Young and Arrogant

My generation, born after 1995, has a very different scenario in adulthood than our parents. As we enter the workforce some things start to come to our awareness when we leave our parent’s homes and begin to deal with our lives. The future knocks at the door, it is now and decisions are yours to make, what to study, where to live and work, what to eat, and how to spend time. A few months later, after you are not so overwhelmed by the daily responsibilities you begin to wonder, is this what life is about?

You see yourself, in your mid-20s probably spending a lot of your time in a job that doesn’t fulfill you, paying a lot for a cramped apartment in a huge city and not getting to meet with your friends and family as often. This is if your life is on the “expected” path, you can start a drug addiction, get rejected into college, or struggle to find a job, all of that could make you lose a few months or even years when compared to your peers. And if you did everything right, aced all your classes, stayed away from harmful addictions, and got yourself the perfect job to bootstrap your career, you still won’t be able to own a house let alone start a family for, maybe, 10+ years.

The point here is that financial freedom is harder now than it was before. But I don’t like bad endings, so what can we do about it? Much like having an asymmetric life the solution to young people is to be bolder. The path of the disruptor lets you live life on your own terms, it’s about doing something meaningful with your time.

Usually, when I talk about this, whoever is listening calls me arrogant, and that’s OK. I believe Steve Jobs must have heard similar things before Apple was a success. Examining that idea, arrogance means exaggerating your skills, in this case, to launch a company, but more broadly to change the world. I agree with that, but is that a bad thing? Being hyperconscious about what you are capable of or think too much about how little impact you actually have is paralyzing, and ignores the fact that there is value in failing.

In (Brazilian) Portuguese, we have a saying that “to take a step larger than your leg”, that’s normally used for saying that something failed, as it was too much to chew. But, to throw yourself on the fire like that is were you achieve the most learning, it means to push your limits and accelerate your growth because others depend on you. That’s why, in my opinion, to be young and arrogant is only way, life isn’t a movie that’s just following a script, it’s a choose your own adventure type of story, and most people are making theirs way too boring, and that’s a shame.

What I learned this week

There is a good solution for concurrency problems in parallel databases, it’s called MVCC, and it works by avoiding mutations and simply holding a “pointer” to the newest version the data

Hashicorp shoot its foot by changing Terraform’s license, if they don’t change it back it will mean a rupture in the Infrastructure as Code ecosystem.