DEV Community: Praneet Rohida

The production ratio and the difference between information, knowledge, and wisdom

Praneet Rohida — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 16:22:27 +0000

There's been this thought in the back of my head for a long time. I pondered over it on and off, but never really did much about it. It's about how much I consume vs how much I produce. Okay, this sounds very weird out of context, so let me explain.

Consumption

Reading books, watching tutorials, binging YouTube videos, all of this comes under consumption. Anything that feeds your brain with new information and insights, anything that triggers ideas and thoughts is to be counted as consumption.

Production

Writing blogs, developing software, creating video content, creating designs, painting, all count as production. Basically using your own experience, skillset, and ideas to bring something into the world that didn't exist before.

The production ratio

I've read 54 books in the past 18 months. I've watched countless YouTube videos and documentaries covering science, programming, art, philosophy, and whatnot. You might think I'm maybe bragging. You might think maybe all this made me a lot wiser. But no, in fact, I wish this number was a lot lesser. Don't get me wrong, most of the content I consumed was very informative and brilliantly produced. In fact, I still look at my bookshelf and drool over all the unread books. But truth be told, all this consumption has made me information-obese.

If I look back at all this information I collected, I hardly applied a fraction of it actively. I know a lot of stuff, but I don't know what to do with it. Rather, I never bothered to do anything with it. I wish I consumed less information but made more out of that information.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like I didn't produce anything at all. I've been working hard at Sizzy. We made a completely new backend portal, redesigned the whole app, redid the landing page from scratch, and a lot more in the past 2 years. I'm happy with the work I did in that regard. But all of this was work. This had to be done. But outside of work, I hardly had any hunger to produce things, apart from some very sparse, scattered, and incomplete projects.

Information vs Knowledge vs Wisdom

I recently watched this video by James Hoffman (highly recommended channel if you're a coffee nerd) where he briefly went over this topic. It helped me add another dimension to this thought.

Information

Any time you are consuming some content, you are gathering information. You are looking at other people's experiences, processes, and advice and registering them in your brain.

Knowledge

Processing the consumed information to make sense of it and fit it into your mental model outputs knowledge. You apply your existing insights, experiences, and judgments to the information you just gathered. Knowledge is customizing the information for yourself. This might include making notes or even deeply analyzing and pondering over the information.

Wisdom

Wisdom comes from the application of knowledge. Reading a lot of books about music doesn't make you wise. It just makes you knowledgeable. Actually using this knowledge to create a lot of music will make you wise. This is the last but the most important step. All your knowledge is pointless if you don't actually use it to its full potential.

The formula

Okay, I'm not going to give you a mathematical formula, because such a formula doesn't exist. I'll tell you what it should feel like though. Here is a series of questions you want to ask yourself.

Does my brain feel overwhelmed?

If yes, you have excess information in your brain that you need to process. Sit down and structure your thoughts. Use whatever technique helps you. Writing, meditating, discussing it with a friend, anything works.

Does my brain feel underwhelmed and bored?

You need to expand your horizon. Start gathering and processing more information. Learn a new skill, or expand on your existing skills. Maybe develop a new hobby.

Does my brain feel well-fed but still a bit hazy? Do I feel under-accomplished?

You have gained knowledge but not really put it to good use. You need to create more stuff. You need to take up projects that will utilize and challenge your knowledge.

I am planning to regularly ask myself these questions to keep my ratio balanced. For now, I want to maximize production. This post was the start of it and I have a few other things planned that I'll spend my time. Until the time being, I am going to reduce the amount of time I spend reading daily.

Do you think this post was helpful for you? Do you want to discuss this or anything else in general? Feel free to hit me up on Twitter.

The State of Web Development

Praneet Rohida — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 03:47:13 +0000

We Have Come a Long Way

After a friend's recommendation, I recently got interested in Aaron Swartz's life and started diving into his blog. I came across this post he wrote back in 2005. I got a glimpse of how Web Development looked like back in 2005. I only started programming in 2012 and got into web development in around 2015. So even though I have had my fair share of copying files on a server using FileZilla, I have no idea how things worked back in 2005. So this turned out to be a pretty interesting read for me.

One thing I definitely realized is that we have come a long way. 2005 Web Development was like Uncharted 1 and 2020 is like Uncharted 4.

You might be thinking this is such an obvious thing. Things do evolve Praneet, what's the news? Don't you have anything useful to say you dumb toaster?

My point here is that taking a look at the past made me appreciate the present even more and has left me very excited about the future. We evolved from figuring out database queries by counting underscores to having awesome tools that can generate a whole production-ready backend with just a few clicks. Tomorrow when I will sit on my desk and start working, I will be even more amazed by all the tools and technologies I have at my disposal. I will marvel about how years of re-iteration and the efforts of thousands of brilliant minds got us where we are today.

But We Are Still Hype Driven

Sadly, a large part of our community is still hype-driven. Marek Kirejczyk wrote a very nice blog post about it back in 2016. Kitze has been reminding us about it through his talk. Years have passed, I think we still haven't moved on much. We all want to use whatever is the latest and greatest on Twitter and Reddit. Our biggest blunder was Redux. Redux is not bad, but it is suitable only for some very specific use cases. 98.36% of the projects that use Redux don't even need Redux (Don't mind, I just like to throw in random numbers. But you get the idea). Still, all the companies and the developers and their cats are using Redux for their cake recipes app. I see the same trend in 2020 with Recoil. As soon as it was announced, thousands of developers jumped with joy because they have this new state management library from Facebook that they can use with no need whatsoever.

Users Don't Give a Shoe

People still use sites built using jQuery. I have seen products being shipped in 2020 that are built using PHP. The hard truth that we all need to realize is that no one ever lost a customer because their site wasn't using the hottest state management library or using some fancy routing thingie.

We focus too much on our pleasure as developers and care too little about the users. It's us who want the perfect Lighthouse score. Do our users want the site to be PWA compliant? No. It's us who wants to screenshot those 4 perfect green circles and brag about it on Twitter. We developers have curious minds, and we constantly want to stimulate our brains with something new to do. Shipping 5 products of value using the same tech stack that just works is too boring for us. We would rather use something new and fancy every time. Whenever there's something new in the Twitter bazaar, we just want to go ahead and rewrite our whole project more than anything. We have an itch that will not go away until we use that new thing. We just want to use the 'latest cutting-edge technology' and get the joy out of doing it. And before we know it, we are stuck into this vicious cycle of refactors and bug fixes, never actually pushing features that the users care about.

I have been guilty of being not enough user-centric. I am constantly trying to shift my mindset on shipping more. I use mobx-state-tree for almost everything I build because it allows me to ship more and ship fast without babysitting my code. I've heard Vue.js and Svelte are great, but I'll still use React for my next project because switching the framework won't provide any extra value. This does not mean that I am not open to change. Whenever something comes along that will help me ship better quality products faster or fits certain use-case, I will definitely experiment with it. But I try not to fall for the hype. Our team at Sizzy tries to give the users something new every weekday. It may be a bugfix or some big feature, but we focus more on improving the value of our product for the users.

The React Ecosystem is Very Fragmented

We have a million ways to build our sites, and we don't need more. React needs fewer ways to manage state, fewer ways to style our components, fewer routing libraries and fewer ways to build a static/SSR site. We need solutions that don't suck, and work well together. We desperately need a well-thought cohesive framework built on top of React.

I look forward to the day when we don't have to go library shopping before starting a project. I am waiting for the day when we developers start shipping products without worrying about our webpack config and babel plugins and 100 more things that we should not be concerned about in the first place. I think we are already on that path, and we'll get there. The future won't suck.

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A First Timer's Guide to Remote Job and Ways to Stay Productive

Praneet Rohida — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 05:00:00 +0000

This post is a response to my own journey. Earlier this year, I was in talks with Kitze about a full-time contract to work with him on Sizzy and a few other projects we had planned. It was a remote job. I was super-thrilled to accept the offer and start working with him, except there was one problem. The chaotic monkey inside my brain started shouting that I was very much used to the office routine and will not be able to do well in a remote job. So after arguing a lot with myself and discussing it with my mentors, friends, and parents, I accepted the offer.

It's been six months I've been working on this job and it has been great so far. This is the documentation of all the problems I faced while getting used to a new work environment, and how I managed to keep my shit together, so I don't end up binge-watching Netflix all day.

The Sunny Side

Remote work is great! I'll probably never go back to an office job. Here's why:

Flexibility to Plan Your Day

One thing I don't like about office jobs is that you have to plan your day around your office timings. Having a remote job with flexible timings meant that I can follow a sleep schedule that works for me. I can do my chores between my work breaks so that I have more spare time after work. If things are going downhill at work, I can decide to take a nap or read a book to freshen myself up.

No More Commute

Working from home means I save 2 hours per day from the commute and getting ready for office. That's about 8% of a day. I don't have to drive through annoying traffic daily. I can care less about rains and storms. I don't get stung by a bee on my lip on my way to the office. (This actually happened once.)

No Distractions

I hate it when I'm miles deep into work, thinking through 3145 dimensions light-years away into another galaxy and a co-worker pokes me back on Earth to ask for a USB cable. Working remotely means that I get to stay in my zone during deep-work.

The Thorny Side

All these things are great! But we need to address the thorns too. There were a few concerns I had before starting the job, and a few issues I faced after getting on board. Let's pick them out, one by one. After that, I'll tell you how I manage to stay productive through all this.

Procrastination Habits

If there was an Oscar for procrastination, I'd probably win all of them (but collect them later). Such was my condition a year back. I would spend endless hours on YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter. And the worst thing was, I would still do it even after realizing how much am I harming myself. My brain was addicted to avoiding what needs to be done and would rather focus on trivial things. And when I tried to force it to do something productive, it would come up with some rational-sounding excuses.

"Hey Brainy McBrain, enough internet for today. Let's work on those dust-eating side projects we started and never touched again."

"Yeah yeah, we should totally do that. But look how messed up your room is. Let's clean that first. Also, you were supposed to do your laundry yesterday."

"Ugh! Couldn't you tell me this when we were watching Gordon Ramsay yell at people on YouTube for hours?"

"And then we should get some rest since we'll be tired."

"Are you even listening?"

"Also, let's order ice cream!"

Environment

It's easy to stay productive in an office since that is a place exclusively made for work. There are people around you who are working on the same thing as you. You have frequent discussions with your team about your work. There are some awesome mentors and seniors who inspire you with their work all the time. It's easy to stay productive in such a dedicated environment.

On the other hand, spending most of your day alone at a place which your mind associates with leisure and rest? Trying to accomplish something every day in such an environment? Oh, boy! I've never been more afraid of myself.

Social Life

Being majorly introvert, I had very little social life outside of work in Bangalore. I had many great friends at work, especially the BuilderX team.

I was very grateful that I got to meet these nice people every day. Taking up a remote job meant I would spend almost every day alone and interact with very few people. I was not sure how I'd tackle this.

Staying Productive

Don't Work from Your Couch

Getting to work from your couch the whole day might sound appealing. But trust me, the best thing for your productivity is having a dedicated space to work from. Working from a coffee shop is good once in a while, but for most of the days, you need a home office. Get a proper desk, a decent chair and create a nice environment that puts you into a working mood. You don't need a $1000 gaming chair or RGB mood lighting or any fancy stuff to do that. Simple things go a long way. Strictly use this space only for work.

Plan Your Day

This is something I have started doing recently and has worked wonders. Take some time in the morning or the previous night to plan your whole day. Dedicate fixed time for both work and non-work tasks. You'll get much more done than a day when you do things randomly.

Step Away from the Computer

It's very important to take a break at specific intervals. It's the only way I've found that helps me stay productive for 8-10 hours per day. Get an app that reminds you to take regular breaks. Time Out for MacOS and stretchly for Windows and Linux are some great options. I prefer 10 minutes of rest after 50 minutes of work. You can experiment with different intervals to see what works best for you.

You must step away from your computer during rests. Watching a YouTube video or browsing Twitter is not considered resting. Take a walk, do the dishes, feed your pet, or use your break to complete any small chore.

Increase Communication with Your Team

One downside of remote jobs is that teams tend to communicate a lot lesser compared to office setups. I hate meetings and video calls, but I've come to realize that they are very important to get things done more smoothly. Have daily Zoom stand-ups with your team. Communicate and discuss everything with your co-workers over Slack and other tools as you would do in person in an office. It's always better to over-communicate than to under-communicate.

Right now we are just 3 team members working on Sizzy. As we grow, I plan to design a rigid communication framework that works and scales well for remote teams. I will write a blog post about it once we get there.