Antoni

being old soul

I heard about the term “old soul” few months ago during conversation with a guy from America. After exchange of thoughts and life experiences he told me that they have a name for my point of view in the US, I am na “old soul”, I feel older than I am. This conversation was very eye-opening for me and stays in my mind to this day. When checking Refind I found article with this term in the title and it quickly caught my attention. After spending day sightseeing Amsterdam and meeting a girl from Ukraine with who I had really deep conversation about life I was in the right mood to read it.

Here are the lines that resonated with me the most:

In many ways, self-sabotage is a misguided form of protection. Self-sabotage “protects” you from playing big in a world where you were taught to play small.

Setting boundaries or calling out toxic behavior isn’t hateful — it’s sacred and it should be taught in every spiritual practice.

The ability to enjoy being alone is a goddamn superpower.

Your hidden desires always have a way of speaking through your choices, no matter how hard you try to repress or silence them. In fact, you’ll find that when you don’t give these inner parts air time, they’ll find mischievous ways of coming out nonetheless.

Abundance and miracles are your birthright. Joy is best served without a side of shame. Grant your spirit space to play, to laugh, to experience the physical world down to every exquisite detail.

The practice of gratitude comes with a caveat, because being grateful isn’t about being in denial. It’s about acknowledging the basic needs that are being met every day that you might otherwise take for granted.

That doesn’t mean closing yourself off to uncomfortable emotions in the process, because in the midst of the discomfort is where true change and catharsis can happen.

It doesn’t mean not being angry or outraged when you are violated; in fact, honoring your anger is just as sacred of a practice as being grateful.

Yet you’ll find that your soul thrives and manifests on a deeper level when nothing is forced at all, but honored for what it is, right here and now. Big dreams accelerate and come to life precisely when you’re willing to give up the resistance to what could be, rather than how you think they should be.

Acknowledging that some things are better left broken and that some people are better off left to their own devices is the passport to your own liberation.

Because deep down, your soul knows: sometimes the very things we think will save us are the things we need to be saved from — to pursue something even greater than we ever imagined.

Forcing something is not a solution. You just have to follow the force and it will lead you.

changing thought patterns

I am starting to notice that I live in many cognitive traps inside my mind. My mind is not working as freely as I feel, thoughts do form a patterns, repeating patterns, learned and adopted by my mind. I was noticing it before but what have changed after reading this article is mindset to take action and not only analyze but also try to change negative unhelpful thoughts. And what have also changed is the new of looking at thoughts, not as negative and positive, but as helpful and unhelpful.

The exact categorization of the thought pattern isn’t important — what matters is whether the thought pattern is helpful. What effect does it have on you when you think it? Is it moving you toward the life you want, or getting you stuck?Most of us aren’t aware when these thought patterns happen, so we’re beholden to their power without realizing it.To be clear, these aren’t “bad” thoughts — they’re natural and normal, but they aren’t always helpful.

We can train our minds to use a more powerful thought pattern. ~ You have to do this over and over.

1. Catch yourself when you’re using the old pattern.
2. Pause and acknowledge your fear.
3. Try new thought pattern.

Currently I am trying to change

Nie uda mi się. Nie ogarnę tego, w końcu trafię na ścianę której nie przeskoczę. Do tej pory miałem fart.

to

Chcę spróbować. Jeżeli odpowiednio się skupię to rozwiążę ten problem. A jeżeli nie to nie był on dla mnie.

Life is complicatedly simple, the threshold for mistakes is very big. Of course there are some things that I cannot afford to break but at the same time I should not be paralyzed by them and always prioritize it. Maybe it is more of a pool than ocean. If you stick to some rules you can play around and never drown.

Mateusz

Keyboard Firmware Reverse Engineering

Thing is a milestone in the net-enjoyers catalogue because I’m referencing my own work this time. Namely for the last month I was reverse engineering my own keyboard for fun. I didn’t really know where it would take me but it was interesting in the moment and I really felt like I was doing something that now body else has really done. Saying that I also want to stress the importance of a community. Because the most valuable thing I learned is: post your work to others if you can. If you spent 2 weeks doing something that was just “for your own interest”, it would only take you an hour to share that with the wider world. And someone might actually benefit from you and be able to stand on your shoulders. As you know scientists don’t each start out by inventing the wheel and proving the Pythagorean Theorem. They “stand on the shoulders of giants” and are able to achieve unthinkable things through teamwork where the other side of the team does not even know that they are helping.

Besides that it’s always interesting to swim in the ocean of knowledge where google results are sparse and most of the things are on you to figure out. The conclusion for me from this project is that you should always purse the thing that interests you, not in a month, or when you are going to have more free time, do it now. Don’t expect something nice to always come from this but you are never going to regret pulling on the thread of curiousness. And as you might expect, share anything you found and you think might help others or might just be a nice documentation on what you did that day.

Programming Hand Tools

You know these talks that you sit with a tea to watch and it just flies by and for the rest of the day you keep thinking about it? I love them! The problem is that they are rare and I also believe that different talks are going to evoke that feeling for different people. If you like anything technical or keyboard related I strongly recommend this talk. It’s quite brisk and flows very nicely. And the opening quote sticks with you because you know it’s true.

The advent of 3D printers and opening your imagination wide open is truly something to behold of. Creativity for me is the result of watching what others do and giving it your own unique spin. Don’t be afraid that others are doing quantum leaps in reasoning by inventing something when in reality all the necessary thing were there. All that had to be done is to connect them and that is sometimes easier than it might seem.

The best engineering interview question I’ve ever gotten

Have you had this talk? The technical interview talk? You have to read code examples from a PDF and tell what is wrong with them. Or you have to implement something from the book of Algorithms And Data Structures. It feels so wrong because it’s so out of place. Judging if someone is fit for a determined job position is hard but in the IT space it’s just shooting in the dark. Coming of as know-it-all here is very hard not to do, but I’ll accept the fact that I’ll do that regardless and just move on. HR people are not IT people and don’t know what is considered knowledge for a person working in that field. I lump everything into IT but I mostly mean software developer jobs.

Say something about yourself that isn’t your leadership, about how you deal with stress or “always meet deadlines”. Tell me about the hardest problem that you have solved, describe it. It’s easy to see if someone understands what they are talking about here. Where if you ask someone how to invert a binary tree they’ll just rattle of something from a book and don’t understand a word from that. Don’t say, SHOW me! I think that if I ever was in that interview that the author of the original post describes I’d be more ecstatic about that question then if I got the job or not. It’s a good exercise to do it yourself, set the timer and get cracking. See how well you’d in that situation.