Here are a few life lessons I’ve found useful, ones that have stuck with me over the years. I often catch myself referring to them or practicing them in day-to-day life. Writing them here isn’t about giving advice (because I know future me will read this and cringe), but simply to record them somewhere so I don’t forget.

Never Bring Your Phone to the Shower

Honestly, most of my ideas or solutions to problems have come to me in the shower; usually when I’m washing my hair. Even the decision to write this post happened there. There’s a reason for that: our brains are constantly bombarded with noise and tasks. We rarely let them rest. When we’re not working, we’re watching a movie, playing a game, or doom-scrolling Instagram. There’s almost no idle time left for our minds to process everything we’ve absorbed.

There’s a fantastic Coursera course called Learning How to Learn that scientifically explains how our brain and learning processes work. It describes two modes of thinking:

• Focused Mode: Intense concentration on a specific problem or concept.
• Diffuse Mode: A relaxed state of thinking that allows for broader connections and creativity.

You can’t be in both modes at once, like seeing only one side of a coin. That’s why learning (and problem-solving) requires time spent in diffuse mode, where your brain connects dots gathered during focused work.

Another favorite of mine is the Veritasium video Why Boredom Is Good for You. Its main message is boredom fuels creativity. When your mind isn’t occupied, it starts to wander. And that’s when new ideas appear.

I’m not saying you should quit social media completely. Just maybe don’t bring your phone into the shower.

You Are What You Do Every Day

We all have goals and dreams, right? The difference between a goal and a task is that the former takes time, effort, and consistency. We often complete our daily tasks but do little or nothing toward our long-term goals. Worse, we sometimes assume they’ll be easy once we finally start, only to find out they’re not, and give up too soon.

A simple fact: you are what you do every day. If you want to build something, learn a skill, make more money, or grow friendships, basically anything bigger than a one-day effort, you have to act on it regularly. Thinking or dreaming about it doesn’t count.

The book Atomic Habits is everywhere, yet few people truly follow what it preaches. The author practically begs us to take small, consistent actions, every day or at least every few days, because that’s how real progress happens. You can’t get somewhere just by imagining it.

Customize Where You Live

We all decorate our homes and rooms to make them feel personal and comfortable. With furniture, tools, decorations, and appliances that fit our needs. But we also live in our digital spaces. If you’re a developer, your terminal and text editor are part of your home too.

So, start customizing those digital environments as well. After more than a decade of coding, I realized (a bit embarrassingly) that I’d done almost nothing to make my terminal better, learn more powerful tools, or optimize my setup. It’s like living in a messy, uncomfortable house.

Improving this comes with a learning curve, especially if you’ve worked in one environment for a long time. I remember losing my GitHub student pack benefits, which included a free JetBrains license, my main IDE. My productivity crashed. So, I learned (and still learning) vscode as a quick fix and neovim as a long-term solution. I rewrote my terminal configs, created useful aliases, and customized the colors and themes. It took effort, but now I genuinely feel more at home, and even get tired later in the day.

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These three lessons are just the ones at the top of my mind. I have more, though I can’t recall them all right now. I’ll write them down in future posts once they come back. They usually do. Still, there’s no guarantee they always will. That’s really the whole point of writing this (and future) posts, to make sure these lessons don’t fade away completely.

The train finally stopped. After hours of sitting, she was free. She had been desperately waiting to arrive, checking the time and location again and again. Yet, when the moment came, she didn’t rush to get up, grab her bag, and leave. If it wasn’t for the young man beside her who wanted to slip out fast, she might have stayed longer. Did she really want to leave, or just like knowing she could?

Stepping out of the station, the first smell of the city hit her: weed. “Yukh. I missed this,” she muttered. Taxi drivers stared into her eyes, shouting offers. Too tired to even say no, she pretended not to hear and dragged her suitcase away. Its wheels rattled loudly on the dotted sidewalks. In airports and stations, a suitcase glides with ease. But out here, every meter was a fight, like a punishment for not taking a taxi.

As she walked past the stores, something caught her eye. Evening was settling in; shops were closing. One clothing store had forgotten to dress the mannequin after selling its shirt. Its bare chest stood awkwardly in the window. She smiled, amused by the silly scene, and quickly snapped a photo. She thought of a funny caption and opened her messenger. But he wasn’t pinned anymore. They weren’t talking. Her smile faded. The suitcase noise no longer bothered her.

She gave a fake smile to the concierge, pulled out her keys, and unlocked the door. “Hello,” she whispered into the empty apartment. The thirsty dieffenbachia in the corner seemed to greet her back in silence. She tossed her keys onto the table, the usual spot. For her, home was a place where you could throw things down without thinking: keys on the table, clothes on the floor, yourself on the couch.

Back in her small, safe room at last. A place where tears never needed a reason, and even if they did, the room had plenty stored. It had seen her try so hard for an exam she still failed. It had seen her heartbreak after countless late-night chats and flirty hours that blurred into dawn. It had been there through happy-ending movies on her laptop, while her own stories never seemed to end that way.

to be continued…

This is my first single-qubit quantum circuit I wrote today:

dev = qml.device("default.qubit", wires=1)
@qml.qnode(dev)
def apply_hxh(state):
    if state:
        qml.PauliX(wires=0)
    qml.Hadamard(wires=0)
    qml.PauliX(wires=0)
    qml.Hadamard(wires=0)
    return qml.state()
print(apply_hxh(0))
print(apply_hxh(1))

It applies a sequence of Hadamard–X–Hadamard gates with optional initial X to a single qubit and returns the resulting quantum state.

I started learning quantum mechanics out of pure enthusiasm. I have absolutely no purpose whatsoever from learning quantum computation. Not everything in life should carry a purpose. To be more precise, not everything in life should start with a purpose. It's not always obvious how a specific path leads to something great.

I believe that's one of the key differences between theory and practice. Mathematicians and engineers. Usually, engineers are building something or improving what they've built. There is always some clear outcome expected after their work. But mathematicians are solving problems or proving theorems that do not have any application at all (for now). They discover new lands we have not yet called home. The fun part is, the technologies engineers use today are the result of the work done by these enthusiastic theorists.

I think this general principle applies to life, too. Our time on Earth is far too short to learn everything or to explore ideas today with the guarantee they'll be useful years down the line. But every now and then, diving into a new science, hobby, or activity completely at random can open doors in ways you’d never imagine. That’s exactly what I’m doing right now.

"The Intouchables" is a great, heart-warming movie that tells the true story of a beautiful friendship.

The film closes with the song "Una Mattina" by Ludovico Einaudi. It's a lovely piano piece. But recently, I realized there's something about that song that makes me listen to it over and over. I'll find myself randomly pulling out my phone in the middle of the day, searching for it on Spotify, and hitting play.

The piece itself is good, but maybe not what you'd call a masterpiece. If you hear it for the first time, you might just think, "Okay, that's nice," and move on. It's not the most amazing piano music in the world or something that immediately gets stuck in your head. So why is it so different for me?

I think it's because those notes don't just carry the music; they carry the entire movie and the good feelings that came with it. Those notes tell a story. Every time the song plays, the final scene of the movie replays in my mind, and I remember how good I felt.

So, maybe the key to making something special is a story, whether it's real or fictional. We see extreme examples of this when ordinary items sell for thousands of dollars at auctions. Winston Churchill's half-smoked cigar (literally trash) was once sold for £12,000.

But what about people? Does hearing someone's life story make them special to us, like that simple piano piece became special to me? Not necessarily.

After all, not every story is special to everyone. Even though Churchill's cigar sold for a fortune, I wouldn't pay a dollar for it. It's not special to me. I think it's the same when you meet someone new. Sure, I'm curious to hear your life story, just like I'm open to watching a new movie, but it doesn't mean it will be special to me. Not yet.

As time goes on and you spend more time with someone, you start creating your own story. You're making your own movie together.

This movie doesn't just have a soundtrack, the music you listen to together. It also has smells, like the scent left on your shirt after a long hug. It has tastes, like your kisses and the food you ate the night of your first kiss. And it has sense of touch, like the feeling when you cafune her.

The scenes of this movie become your memories. That’s the point when everything about that person becomes special. All of your time and experiences together get compressed into these ordinary things: a song, a scent, a taste, a touch.

"Una Mattina" is special to me because it's a sweet capsule of a movie that's one hour and 52 minutes long. But I have other capsules, simple things I own, that hold entire movies stretching for months or years. Unlike "The Intouchables," none of those movies ended well.

And that's why little things are breaking my heart, each in their own unique way.

I've always been fascinated by mathematics. I was never exactly at the top of my class. Not a math prodigy in school or university, but something about the elegance of math and how it underpins the very fabric of nature has always blown my mind.

Sure, when most people hear "math," they think of calculus, integrals, or Fourier transforms, topics that were often despised and quickly forgotten after finals. We rarely use them directly in day-to-day life, or so it seems. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that math quietly powers almost everything around us.

Take Shazam, for instance. The app that magically tells you what song is playing in a noisy cafe. It relies on the Fourier transform to break sound into its frequency components. Or consider ChatGPT. At its core, it runs on complex neural networks and transformers, which are essentially large-scale matrix operations, a pure expression of mathematical beauty.

The deeper you dive into math and computer science, the more you start seeing everything as a system to be modeled, optimized, or hacked. Years ago, I had this idea to exploit ride-hailing pricing algorithms using chaos theory. Another time, I used Laplace’s theorem to improve how to rate and choose products to buy. It started as a personal hobby, but when I casually shared these ideas on a second Twitter account, people loved them. They followed, engaged, and began using what I built. It was and still is a fun and surprisingly rewarding experience.

Then something shifted.

While reading Algorithms to Live By, a particular chapter on sorting caught my attention. It explored how we organize and rank things in life, and naturally, it brought up sports leagues. The whole purpose of a league, after all, is to figure out who the best teams are, efficiently. Computer science gives us several optimized approaches for that: single elimination, Swiss-system, etc. Formats that avoid unnecessary comparisons.

So why on earth do leagues like the NBA or LaLiga use round-robin formats where every team plays every other team? From an algorithmic standpoint, it's wasteful. It's inefficient.

Then came the golden line of the chapter:

Well, minimizing the number of games isn't actually in the league's interest. In computer science unnecessary comparisons are always bad, a waste of time and effort. But in sports that's far from the case. In many respects, after all, the games themselves are the point.

Leagues use long, complex formats not because they’re efficient, but because they’re fun. Because they build narratives. Because they generate moments. The goal isn’t speed; it’s engagement, entertainment, and sustainability.

And that’s when I realized: sometimes, math doesn’t need to win.

That moment felt like something new. For once, the powerful tools I’d always trusted didn’t really matter. And you know what? That was okay. Not everything needs to be faster. Not everything needs to be smarter. Sometimes, we just want to enjoy.

Show me the longer home route so I can finish that song I love. Recommend me a movie that's nothing like what I usually watch, maybe I’ll discover something unexpected. Find me that overpriced hardcover book, even though my Kindle is fully charged, just because I want to feel the pages in my hands.

Maybe life isn't always about being fast, cheap, or efficient. Maybe sometimes, the best choice is not to optimize at all. Just let it be. Forget the tools. Forget the rules. Just live. Who cares?