Isaac Su

On my “off-days”, I occasionally like to pop into Work Chat to approximate (like a parallel timeline simulator) what I’d be up to were I still engaged in my prior role and capacity.

It’s a pointed reminder of things I’ve since moved on from, but more importantly, it sets a baseline for the things I am currently pursuing, and motivates me to do so with greater purpose and focus.

Building a shed is a finite process with known steps that produces a tangible result. If you spend time on it, you will make forward progress and be able to see it.
If you are a knowledge worker, this is frequently lacking. […] And at the end of the day, what you accomplish might not be very visible or might end up being finished but useless.
So it’s nice to do something where you feel like you actually did something.

– saalweachter on Hacker News

This struck a chord for me in how neatly explains the uptick in my at-work satisfaction when I pivoted from management back into individual contribution.

The desire for finite steps and tangible results also looms over my investment practice. Coding up reports and executing trades – fun! Doing analysis, sitting on my hands waiting for a trade to materialise – less fun.

Yet it is in still-infinite and not-yet-intangible that the new, the wonderful and the profitable lay waiting to be uncovered.

I run my own Mastodon instance at isaacsu.com. (Not anymore) Over time, it accumulates avatar and header files of accounts that I do not care about in the live/public/system/accounts directory, and it gets quite large.

Here’s a Rails console script that I use to purge them every now and again. There’s one method unused_accounts that tries to assemble a whitelist of account_ids that I’ve ever interacted with and returns a list of accounts that are not them.