post.
Last week I tried working with 4k monitor first time. I fell in love with it instantly. Until now I’ve been using 1-2 1080p monitors and 2560×1080 ultra wide monitor at home, but 4k monitor allowed me to have everything necessary on one single screen at once. I had been putting 4k off for a long time because I thought MacBook Pro would be slow with it, but that was not the case at all. It could do 60hz and I didn’t notice anything particularly slow during one day. So, I made a quick decision to buy 4k monitor for home office.
After using it for one week, here are my impressions.
Communication is extremely difficult, yet important skill to master. Lately I’ve had couple of instances of miscommunications, or lack of it and things didn’t go too well. I’m writing this to remind me of the rules of effective communication.
When studying Japanese about 10 years ago, one of the big realizations was to notice that I learn much faster if I fail fast and check the answer, as opposed to try to think about the word for over 10 seconds.
Some of my friends studied more systematically all readings of a Kanji, but I mostly focused on real world words and wrote down everything I encountered. Studying only about 30 mins every day, I could study about 100-200 words.
I realized later that I had learned the same thing when I was studying the board game Go. In about 2 years I went to 3-5 kyuu level, but it was because I played a lot of fast games, with short reviews afterwards.
I have been using that to study other things also, but I think it has become kind of way of working also.
If I need to do something, I draft something fast to see if it might even work or not, prepared to throw it away. To be able to do that I do spend long time learning and optimizing shortcuts and other practical things. That allows me to get feedback fast.