Lane Sawyer🌹

Just trying to leave the world a little better than I found it.

One Simple Thing: Stop Using So Much Air Conditioning

Holy hell people, tone it down with the AC. After moving to Utah, I've been freezing every day, regardless of what building I'm in, despite the outside temperature being 10+ degrees hotter than Seattle on average. Seattle hardly has any AC, and while I sometimes complain about it, I'm so much happier without our stupid human construct of "room temperature". People are addicted to 72 degrees. While that's a nice temperature when you're in long pants or multiple layers, it's absolutely chilling...
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One Simple Thing: Build an Emergency Fund

If you're one of the zero people who avidly read my blog, you'll have noticed that I had to move in with my parents thanks to pay cuts from COVID-19 causing an economic downturn. In one day, I had to pay my lease cancellation fee, book an expensive moving truck, and pay taxes. Needless to say, it was an expensive day. The only reason I got through it without loading up on credit card debt or taking a personal loan was thanks to my emergency fund! If you're not familiar, an "emergency fund" is...
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My Privacy-focused Apps

Over the last few years, I've made a concerted effort to find open-source tools that focus on protecting user privacy. It's an ongoing journey. As you'll see, I'm still working through replacing some applications (and even operating systems). This post lists out the tools I'm currently using, both so I can keep track of it for myself and help other privacy-conscious folks find software that values their privacy! Cross Platform Applications These apps work on all my devices, which is a big re...
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The COVID Experience: Heading to Utah

Welp, after getting my pay cut drastically due to the pandemic, I can no longer afford to live in Seattle. I've moved in with my parents in Utah, and I'm truly grateful that I'm fortunate enough to have that as an option. The United States is still largely pretending we're not in the middle of the worst pandemic in 100 years. I got a few dirty looks from Utah folks when they saw me wearing a mask. Neighbors chatting while standing two feet away from each other, without masks. I still haven't se...
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On Being Normal

The last handful of years have been some of the hardest of my life. Since 2018, my wife left me, I was diagnosed with depression, our country is accelerating its slide towards fascism thanks to Dear Leader, and COVID ravages our country and my mental health from being isolated. This wasn't how life was supposed to go. It wasn't in any of my plans. But that's how life is. You can't predict what will happen. Success is not guaranteed. I feel like life has taken a crowbar and beat me silly. And ...
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Life During the Pandemic With Anxiety and Depression

Every day in the pandemic is the same, and all of them feel like this: 08:00 - Wake up freezing, even though I'm buried under sheets, cuddling Kaladin in a 76 degree apartment 08:30 - Ignore the constant body aches and pains by planning my day or snoozing 09:00 - Hot shower to relax my tense muscles, most likely avoiding a panic attack in the shower 10:00 - Existential Dread 11:00 - Despair upon hearing new record numbers of cases in whatever fresh hell was birthed with today 12:00 - Put food i...
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The Coming Storm

Wave 2 is here, folks. Well, sorta. COVID's first wave never really stopped, we just kinda barreled through towards our second peak without obliterating the first. Today Florida had its single biggest reported count, with just over 15,000 infections. Florida also broke the single day record for the entire USA. Florida is going to be worse than New York, and New York did not have an easy time getting to their first day in months with 0 deaths. I'm not sure that I can go visit my family in Ut...
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Our Broken World

Our world is broken. It's been broken for a long time, but some people are only just noticing. Rampant inequality, unrestrained consumption, deregulated markets, and a Laissez-faire attitude has led to a wholesale looting of the Earth, who has responded by sending us a climate crisis in response. COVID-19 has been a wake up call for many people, especially in the United States. We're handling this pandemic by basically ignoring it, and, as a result, the deep economic and racial inequalities h...
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Surviving the Pandemic: Protests, Violence, and Panic Attacks

2020 is quite the year. Whenever I think we've finally hit rock bottom, we manage to go lower. In the last month since I threw some thoughts out there, a lot has happened. The biggest event is obviously the police murder of George Floyd that sparked worldwide protests. Hundreds of cities in every state in the US rose up in unison to push back against the frequent violence our police inflict on citizens, especially the disproportionate violence towards our Black friends and family. Countries f...
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Catastrophizing for Good

So my friend and I were talking about how crazy 2020 has been. Both of us can be pessimistic at times about the direction our country is headed (or as I call it, being realistic), so we did some catastrophizing with over-the-top things so we can be wrong about some of the bad stuff coming up this year. I ended up writing a short story! I really enjoy creative writing and need to do it more! The story below could use a bit more substance, dialog, descriptions, and all the stuff that makes a stor...
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Open Source

Pull Requests I primarily contribute to open source through coding. Anytime I complete a PR of note, I'll be listing it here! Clap.rs Clap is a powerful argument parsing library that I've started contributing to. I use clap on the majority of my Rust projects, so I thought it would be fun to give back! Implementing a convenience method Updating a derive macro to take a character instead of a string Projects I've put a lot of code out there that isn't great, but any project I finish will ...
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Surviving the Pandemic: Part 2

Time has no meaning during an eternal present. To mark its passage, I might as well write about how things are two months after my last post. How am I Overall, I'm doing okay. Between minor bouts of depression and copious amounts of self-care, I'm keeping my head above water. I'm even being productive in my free time (which I'll talk about in the Rust section of this article). I did get a 20 percent pay cut due to the economic shock of shutting down the country. That did not feel nice, but I'...
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My First Crate

If you've talked to me in the past couple months, I've likely mentioned the Rust programming language. Andf if you have any sort of programming experience, I've probably given a miniature sales pitch to you on why you should learn it. In a word, Rust is beautiful. I've never seen such a thoughtfully crafted language that focuses on the developer experience while still being blazing fast and eliminating entire categories of programming errors that plauge developers (null exceptions and memory ma...
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Surviving the Pandemic: A Rant

Since we're in the midst of a global pandemic, I figured I should write my thoughts on it. This is a strange moment in world history that I hope we'll all never experience again, so keeping some record seemed prudent for future me to look back on. Working from Home It's day ? of working from home. Yup, I've already lost track of the days. I started working from home a handful of days before my company asked us all to do it as well, so I think it's been about three weeks? All the days blend tog...
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Hello, New Blog!

I did it! I moved all of my past Medium posts over to my new blog. It took a couple months of chipping away at it regularly, but I got all 31,996 words moved over! Now that I can't get away with the excuse of having to move old content anymore, I supposed I should start writing new content. That's always the tricky part. But I do have a few goals that I'm striving for: Finish my guide to effective development teams Publish some of my learnings about the Rust programming lanugage Comment on ...
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Tips to Reduce the Environmental Impact of your Job

Work makes the world go round. Humans putting in time and effort to create amazing things is one of the reasons we have so much abundance in this world. But the same work we do to create all the cool things many of us on this planet enjoy also contributes to our rapidly decaying environment. In order to save our planet, we need both systemic and individual change. This list is compiled from my personal journey to reduce my individual impact, but it can also be used to create corporate policie...
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Schrodinger’s Apartment

Every day I come home to a mystery. Sliding my key into the lock, I pause to wonder what kind of apartment I’ll find. Some days I open the door and my home greets me with open arms. I smile, entering my sanctuary. Where there is a place for everything and everything in its place, even if that place is scattered on the floor or tossed on the table. Living on your own means you can build you own little world exactly the way you want. On those days my dog greets me with the wag of his tail and a ...
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Rainy thoughts from a rainy evening

I’ve always loved the rain. I don’t really know when it started. Maybe when I was a little child, singing songs at church every Sunday. Songs about being cleansed from sin, just like the earth is cleansed after rain. Or maybe it was the hours spent splashing in the gutter whenever a heavy storm rolled through. Or the times I was caught without an umbrella, hurrying home to avoid getting wet but loving the feeling the rain on my face. Now I find myself living in the prototypical rainy city: Sea...
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One Simple Thing: Walk to Work

At the end of last year I changed projects at work, which allowed me to start commuting to my company’s downtown office instead of a client site. Since I live about a mile away from the office I started walking to work each morning. At first it was a little tough. The distance itself is doable. But the 25 minute walk isn’t any shorter than my previous commute, so during those early days I longed to hop in my car, crank up the A/C or heater, and be there in 10 minutes. The walk itself is genera...
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When the words come but you’re too scared to publish: By trying to please everybody, you please nobody

Nobody will have noticed that I’ve started publishing content less frequently. That’s what happens when you’re inconsistent. There is no audience to care whether you write or not. Today I realized that I have almost as many drafts as I have published works on Medium. While I haven’t published a ton, I had kept a fairly steady cadence over the last few years until a few months ago. As you can see from the screenshot below, I start a lot of stories that I never finish. My stories page, with al...
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Code Reviews: What they are, why you need them, and how to get started

Have you ever come across a line of code that made you pause and think WTF is going on here? You get in a huff because some careless programmer did something completely wrong and wrote poorly formatted, incomprehensible code. Then you do a git-blame and discover that you wrote the line yourself. Whether it’s poor logic, the use of tabs over spaces, or even a brilliantly crafted solution that is difficult to comprehend, reading code can feel like translating a cryptic language. When nobody on y...
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No. Just No. I’m not writing about this again.

It’s clear nothing will ever be done to stop mass shootings. Just read these again. No reason to write more on the subject. Nobody in Congress is listening. The Orlando Massacre Thoughts and prayers are not enough ...
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One Simple Thing: Delete 5 Todos

You read the title. Now pull out your to-do list and delete five things from it. It doesn’t matter what they are. It doesn’t matter how many are “overdue”. It doesn’t matter if you don’t even have an actual to-do list. All that matters is that you relieve yourself of the need to do five things. Did you actually go delete five tasks? No? I can wait. … Done? Good. Now that you’ve deleted five items from your to-do list, listen to your body. How does it feel knowing those things are gone? M...
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One Simple Thing: Do Something Radical

Have you ever done something radical? And no, I don’t mean hanging ten with Michelangelo, stuffing pizza in your face while you fight off Shredder’s minions (although that would be a wonderfully radical experience). I mean something out of the ordinary. Something unique. I’m not saying you need to go discover a new brand new human experience, like seeing a color no other person has ever seen. It only has to be something unique to you. Your uncommon, radical act could be as simple as eating o...
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I’m doing another 52 things during the 52 weeks of 2018

Another year has flown by. This year has easily been the worst best year of my life. Some of the best things in my life happened this year, but even with all that I had an awful year. Paying attention to Trump’s America has been terrifying. The vast majority of my empathetic and mental energy was directed towards fighting Trump in order to help the people he is screwing over. As a nation, we’re entering the midpoint of one of the worst presidents ever, and that makes this year awful. But since ...
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Minimalism - The Power of Less

Excess defines modern society in the United States. We’ve become so rich that we will soon spend $30 billion a year on storage. That’s $30 billion spent on hoarding. On tucking away our late grandma’s doilies. On letting mildew grow on our homework from 6th grade. On keeping our stacks of photo albums that we never look at. We spend an insane amount of money to keep everything around just in case we need it. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we carry around piles of junk every time we move...
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Thoughts and prayers are not enough

The GOP’s inaction shows deep indifference towards stopping mass shootings. Another mass shooting happened yesterday. This time, it was the deadliest one in recent history, with at least 58 dead and over 500 wounded. A single armed man permanently snuffed out dozens of lives and profoundly affected thousands more. Don’t you wish we could get back to the good ol’ days of 2016 when the previous mass shooting record was only a paltry 49 dead and 58 injured? I wrote about that one too. It seems t...
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Team Fortress 2 vs Overwatch

What would happen if these two teams clashed? The Overwatch cast would dominate. For one, there are 25 characters in Overwatch compared to TF2’s 9. Sheer numbers alone would give Overwatch a clear advantage. They would swarm the TF2 cast using a well-defined plan (they’re a crime fighting super team, after all) and it would all be over shortly. That’s no fun though. Let’s say we were limited to teams of nine. That would mean every single TF2 character gets to join the fray. But which Overwatch...
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One Simple Thing: Get Rid of Your TV

At some point in the last fifty years the great American pastime pivoted from baseball to television. Ever since Philo Farnsworth invented the television (and gave my home state of Idaho at least one claim to fame outside of potatoes), the TV industry has exploded. Up to 97 percent of U.S. households have a television, and they are all put to use! On average, U.S. adults watch 5 hours of TV every day. That’s 35 hours a week! 🤯 Think of what we could be doing with that time. Developing a hobby, ...
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Creating a Definition of Done

During my first year as a developer I screwed up a lot. Unintended changes made their way into my files seemingly at random. My commits broke existing unit tests. Sometimes I missed entire requirements because I didn’t read the story thoroughly. In short, I wasn’t deliberate with my work because I did not have a definable, repeatable process. My lack of process cost my team time and money when they helped me fix things that I should have done correctly in the first place. What my well-intenti...
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