I've been pondering resilience and removing things from my life that make the important things seem harder—like deciding to not watch YouTube ever. It might seem harmless, but it is far from it. It's been less than a week, so it's too early to see any notable improvements. I think, if anything, fewer distractions leave room for you to at least try the things that are important to you, to observe what it is about a task that makes it hard. These things need space and do take some mental bandwidth. They cannot compete with the ease with which you can go from one YouTube video to another. I commend the people at YouTube; they understand my mind better than I do.
This morning, I got to witness a sliver of what resilience can do. It helps that I find it difficult to let go of a problem sometimes. Anyway, about two hours into parsing if statements in my interpreter that I'm building with Zig, I was stuck. It didn't take me long to realize that I've been too reliant on the garbage collector to do some of the heavy lifting, to the point that I don't even know when it's involved. It was the classic memory problem of the same memory getting overwritten as the statements were being parsed. So only the last one remained. It took me a while to realize that the test was also faulty. Fixing it allowed me to see that my parser was overwriting the same memory. It took about fifteen minutes to have the realization and fix the problem. All the while, I wanted to throw in the towel for the day and try again tomorrow. Yet, an extra fifteen minutes saved me an hour of tomorrow, as I'd have to go over a few things to get the context window of my mind up to speed.
It also led me to my longest stream ever—over three hours. It's been a while, I'll admit, since I've been able to focus for three hours straight. Most of my day-to-day tasks don't take so long; if they do, I usually fragment them so they can be tackled over the day. My next goal is to stream for four hours. It helps to play games like this with yourself, as early on my goal with streaming is just to show up. It seems a bit unreal at times, as when I started to stream I did not know if I'd have anything to stream about for an hour, let alone two or three. It's a beautiful thing to just start; you tend to figure out the details as you go along.