How to relax with all the powers of the universe at your fingertips (opens in new tab)

Developers can really create their own universe. To put that in perspective:

My father was in a meeting discussing how to increase the amount of power they could get to run a communication satellite. An equation was written on the board. A suggestion was made by someone that they increase this one value and, if they did so, it would increase the power output of the solar array cells.

My father had to point out that the value was the luminosity of the sun.

Upvoted for the title, but the content is a little thin.

You have the power of the universe right between your ears, no computer necessary. It works in the dark, on the road, while drunk, without power, without money, but it's a blunt sword at first. It takes years of honing and sharpening and exploring before it starts truly being useful.

It's often easier to leverage other machines that only tell truths. It allows for laziness. No thought necessary when something else could do it so much faster. But stepping back and thinking for a moment can save a lot of cycles. Maybe not right away, but if you're investing your time, a small amount today can be an awful lot tomorrow. (I wish I was a better writer, as I would write a cool story about computers vs. human brains - where either interpretation would be 'right', as to computers, a human tells its own truths (the preconceptions of a life), where to a human a computer only tells truths.

It's easy to take incremental steps. Every single moment you spend on this website is an incremental step. You can see where you were before, you can see where you are now. You can't notice changes when everything is incremental. There is a lot of power in being able to step away, to back off, to explore other parts of your mind than just the one that's connected to the internet. There's a lot of life to live that doesn't involve a computer. And when you (inevitably) come back, you'll notice all the things you could never have noticed if you were on the computer the whole time.

Edit: To use a workout analogy - you don't want to only work out your right forearm. You have an entire brain to exercise.

I think the best analogue I have for this piece is that of an athlete who obe hand wants to compete and play, but on the other hand must take his time to rest between workouts and competition to re-build his energy and at the end if the day be able to better perform or in this case solve complex problems by coding. I also gave to day that the title of the post is really beutiful.

What's with all the medium.com blogspam of late?

Definitely not just true for programming. I design chemical manufacturing equipment (and LED lighting, which I suppose is closer to programming in a way), and find myself constantly anxious about this and that little detail.

I suppose similar to defining what a program would do and why it's possible to make it work... with additional constraints. The constraints might make it a little easier, but for a sufficiently creative engineer it ends up being more like mental aikido against reality whereas for programming it's perhaps like mental aikido versus math...

I wish there were more... you know... examples of "How to relax with blah blah" in the article though. There's nothing here with ideas of things to do, just stating that it's important. That's rather on the useless side, just saying.

I find that in order to relax I need switch to do something else or somewhere else.

I.e. I love coding and reading all technology-related, but from time to time I work on my car or motorcycle, play guitar randomly, if it is cold - get some wood and fire fireplace, etc.

Even foosball is so popular in tech companies for a reason - it allow you to switch your focus in to completely different area.

So... I believe switching what you are doing is the best way to relax.