Just one update for the moment: Regular Programming, episode 62: About Learning Languages

Cough, cough, conference?

I had a plan. I was going to speak at Oredev 2024 here in early November. I still have that plan largely. But the plan was that I would do the slides and prep-work for that talk in the time between Berlin and the 5th of Nov. And it hasn't worked out the way I planned.

I had outlined my talk to know what I wanted to cover and was planning what audacious new experiment to try with my slides when I was hit by an increasingly bad cough. My entire family has had a cough since the start of October probably. I had a bout of fever early October. Due to chronic acid reflux issues a cough can stick around for me for quite some time. So nothing odd there in my life. Then I got a different cough. More full-bodied, you know, phlegmier (sorry, if you don't want taste-notes on illness). And my wife apparently had had that for a bit while I was away. Preschool-age children. This is a constant.

I seemed mostly fine. Until I wasn't. This hit tuesday. Then I had a 40C fever. And when I get a fever it seems to always conspire with stomach issues to make something altogether worse. Or the stomach issues influence getting the fever. I can't seem to find out. So I lay down and rest, I medicate, I try to eat very carefully and not provoke my treacherous stomach-throat interaction.

One fairly likely co-conspirator is stress. I put myself on the hook for things that I want to do and that helps me ensure that I do them. But this means that there is stress in pretty much all of what I do. Because the only consistent mechanism I know to get myself to fulfill and endeavor is to make myself highly accountable to other people:

• Running my own business: I figure out how to get paid for effort or I don't get paid (don't eat, lose house, so on).
• Client work: There are expectations and I need to deliver on them, or I don't get paid and more importantly I let them down.
• Having employees: I love my team, they don't cause me a ton of stress but I'd be a shit boss if I didn't feel a ton of responsibility. And the market has certainly been stressful around keeping them with client work.
• Open source work: I am only engaged in projects with people I care for and respect. I do not want to dissapoint them. This is a very mild pressure as I know I can skip an issue of the Nerves Newsletter or be quiet for a bit without anything blowing up.
• Startup effort: Getting NervesCloud off the ground is a multi-people thing and if I don't put effort into my things I will let some people down. The pressure is mild but it adds to the amount of things I time-slice between. Eventually it may be the thing that simplifies my life by not needing to balance client work but that's still quite far off.
• Publishing, writing, sharing: I am off of doing continuous YouTube which is way worse in this sense. But I care to keep speaking to the world and interacting with my communities. It also serves my business in many ways.
• Speaking and events: Both arranging things locally for various heartfelt reasons and engaging with my communities by travelling, speaking and such. The prep-work drowns the travel and actual event-time but both wreak havoc on other things.

I rarely feel stressed but I've worked in high-pressure environments for a long time and it scratches my brain in a productive, not necessarily healthy way. My bet is that I am generally on a fairly high dose of stress. Last few months I have felt a bit stressed as I was gearing up for Berlin, knew I had Oredev coming. I've done more work hours than I usually do and all that. So I've probably earned a crash. The body keeps the score I hear.

Anyway. I am still planning to do Oredev. I feel a fair bit better across the last two days. I am confident it will be done over the weekend and I can travel as intended and give my talk. I don't think my slides will be incredibly ambitious. I will have to adapt a fair bit as it can be a rehearsed talk of the kind I am most comfortable doing. But I've done a lower-prep talk before and I think it worked out. The talk will still not have a trace of GenAI in it because I care to craft my own message. Saying that mostly in case someone felt the desire to suggest I have an AI write it for me from my bullets. Not even tempted. Writing is not the hard part.

Thanks for the therapy session. Sometimes a tight plan gets very derailed by health. I do feel a bit stressed about the whole change as it just murdered all my margins. I'm more bummed that I couldn't go to my kid's dance "recital" because I was coughing my lungs out.

Hope you are staying away from preschool plagues and balancing your life decently. You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.