16 Apr - 22 Apr 2018
First BBQ of the year
I didn’t think I’d be writing that headline just yet! It’s mid-April and the sun’s out! We’ve had several days of nice 20+ degree weather. Hard to believe that only a month ago we had snow on the ground. We had a last minute BBQ with our neighbours on Thursday night. Let’s hope there’s plenty more to come this year.
Ruby
It was our regular ruby user group meetup on Wednesday and we attempted the bowling kata using mob programming. We’ve done this kata before but we were trying to do it using east-oriented code techniques. It was quite an interesting experiment since nobody was familiar with the technique so doing as a mob really helped us get further than we think we would have done in solo or in pairs. We all enjoyed it so we’re planning to repeat it next month to see if we can get further. East-oriented code is an interesting concept that feels like there could be something to it, but we have all been struggling to wrap our heads round it beyond trivial examples in more real-world settings.
Reading progress
I’m about 60% or so through How to have a good day and I think it’s an excellent book that should be on everyone’s list. It’s full of practical strategies that you can implement straight away.
A week in Stoicism
This week we’re focusing on impulse control and how we respond to those events that happen to us. It brings us back to one of the core tenets of Stoicism and one of the true virtues — practical wisdom. Using reason and logic to train yourself to be aware of how you react to the opinions of others, realizing that it’s up to you as to how you respond and feel about events outside of your control.
“What is bad luck? Opinion. What are conflict, dispute, blame, accusation, irreverence, and frivolity? They are all opinions, and more than that, they are opinions that lie outside of our own reasoned choice, presented as if they were good or evil. Let a person shift their opinions only to what belongs in the field of their own choice, and I guarantee that person will have peace of mind, whatever is happening around them” Epictetus
“Do away with the opinion I am harmed, and the harm is cast away too. Do away with being harmed, and harm disappears” Marcus Aurelius
Beyond this I also feel like I’m starting to get a grasp on some of the nuances and get a deeper understanding of what Stoicism really means as a philosophy. An excellent resource I came across this week really stood out to me and shined a light on what the Stoics may have really meant when they talk about virtues and good and evil. Today’s modern definitions of those words as translated don’t accurately convey the messages they were trying to get across.
weeknotes