Maybe not a direct answer to your question but I’d try to keep it the lowest number of subjects at any given time with deeper learning in them.

In school I was genuinely interested in learning, but every instructor seemed to hand you a mountain of homework each day and acted like their subject was the most important. I spent most my time scrambling to get it all done and in the end only learned what little I could to simply pass.

I remember this especially with math, I loved math but if I took the time to study better and actually learn the concepts, I wouldn’t have had the time to finish my other homework.

This has crept up on me as I get older. I worked in fast food a lot when I was younger and would just cobble something “healthy” together on breaks. For awhile I drank Huel all the time because I got burned out on food.

After going vegan I discovered a whole new world of flavor, and a bit before that realized I’m obsessed with spicy food (I grew up in the Midwest with very low exposure to spicy food). Now that I have basically all the material things I want, I really value having an incredible meal more. Unfortunately that’s resulted in poor choices and I’m getting fat.

This is actually a great habit my wife and l do. We don’t eat on the couch, we actually have dinner at the table (though admittedly yes, we’ll still watch the TV sometimes from the table).

It just feels so much better. The last time I visited my family (out of state) and we were eating something, I brought my plate to the table and everyone else went to the couch, and it just felt kind of dirty to eat there.

Reminds me of my previous job that I stupidly took on because they wanted to go from the developer’s custom fork of Rails 3.2 up to Rails 6 (just released at the time).

The entire thing was spaghetti code and it was so out of date that I couldn’t really do incremental version updates due to libraries just straight up missing or being unmaintained.

My other mistake was thinking that because I had years of Rails experience I could take this on. As expected bugs occurred and everyone pointed their finger at me. I could barely make out what was going on and wasn’t familiar with unit specs at the time (ouch) so it was a poor experience on my end.

(My favorite was them doing currency conversions but storing the results as floats in the database. During a monthly scheduled job thousands of transactions were 1¢ off due to poor rounding. I felt ashamed because before working there I always knew to never do this, but apparently I didn’t do an adequate job of confirming how it worked in this app.)

It sure does, but I don’t log my family and friends’ queries so I’ll probably MITM myself using a travel router.

I’m blocking primarily with my self-hosted, non-logging DNS server (Unbound).

I might just use my travel router to MITM myself while Tailscale is disabled on the iPhone to glean more information that way.

I’m a developer too and sometimes I say “I don’t know” knowing full well the shitstorm it’ll bring. I’m a few years in and I just don’t give a fuck if that pisses off the person on the other end.

I just don’t have time for games — a few times I tried to give a better answer but didn’t have all the information I needed and every time it came back to bite me in the ass.

I love being a developer with all my heart, I don’t come into the office and I love my job. But I won’t play politics, kiss ass or put lipstick on a pig. Why would I? In my experience doing so is a lot worse than admitting I don’t know something; if someone wants to throw a tantrum that’s fine but they can do it on their time. If we could just get off this time suck call I can find the information I need pretty quick and get you an answer ASAP.