I have just read this article, named No More Zero Days by Lyteforce Writes, and it inspired me to scribble a few words. I’m not sure it’s a Re: though. More likely an inspired by piece.
Shared by Reddit user u/ryans01 over a decade ago, the simple premise is that a day where you’ve not worked on a goal or target is a zero day:
What’s a zero day? A zero day is when you don’t do a single fucking thing towards whatever dream or goal or want or whatever that you got going on.
It’s a nice idea, and I believe I’ve been trying to do something similar when I was younger, and had no family. I think it mostly works, until it stops.
It hacks the system by forcing yourself into an activity, and once you started, you may continue a bit longer.
But there are so many things I wanted to learn and do in the past, and over time they accumulated into an unmaintainable mess for me. I wanted to learn Perl! I have this goal written since twenty years ago!
I have no idea why! I’ve read something somewhere, and decided that I badly need that. Never read a single article on Perl since then. The worst thing is, I truly do not remember what was the reason for me being motivated by it.
I’ve did some Perl recently. With ChatGPT or Claude. I needed to process some text with bash, and my usual awk or sed did not work, as what I needed was too complex. ‘Let’s write some Perl code!’ the slop machine suggested, and I confirmed. The code worked and all. But in a week or two, or maybe days, I would rewrite the entire thing with Go. And then Rust. The codebase was tiny, and even me never touching Go or Rust, I realised there’s no point in Perl for me now. I’m satisfied with Go and Rust, and it won’t change any time soon. You can do a lot of projects with either of them.
And so I started writing these things into my personal blog (a kind of diary attempt), instead of setting a goal. (Without even properly setting it anyway.)
Which could be public most times, so maybe I’d just write these notes right here next time. The entries are simple, they are like: ‘oh wow, Perl is so cool, Jess told me, and I’ve decided I might crave some effort to study it properly any time soon. Could be very useful for when I need to summon some advanced text editing in bash.’
That way, there’s a chance I may at least remember the initial motivation to go study it. I may do the same for books and TV series / films recommendations, putting them into my current context. And if I’d miss them, I may just accept the fact the context has changed, and they are no longer necessary.
Having Perl not written down this way, made it into a monster that lives in my head. I won’t be surprised to find out it’s still there, that old task that was never even planned properly. I might have to learn at least some of it, just to let it go.
Thankfully, these days it’s fairly easy. I had the same itch with Go and Rust, and it took me a couple of months — that unfolded gradually from weeks, which unfolded from days too — took me heart a couple of months to get familiar with both. I wrote so much with them (with AI assistants), that if I’d take more effort to actually properly explore and refactor my own code, I’d be at least a person who wrote a bunch of apps for himself.
Returning to the topic, I think it’s very important to actually walk in someone else’s shoes for a while. AI assisted coding, with all the downsides, is very useful here. I’ve tried a Rust system developer hat, and I like it so much, oftentimes I think of changing career, and just delve into some very niche projects, like developing Linux kernel.
That’s not the level of expertise I’m currently holding, but if you understand you like something to the point of knowing you won’t need to find that motivation to actually do just fifteen seconds of something at 23:58 to skip zero day. You just live your life and stay with the flow of it. I hope I’d get there one day, and I think this is the way.