Martin Rue

While negative visualiation is a profoundly useful mental tool to bring you back into the present, sometimes you just need to tune in.

Don't get fooled into having a plan of what you'll do without a plan of how you'll keep going.

Hearing that someone has enjoyed or found your work useful is an indicator that you're achieving the goal you set out to achieve, and that's an amazing feeling.

It's time to pack a small bag, leave my current world behind and begin overusing the word "nomad".

The problem with an obsessive compulsion to be clean is that the shower is a dangerous source of ideas, and I can't in good faith claim that all of them are sensible.

Creativity is a muscle. Progressively overload it so it keeps growing, and whatever you do don't forget to rest it.

Microdose progress and remind yourself what a tiny dose feels like. More often than not, that's all you need to become much more willing to switch gear and go for a bigger hit.

It's far too easy to be passive and experience life as the default, but it's clear to me that it works the other way around.

As squishy, brain-carrying flesh bags we simply cannot operate at 100% consistently. If we insist on doing so, we inevitably fail and the consequences can be severe — from fatigue and burnout to losing the will altogether.

To make progress, you need consistency and to keep upping the pace. You're getting better all the time, so up the work rate to stop yourself from slowing down.

I've always felt that with such a puny serving of breathable days on this rock, it's worth throwing yourself into new, crazy-esque (or even full-blown crazy) things in pursuit of new ideas, better habits, and fresh perspectives.

This question is my secret weapon to create interesting conversations. Aimed at the right target, it cuts right to the good bits.

Let's be honest, silence is not usually considered an exciting subject. Despite Depeche Mode's ironic effort to convince us, the idea that we should enjoy silence seems like a stretch. So why am I writing about it?

A few months back I gave a talk in which I shared a list of my personal engineering axioms – things that, over the years, I've come to think of as generally true and useful to have in mind when writing code, building things, and working with others.

There are few things more enjoyable to me than the mental solitude that hand-delivers interesting shower thoughts, or that let’s me sit in a bustling coffee shop contemplating life.

Today wasn’t a failure because I’ve not reached those states. It was a success because I’ve followed the process – a process that accrues results over time. I’ll be back tomorrow for my next batch.

I’ve told a few different coding stories over the years on this blog. I enjoy reminiscing about the silly things I used to do. So, in that vein, here’s one I haven’t told yet.

A few days ago I was hanging out in a coffee shop with my Russian friend. We meet every week to chat over coffee.

When people hear Esperanto for the first time, they sometimes think they’re hearing Italian, or maybe Spanish. A good amount of vocabulary in Esperanto is taken from romance roots, so this isn’t totally surprising.

Hey, it's Zamenhofa Tago, otherwise known as Esperanto Book Day. Read on to learn more about the international language and why it's so cool.

We ofen hear the advice “get out of your comfort zone”, and in my experience it’s good advice to avoid becoming stationary in whatever it is you’re trying to get better at.

It’s the end of 2017 and right now there’s a huge amount of interest in buying [insert any crypto currency coin here]. Everyone wants to buy everything, and as a result we’re very much in a bull market at the moment.

Anyone who knows me will know that the gym is a fairly big part of my life. While my goal certainly isn’t to become the next Eddie Hall or Phil Heath, during the last 3 years the gym has been a valuable source of discipline and improvement for me.

I heard something a few days ago. You know, the kind of thing where you stop and think for a while, and then the significance starts to become really clear to you.

I remember my first computer fondly. As a kid I was more than addicted to the Commodore 64 – perfectly happy to sit and endure at least 5 minutes of the most colourful, potentially epileptic attack you can imagine, simply to have a few games of Boulder Dash.

It seems like a stupid question – obviously, we read in order to process written material until we understand it.

Whilst walking to work this morning, I noticed myself doing something that I wouldn’t normally give a second thought to. I took out my phone and checked Twitter.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from my grandfather. He didn’t visit very often and so conversation often felt a bit like an ice breaker.

In the startup world we hear a lot about growth. Startup accelerators focus on being the facilitators of quick growth and the term is thrown around like it’s universally a good thing.

Motivation by itself gives us the willingness to do something, but nothing more. Once we make a start, the game changes and it becomes about knowing how to make progress.

I am not young enough to know everything. This is one of my favourite quotes.

Recently I’ve been thinking more and more about the zone. I’ve been trying to work out what it actually is. Most often it’s described as being in a super productive state for short periods of time, where the best code you’ve ever written just flows from your fingertips.

Growing up I was a pretty shy kid. I didn’t talk to many people and I loved hacking away at things almost in secret. I would get pretty nervous if anyone asked me what I was doing.

Are you doing happy? No, seriously, are you doing happy? OK, what about this, are you doing flexible? You probably think I’m talking nonsense, and that’s because I am – I’m using adjectives as nouns.

I remember when I was first introduced to programming by way of watching my older step brother type the then–very–confusing words gosub and rem onto a bright blue screen. It was exciting. I had no idea what this cryptic language did but I was definitely hooked.

Sometimes we must read, talk and observe others in order to do better ourselves, but we must also do.