Discover more from Dancing Monkeys

Stories for developers and others from my long life in and out of video games. I wrote Code is Just, but also Chimera, sometimes to remember, sometimes to forget.

You are an Intern for Future You

Are you good at your job?

Shahid Kamal Ahmad

Jul 19, 2023

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Automated Crisis Aversion

"About the energy bill..." my wife says.

Crap. What now.

"We are £800 in credit, because we have been overpaying by direct debit for quite a while. What do you want to do?"

We seem to have survived the fuel crisis, even though at one point we were pushing £20 per day on energy spend. How?

It seems that some time in the past, we had revised our direct debit to our energy company upwards significantly and never brought it down again. This buffered us through the fuel crisis and lands us in significant credit today.

I'd forgotten about the direct debit, and I had no idea how much credit we'd accumulated. For once, I was delighted with a decision past-me had made.

There's no point me wondering what other decisions past-me might have made that I'd be happy with today, because all I have to work with is today-me.

There's much talk about AI being like a free intern, or a thousand free interns. Whatever. I want a simpler life. I want simple ideas, simple mental models and clarity. So here it is.

I'm an intern for future-me.

What can I do to make the life of future-me better? That's my job.

That's always my job.

Workplace XP

I recently gave a talk on building resilience in the workplace and breaking out of your comfort zone at BAFTA. I've had a lot of positive feedback for this. My intention is to create a course expanding on this for professionals. If you're interested in something like this, do let me know.