Matt Chung

On drifting apart & Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/09/22

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by

Matt Chung
in ,

Before stepping into parenthood, my wife and I would often read about other couples scheduling time for being “intimate” (aka sex), time alone just for the two parents. Without this deliberate effort, parents can fall into the trap of focusing 100% of their time on raising their children and forgetting what its like to be a couple.

When I first heard and read about these couples, I couldn’t wrap fathom how the gradual drifting of relationships could possibly happen to me. No — that’s reserved for other couples. Thanks for the universe (and karma I suppose), I’m now noticing that my wife and I are drifting apart … but luckily at a glacial pace. To be fair, the two of us are brand new parents raising a (almost 1 year old) daughter.

Fortunately, we’re acutely aware of this drifting apart so her and I are reeling it in. So what are we doing about it? Well, the idea of scheduling time for being intimate sounds ridiculous but we’re going to muse on it.

Writing

Parenting and family matters

  • Bathed Elliott for only about 5 minutes last night. Normally, our little bed time routine normally lasts between 15-20 minutes but lately she hasn’t really enjoyed the experience and merely tolerating. I’m hoping her allergy to the bathes is temporary since this is one of the few times throughout the week where I get real 1:1 time with Elliott.
  • Jess and I watched three short video clips from Roxanne Gay’s Skilshare course titled Crafting Personal Essays with Impact. Taking a little fun course like this one, while washing the dirty dishes, is one way for husband and wife to mix things up since as I mentioned earlier it’s so easy at the end of the day for two tired parents to just mindlessly eat dinner in front of the television.

What I am grateful for

  • Jess preparing a snack for Elliott and rinsing cotton candy grapes for me. Side note: if you haven’t had the experience of a cotton candy grape exploding in your mouth you are seriously missing out. These seasonal grapes are basically (healthy) candy for adults.

What I learned

  • Learned that hierarchical locking (or locking in general) hinders system performance, preventing concurrency. What should we do instead? Reference counting for existence guarantee.

Music

  • Recorded a little harmony and melody based off of some lyrics that I wrote down as I winding down for the evening. Usually, I start with writing the harmony or melody first but this time around, I’m approaching the song writing with whipping together lyrics. This lyrics first approach tends to be working well for me actually so I’m curious what else I can come up  over the next few weeks as I experiment with this new process.

Work

  • Ran benchmarks for an optimization I added (basically adding metadata to a data structure that fits within the first three cache lines). Also ran a bench mark for a longest prefix match data structure that I’m evaluating for a new feature that I’ve designed.