Raymond Hettinger at PyCon 2015, Beyond PEP-8 — Best practices for beautiful intelligible code:

[Putting form over substance] happens all the time. It happens when we shift our focus. I had some idea of playing this little video here in the background. [..] These people are playing basketball. What you’re supposed to do is follow the people in the white shirts and count the number of times they pass. Try this for a moment. Count the number of passes. Okay and now handful of people are laughing or seeing what you’re actually supposed to see — a gorilla just walked through the middle of the scene. If you were actually counting passes most people — when I say most, 99 out of 100 — will count passes almost correctly and not ever see the gorilla.

PEP-8 is a style guide for the Python programming language.

So if you get yourself in a PEP-8ing mode what do you tend to see? Now this highlights it quite a bit. You tend to see the PEP-8 stuff and not what really matters.

This is a great demonstration of feeling like you may be doing something productive by following or conforming to guides. Guides exist to help surface clarity, but when blindly followed, you may miss the point. This not only applies to programming, but a lot of life in general.

99% Invisible:

“In America today, most people think of design as shape,” Gregg Buchbinder told Walker on a tour of Emeco’s Harrisburg factory. “The average consumer doesn’t realize that design is so much more than that” — how the chair is made also matters. “There are 77 steps to produce the navy chair,” he explains.

The command “import this” from the Python interpreter prints out twenty principles that guides the design of the language, and I feel so aptly applies to how we should live.

The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than right now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

James Clear on Entropy: :

Entropy is a measure of disorder. And there are always far more disorderly variations than orderly ones.

…

Maintaining organization in the face of chaos is not easy. In the words of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, “The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life because everything is pulling you to be more and more complex.”

Laura Bliss for CityLab:

Let’s start at the beginning. A shaker glass was, and is, the 16-ounce glass half of a Boston cocktail shaker. They’ve been stocked behind bars for mixing drinks since the early 20th century, long before their takeover of American draft, as if waiting in the wings.

Enter the post-War years, a time when American beer entered a long, steady decline. Prohibition had forced the vast majority of small breweries out of business, leaving mostly larger brands like Schlitz, Anheuser-Busch, and Coors in operation. If you wanted a draft beer, this meant you were kind of drinking yellow, flavorless stuff—and in large quantities, since it had such low alcohol content.

Garrett Oliver, brewmaster at The Brooklyn Brewery and author of the Oxford Companion to Beer, surmises that this dearth of quality beer (though with plenty of mass-market brew to go round) was the shaker glass’s opportunity to rise. Why bother with a fancy glass when you’re drinking nothing special? “Complaining that your glass wasn’t good enough for your beer would have been like complaining your paper plate wasn’t good enough for Wonder Bread,” he says.

In terms of sheer utility, the shaker glass was exceptional. It was cheap, durable, steady, and stacked easily. A server needed to worry less about splashing or spilling than with a dainty flute, or about smashing that fancier glass on the way back to the bar. For managers, using the shaker for draft beer meant you needed fewer kinds of glasses in your bar, saving money and precious shelf space.

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

New Oxford American Dictionary definition of violence:

strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force

Leo Babauta, Zen Habits:

Each moment, we can do another one thing, giving it our full attention, giving it full weight, acting as if it might be our last act, and truly appreciating the opportunity we have to be alive in this moment.

Gary Shteyngart for The New Yorker:

I was obsessed. And I had time to indulge my obsession. I believe that a novelist should write for no more than four hours a day, after which returns truly diminish; this, of course, leaves many hours for idle play and contemplation. Usually, such a schedule results in alcoholism, but sometimes a hobby comes along, especially in middle age. For us so-called W.I.S., or Watch Idiot Savants, all roads led to one Internet site: Hodinkee, the name being a slightly misspelled take on hodinky, the Czech word for “watch.” Hours of my days were now spent refreshing the site, looking at elaborate timepieces surrounded by wrist hair and Brooks Brothers shirt cuffs, and learning an entirely new language and nomenclature. By this point, it was becoming clear that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee. Hodinkee became a natural refuge, a place where I could watch videos of celebrity Watch Idiot Savants talking about their obsession in terms that made me feel less obsessive myself. The rapper Pras, of Fugees fame: “I think about my watches. Like when I get up in the morning.”

This incredibly describes how I feel in the season of life that I’m in. It started with a purchase of a Casio F91-W. Then the obsession began: Casio 158WA-1, Seiko SNK807, Seiko SKX013K, Seiko SARB033, and then a rediscovery of my Casio W800H-1AV that I had purchased years ago and nearly threw away.

In addition to the tracking of time passing, a watch also reminds me of specific moments when I wore that watch, in a way that no other physical object does.

John Perry Barlow, on the eve of this 30th birthday (1977):

1. Be patient. No matter what.
2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
4. Expand your sense of the possible.
5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
7. Tolerate ambiguity.
8. Laugh at yourself frequently.
9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
11. Give up blood sports.
12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously.
13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.
18. Admit your errors freely and soon.
19. Become less suspicious of joy.
20. Understand humility.
21. Remember that love forgives everything.
22. Foster dignity.
23. Live memorably.
24. Love yourself.
25. Endure.

From a colleague:

To arrange your life such that nobody expects more of you than you actually have to give.