Ricci

Building software products to solve my own problems.

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[Ricci @facricci]

A Test, A Competition, A Feat, An Exploration, Not A Challenge

"I challenge myself everyday" can mean two widely different things. Either you put yourself in unplanned situations and try to overcome them or you carefully plan for a little discomfort everyday in order to keep growing. It depends by who is listening.

The word "challenge" is used interchangeably and more often than not it replaces words that would convey a more specific meaning. What everyone understands is that a challenge is an event that gets you of your comfort zone. An event that forces you to make an temporary adaption in order to get over it. Since the comfort zone is different for everybody and everybody has a different approach on getting out of it, a challenge means a different thing for everyone and is perceived in a different way by everyone.

This gap leads to a misunderstanding of what each one of us is capable doing and it skews how we assess the capabilities of others. Somebody who plans carefully sees a challenge as a failure. The same situation is seen as an opportunity to grow and thrive by somebody else.

A clear example is how people practicing any sports in general, and KettleBells in particular, approach a so called "challenge". "On a given date, we will do such and such for this long and record the results". Some people start preparing right away, some assess their relative capabilities, some get hyped up, some dread the date, some find other things to do on that date. The proposition is quite a vague for an events that gets you out for your comfort zones. How do you prepare? What's the purpose of it? Do we do it just for sake of it? Will anything good will come out of it?

If it were to be called a test, then you know that you have to prepare and if you succeed then you are able to move to the next level. If it were a competition then you know where is your place among your peers and if you do it very well you might even win something. If it were a feat then you could obsess over a short time period on a single exercise in order to show off. If it were an exploration then you know the existence of new possibilities and determine if you are ready to take them on or not.

Even though these things are challenges, they have a specific outcome and convey more meaning for one time events with determined outcomes. It gets everybody to be aligned on the same page, to know what is expected of them and what can they expect to get out of it.

The generic challenge can be, and should be, much more than one time events. The challenge has the potential to be the mechanism of growth when given a more specific meaning so it has a determined outcome. A generic challenge only ends in success or failure but a test, a competition, a feat, an exploration puts you in a feedback loop within which you can improve. It should be an everyday thing. Big or small, harder or easier is irrelevant. A moment of discomfort what's important.

Either a specific or a generic challenges, they will arise and you will have to go through them. Take the time to name them properly so that you can prepare so that you can learn so that you can make progress.

[Ricci @facricci]

@dhh Congrats on the launch!

[Ricci @facricci]

@stevenkplus1 @RichardDawkins Maybe this should a tool. "amigettingoneshot" ?

[Ricci @facricci]

@atelicinvest The same people will spend hundreds of dollars on tokens for their next big app 🤡

[Ricci @facricci]

@dhh Wow! This is great!

[Ricci @facricci]

@andytokaufman Ese café es un truño y la espuma de la leche viola más de un párrafo de Convención de Geneva.

[Ricci @facricci]

@WillManidis Unfortunately for the land, executives have quarterly meetings and the best they can do is walk for 5 minutes alongside you while taking another call.

The people making the decisions about the land are not the owners nor have any incentive to make good decisions for the system.

[Ricci @facricci]

@neogoose_btw Plenty of the current paradigms in software will have many troubles to survive the introduction of Agentic AI.

Coordinating people is the actual major disruption that has to happen.

https://t.co/0F6jVfxVfu

[Ricci @facricci]

@philippemnoel The fact that they blame this on postgres is outrageous. How can a row by row comparison on 17.000 queries be slow?

Are they running their databases on cheap instances paid by free credits or what?

[Ricci @facricci]

@tekbog Do not attribute to leetcode interviews what is painstaking obvious in team compositions.

[Ricci @facricci]

@IterIntellectus No way North Korea’s score is real.

[Ricci @facricci]

@Elliot_Coll Chair?

[Ricci @facricci]

@BrettFromDJ Did Ive ever deliver something good after Job's death?

[Ricci @facricci]

Once you have been through the JavaScript UI libraries churn of 2016, nothing bothers you anymore.

[James McDonald @jamesm]

How does everyone keep up? New tools dropping every 12 hours at this point 😅

[Ricci @facricci]

@0xgaut I have known this for a long time.

[Ricci @facricci]

They mismanaged the entire AI adoption by trying to remove editors and moderatos.

[effectfully @effectfully]

Stack Overflow was one of the best things that ever happened to the tech industry, and its downfall will send shockwaves far into the future, because there will no longer be a source of high‑quality well‑structured data to train AI on.

[Ricci @facricci]

@LundukeJournal What on Earth is X11ism?

[Ricci @facricci]

@DanielLockyer And the little that's left is mostly generated by agentic tool scanning the web.

[Ricci @facricci]

In 2026 I’m going on the Rails after writing php for a decade. It’s the enthusiasm after finding a new great toy rather than rationale what is making this decision.

https://t.co/rwzNeDY782

[Ricci @facricci]

@visegrad24 Did they go there to extract him?

[Ricci @facricci]

@Aperta That's just an F1 car with a blanket on top