Week 3, Between Work, Books, and a Bit of Self-Discipline

Published: 2026-09-07

What I Got Done

I listened to two episodes of After Hours, one about BYD and one about market expectations for 2023.
I also spent some time getting a rough sense of Modern Monetary Theory.

Even though I stayed up late on Friday and Saturday night because of the New Year celebrations, I still managed to get up early in the morning at 8.
I had come across a more sensible way to catch up on sleep: wake up at the usual time, then take a nap around midday or in the afternoon. That seems to help keep my body clock steadier.
In practice, it worked pretty well. I could still get some things done after getting up in the morning.

This week, I kept my phone next to me while working, and I kept reaching for it. I really need to just throw it farther away.

Work went fairly smoothly this week. Using a daybook to make the day’s priorities explicit and to keep notes as I went made it much easier to track everything. I’m genuinely grateful for that tip from The Pragmatic Programmer.
I also worked two late nights. There wasn’t much choice; the pile of tasks is just too large. Honestly, it was exhausting. I hope I can improve my normal-day productivity a bit more.

I managed to wrap up two books this week, even with two evenings spent working late. That felt like something to be thankful for.
Next week I’ll start Invisible Women, but I still want to read The Art of War in February. I’ll have to see whether I can use my time more efficiently.

This part has not been going great. I’ve been putting off my H-1B materials for three weeks now. I really need to set aside half a day and finish them. I can’t keep delaying this.
I also need to get back to a more regular workout routine next week. There’s a fitness test in six weeks.

Cai Lan strikes me as a very clear hedonist. He knows there is plenty in life that doesn’t go the way he wants, and he knows he has ambitions of his own. But he seems to choose to pack those feelings away: "put them in a big box, lock it, and throw it into the sea." I can’t tell whether that is because he can’t face those emotions or because he doesn’t want to. When Xu Zhiyuan asked him, “Why do we read the sages and the classics?”, he dodged the question. Maybe, at his current age and with his physical condition, he no longer has the energy to confront a question like that. Or maybe he simply misses the ambitious version of himself he used to be.
Yu Feihong’s interview was a surprise in the best way. What came through in her was a calmness and composure that seem to have settled in after years of life experience. She said that she doesn’t place too many expectations on external things, so she also experiences less disappointment. I may not be capturing her exact meaning, but that mindset is very close to what I’m trying to move toward right now. In a sense, it is the same as not being overly moved by gain or loss.

In the BYD episode, they mentioned that Tesla’s Model 3 is already a product from six or seven years ago. Its design was very fresh back then, but today the design itself may no longer feel as appealing. New players are entering the field, and it’s going to be a chaotic battlefield.
In the episode about expectations for 2023, they brought up the possibility that companies like Amazon, Meta, and Google might end up being split into several separate subsidiaries. That was a pretty interesting idea.

This is a macroeconomic theory I only just started learning about, and it’s pretty interesting. In simple terms, the idea is that government debt is not necessarily a big problem. As long as the economy keeps growing, printing money is not automatically a bad thing. Debt is one way to create circulating money in the market; taxes, by contrast, destroy money. If the market needs more money, issue debt; if it needs to contract, raise taxes.
I think there is some logic to it, but not every country has the ability to do this. So far, Japan is the main country actually putting this theory into practice. The U.S. tried something along these lines for a period of time, but pulled back. The dollar and the yen are both major world currencies, so if other countries tried the same thing, they would likely just drive domestic inflation higher.
My current understanding is that printing money is not the scary part. If a government keeps printing money to stimulate the economy while stabilizing employment and inflation, that can be fine. But there is still the question of return. If printing one unit of money brings two units of economic benefit, then it makes sense. If the input-output ratio is too low, it can lead to runaway inflation.

The writing in this novel is extremely delicate and beautiful. There isn’t much in the way of dramatic twists; the story is tied together through Sachiko’s several marriage meetings, which guide the plot forward. The reading experience was wonderful and very calming. It lets you sink into that slightly affluent, sheltered world.
Of course, if you remember that at the same time, the Chinese people were suffering under Japanese invasion, the whole thing takes on a strange, almost surreal feeling. It’s the same historical period, yet the lives of people in different countries were so completely different.
Still, it was a very enjoyable reading experience.

The first three chapters mainly felt like they were about one thing: a shared language. In other words, how programmers and domain experts keep talking until they have a clear, shared definition of each concept, and then build a model that actually matches the business logic before moving on to development.
It hasn’t really gotten into how to divide different domains according to specific rules yet.
At the very least, our team doesn’t use a SpringMVC-style structure. From the examples in the blogs I read, it does feel somewhat aligned with the DDD mindset, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to keep digging into the book.