Lakshay Sethi's Blog

In the software engineering industry we have a term called TDD TDD stands for test driven development It is a philosophy of writing code where you write the test for the code before you write any production code that is you right code that will actually test the code usually in a back black box way with expected outputs and certain inputs. this really helps because the tests you write give you a clear picture of the requirements for the code and the tests can also later help find out any regressions that may occur in future when adding new features to the code base. I had an idea about why not apply this same concept to your personal life. why not do test driven development for personal life. for example say you want to learn Chinese A test will be can you talk with a native Chinese person for at least 10 minutes without having to use any English or any technology to translate what they are saying? a smaller test would be if you could read a particular passage in Chinese or not we can ...

since this is the second time we are doing this for a month it will make sense to compare how we did last month to this month April 2023: as we can see the time invested in Linux has decreased from over 3 hours in March to less than 3 hours in April 2023. The reason for this is because I recently changed jobs and I'm not doing as much Linux work in the new workplace immediately as I was doing in the previous workplace. There has been an increase in the Trying or setting up tag which is mostly what I've been doing in the new workplace. - getting set up I'm not too happy with this actually I don't want to spend an eternity setting up I actually want to do Linux or programming work I take full responsibility for the lowered Linux and programming and high trying and setting up this month. And next month I will try to reduce trying and setting up to a maximum of 0.4 hours on average per day next month I will also try to increase the amount of time I s...

March 2023 Time investments: Since the decision to change the ambiguous job tag  to reporting what was actually done, we see that the job tag has vanished from the top 10 activities invested in March 2023 The purpose of doing these reviews is to help get insights about where a course correction is needed and what we can expect the future to look like. Why Linux was heavily invested in? - Because that is what pays the bills and I enjoy it. Why writing was heavily invested in and promoted? - because it helps me think clearly and make good / better decisions . Why did we spend 30 hours on other people and why did I put a max limit goal of 0.4 hours a day on other people. - the issue is we need to have boundaries, Highly effective people do not allow, just about anyone to message them and start taking up their time. - part of the other people tag is situations or meetings with people where there was not a clear win-win for both parties. The meeting was a waste of time. And so I wa...

I was recently looking at a list of top searched queries on search engines like google. Here are the broad themes I found in the questions people asked: 1. Money  2. Relationships and everything related to that 3. Food 4. Celebrities 5. How To  6. Happiness and personal success 7. Health And this list is also very close to most peoples' goals and top priorities. Today we will be looking at and discussing number 5 on this list.  How to. The questions related to this theme included the following: 1. How to make an app 2. How to build my own website 3. How are cars/phones/etc made? 4. How to edit/create videos/movies and so on. In life, as we grow up we need to learn certain skills. We need to do this so that we can offer the fruits of our skills to others and in turn exchange them for the fruits of their skills. When we are young our parents and caregivers take care of our needs and desires. But when we grow up, we have to shift from depending on other people to depending o...

In the month of Feb 2023 this is what I spent my time (life) on: Sleep 7.03 hrs per day is fine though Elon said he sleeps average 6 hours a day - so I think we can improve on this, given we are not exercising as much and dont need too much sleep Job 2.05 hrs/day this has been reduced because mid-Feb I decided that the job tag was a bit ambiguous and should not be used any more - it is better to log what I was actually doing - eg - programming? linux? or talking to other people Linux 1.16hrs /day  has come from job work  Driving 1.10 hrs per day on this is definitely not okay, especially when we have the option to work from home. I dont want to waste my life sitting in traffic because this means I am not focusing on reading a book, learning from udemy etc or programming and doing linux stuff. Writing 1.01 hrs per day - this is awesome :) I will keep it up - it is what I am doing now. Most of what I write is Qna I make a list of questi...

25 November 2022: top activities in the last 365 days aka Priorities activity name -- % - (avg hours/day) - activity name 1. sleep - -30.42% -7.3hr - sleep 2. job - -16.25% -3.9hr - job I love creating Software systems and working as a software engineer. - as we can see this activity is the top activity by time spent after sleep.  In general, the job tag is composed of working with Linux tools and programming and working or meetings with other people about these. 3. food - -5.0% -1.2hr - food * After job - food is what took most of my time. I am not proud of this. Food is something I need to get better at - When I die, I don't want people to say this man's top priorities were sleeping working and eating food -_- . By the end of next year, I aim to get more efficient at this. It is not that I do not like food, or that I do not enjoy spending time with other people over a delicious meal in a nice environment. It is more that I don't want this to be 3rd on the list of my pr...

 I want to share my thoughts and experiences, I want to share stories with you that would help you understand, better,  the reality that we live in. But there is a fear of doing this. There is a fear that prevents us from sharing our thoughts  I will give you 2 examples: 1. I have had this blog for a long time, I havent shared much on it, part of the reason why is my own time management and the other part is fear, "what if my employer sees this?"  Lame. 2. My friend has made several funny videos that they never shared on the internet, why?  similar reasons, fear of being judged by others. Fear that if I put my self out there people will not like me and then they will end their relation ship with me. Yeah what if my employer sees what I have put up on social media ?  - they can choose to fire me  Why would they choose to fire me ?  - well the fear is that if I put out my ideas, that I dont want them to know about example Ideas and stories and belie...

 Oracle is giving a free server with unlimited internet in bound and  You can install a desktop environment on it with webtop  and use cloudflared to get a link to it   Then you can install Google chrome on it and link it up with google remote desktop - chrome remote desktop 

I have still been facing this question for a long time now, even after the first post I wrote. I have new insights to this problem. First of all lets be clear that its not really cool to not have a good answer to this question. Why? Because if you're not clear about what you should do next, you're left in an environment that wants you to be its puppet, small requests from people around, a notification on your phone, everything is made to take your time and to make you work for helping it grow.  When you say yes to a small request, then yes to the email that just popped in or that notification from social media, you are saying no to your dreams. You are saying no to working on your goals and helping yourself. Without a plan for your time - other things take it all. Ok so what is the solution? To help me stay aware and track what I spend my time on,  I have built a telegram bot that helps me keep track of my time. It talks to my ManicTime server, (a time tracking and timesheetin...

 We sometimes ask this question when something bad has happened and we are in a undesirable situation and want to escape it. However I want to discuss about another time you might ask yourself this question. Yes I've found myself asking this question multiple times over the past few months and the context was completely different. I'm not in a bad situation, I usually ask this when I have completed a big task and there's nothing more to do. So I googled the word should : Apparently we have been using the word "should" a lot less than before and the trend is that it's decreasing. Could this mean that the number of things we should do have been decreasing? It seems true given we have been automating and making machines to do  boring repeative tasks that reduce what we need to do and what takes our personal time. Which means that we are headed towards a future where there would be no shoulds or musts. No "have to"s  We can then choose the ga...

 I recently saw this cute cat volume notification   The problem was I could not get this to work with my barebones super stripped down tiling window manager i3 So I decided I will code it up my self. The final results looks like this: I used a dialogue utility called Yad (yet another dialogue) to recreate this. You can find the code for it here: https://github.com/lakshaysethi/linux-customizations

 According to this article from Harvard   intermittent fasting is not more effective than any other diet. Tello write that "Studies in humans, almost across the board, have shown that IF is safe and incredibly effective, but really no more effective than any other diet. In addition, many people find it difficult to fast." When I first read this I was thinking that is was biased and that Tello was going to talk challenge the effectiveness of fasting. But then I realized that most studies the looked at fasting in humans, probably include testing if just fasting for 12 hours or 16 hrs a day was enough. Umm.. no no no. Fasting for 12 hrs means nothing. Yes if you fasted for 12 hours in a 24 hour day you haven't fasted mate! In my personal experience you have to not eat for at least 22 hrs a day to say that you fasted that day. If you even eat anything, no matter how small it was before 22 hours, even by mistake.  Stop right there and reset your timer. Let me say this aga...

After switching to Linux as my daily driver OS on my laptop, I started to notice the temperature readings every now and then. Everything was good until the fan seemed to become more annoying than usual My fan started to stay on more often and I was not sure why At first I thought that it's just because Linux is not like Windows, and it just keeps the fan on because it is on high performance mode at all times. But then, I'd installed tlp and autocpu-freq (utilities for power management) which are supposed to make things better and keep the fan quiet when it doesn't need to be on. I started doing more research (on YouTube 😂) and decided to open up my laptop and clean the dust that must have gotten accumulated over the fan I opened my laptop and couldn't find any dust near the fan, nothing significant :/ Then after a few days of worrying about the fan and temperatures on my CPU that averaged around 75°C and sometimes reaching 90°C on my 4 year old awesome dell Laptop I de...

Disclaimer - I am not a mental health professional and anything written on this blog may not be taken as Health advice. Anything you decide to do with your life is 100% your resposibility. Actions you take motivated by reading my story do not make me liable for what  you do and the consequesces, I do not know you and your story I am just telling you what I did and what worked for me. In 2013-2014, I got depressed, really depressed, really really really depressed. I was 16 ~ 17 then and I did not want to live a life of a deprpessed person.  I tried reading books, I tried to exercise I tried what I could, but I was too young and dumb and depressed to help myself. My family suffered a lot because of my depression, I was just too erratic and unpredictable for them to help me. I also many times turned against them, after reading and being influenced by the internet and stared to blame them for my depression.  Over the years this depression continued to make the life of people ...

James Clear in his book Atomic Habits, talks about the problems with goal setting  I had been a goals person for most of my life until I read about what james had to say about goal setting. He makes a good point: both losers and winners in life have the same goals. What actually differentiates them is their System for achieving goals. I used to ask my self 'what are my goals?' all the time. I dont do that anymore . I ask myself a different question now  I ask : yup  what are my systems you see goals solve the problem once  systems solve the problem for ever example: before: I'm hungry my goal: I want to eat ok ill go to the store and buy almonds and bananas and eat them. problem solved for today now: im hungry what is my system for food? my system:  regular subscription for almonds and bananas setup with local grocery store. problem solved for ever.