Ethan’s eyes burned as he stared at the ceiling in the dark. It was past midnight, yet his mind churned with lines of code, bug reports, and deadlines. He could hear the faint hum of his laptop from across the room, the machine sleeping-but his brain never did.
He wasn’t in the office. He wasn’t even near his desk. But he might as well have been shackled there. Every time he tried to drift into sleep, a stray thought would pierce through: Did I fix that memory leak? What if the deployment fails tomorrow?
On weekends, when his daughter tugged at his sleeve to play, his body was present, but his mind wandered back to sprint boards and review notes. He’d nod and smile, but she could tell he wasn’t really there. The guilt would come, heavy and sharp, but instead of freeing him, it only chained him tighter.
Work lived in him like a warden. No one forced him to think about it-not his boss, not his colleagues. The prison wasn’t physical. It was a cage built from expectation, ambition, and fear. A cage he carried with him everywhere.
Sometimes, he wondered what silence would feel like. Not the silence of a muted Slack notification, but real silence-the kind that let you hear your own heartbeat without worry pressing against it.
One evening, walking home, he noticed a sparrow land on a fence. It hopped, light and unbothered, and then flew off. He stopped in his tracks, watching it disappear into the sky. For a fleeting second, he envied the bird’s freedom, a freedom he had once believed was his by right.
And in that second, he realized: the keys to his cell weren’t held by his company, or his laptop, or even the endless tasks. They were in his own pocket, hidden beneath the weight of his own unwillingness to set them down.
In software development, understanding the difference between being effective and being efficient is crucial for delivering high-quality products.
Effectiveness is about doing the right things - choosing the correct features to implement, solving the right problems, and aligning development efforts with business goals. An effective developer ensures that their work has a meaningful impact and contributes to the project's success.
Efficiency, on the other hand, is about doing things right - optimizing code, reducing resource usage, and minimizing development time. Efficient developers focus on speed and resource management, ensuring that solutions are implemented with minimal waste.
Balancing effectiveness and efficiency leads to better outcomes. For example, writing highly optimized code for a feature that users don't need is efficient but not effective. Conversely, delivering valuable features slowly or with unnecessary complexity may be effective but not efficient.
In summary, successful software development requires both: building the right solutions (effectiveness) and building them well (efficiency).
I have a git repository with 25k commits in it and 7k+ files.
Under Windows 11 using WSL, I noticed that git operations were significantly slower compared to running them natively on Windows.
I have a script that I use to synchronize many branches that was taking forever to execute, but should have been relatively fast.
It also had trouble with line endings which caused issues when merging branches but reminded me of a setting I used to configure in my ~/.gitconfig a very long time ago.
Given that git configuration under Windows and WSL are separate, I had to update the ~/.gitconfig file in my Linux environment with the following.
[core]
autocrlf = trueThis immediately fixed my problem and git was fast again.
When I started using WSL on Windows 11 I had slow network performance issues.
We're talking running speedtest-cli and getting ~3 Mbps download speeds while my connection can reach 400 Mbps.
After searching online for a while and trying a variety of things I finally found a solution.
In %USERPROFILE%\.wslconfig add the following:
[wsl2]
networkingMode=mirroredWith this fix applied I'm now getting ~400 Mbps download speeds in WSL, matching my native Windows performance.
Every week, on Friday.
15 minutes.
- Gather feedback from team members.
- Review feedback and identify key themes.
- Identify action items based on the feedback.
- Identify a date at which to revisit the feedback and the action items.