Thoughts

On riding in my first ever virtual group ride on Zwift

8th October 2020 / Leave a Comment

Read this post on my new blog 👉 https://gears.substack.com/p/on-riding-in-my-first-ever-virtual

Introduction

I’ve been Zwifting for about 4 months now. It’s a fantastic platform for indoor bike workouts. All you need is a bike trainer or rather anything that can provide information regarding how much power you are generating on your bike. You can read up all the info on Zwift’s website regarding what you need to get going.

I started my subscription on Zwift when I bought my first bike trainer. The story regarding this is a little weird but in the end, I subscribed to a 1-month free trial and then kept my subscription as I was getting quite a lot out of it. And why wouldn’t I? It’s better than staring at the wall while grinding on the pedals.

Zwift is a platform for indoor virtual bike rides. It has a social aspect to it too, where you can meet up with friends and ride virtually. You can kit out your bike, buy new bikes, gear etc to make your experience better. I have a pretty standard carbon bike on Zwift but I can always switch to a sturdy steel bike if I wanted to make it more difficult for myself.

There is always something going on in Zwift. If you check the events calendar, there is always some group ride or race, or a group workout happening every half an hour or an hour, 24 hours, every single day. It’s astonishing how many people are on it at any given time. It’s always in the thousands! That in itself is pretty motivating. Every single time I open the Zwift app on my laptop, it’ll show me something like 4,000-6,000 people riding in Watopia (Zwift’s virtual world) or some virtual location. I’d just imagine that many people spread across the world, in their shed, garage or just in a living room pushing on the pedals, heart pumping, riding in the virtual world. That’s a lot of power and a lot of sweat!

So after having been on the platform for 4 months, I decided to sign up for a group ride. Now the timing of my group ride was pretty bad. On the day before I rode the Road to Sky route. For those of you who don’t know, the highest mountain in Zwift is modelled after Alpe d’Huez and is called Alpe du Zwift. Mountains in cycling are categorised in different categories, from Cat 4 (easiest) to Cat 1 (hardest). This mountain is a HC category climb, HC = Hors catégorie which means beyond categorisation, i.e. its so steep they can’t even categorise it. From a pure numbers perspective, the average gradient is 8.5% for 10.7 miles, although every single time I look up at the screen its always between 9-10%.

Needless to say, riding up this mountain, even though its virtual is hard work. My legs would be begging me not to do the ride from the moment I wake up on the day. It’s more mental than the physical effort to do the ride but the physical definitely matters. However, what I did was even stupider than this. Instead of resting for a day after the ride up Alpe du Zwift like I should, I signed up to the Zwift Academy Group Ride on the very next day.

On the next day, as if my brain was trying to sabotage this whole thing, I completely forgot I was supposed to be doing a group ride. Although I was smart (or dumb depending on the way you look at it) and I had set an alarm that would go off 30 minutes before the ride. Either way, I was totally unprepared.

buzz buzz buzz buzz

As soon as the alarm went off my whole body realised what was about to happen. The plot had been foiled and it was going to be 1 hour of suffering on the bike, definitely worse than the previous day because tiredness and fatigue from the ride up the mountain had already set in.

I quickly made a cup of tea to get that caffeine boost. I’d have made coffee but that’d have taken about 15-20 minutes to prepare. I prepared my bike setup – fished out the trainer, attached the bike, set up my laptop, connected my headphones and prepared my electrolyte drink. 4 minutes to go. I stepped into the shower to freshen up. When I got out, I had 2 minutes left. Changed into the cycling clothes and got on my bike. 1 minute late.

Now it took me a minute to figure out how to join the event from the Zwift home screen. I was more awkward than I anticipated. I thought it’d be a big red button on the home screen that would’ve said “Join Event” but instead I had to do a normal ride and then while loading the “World” Zwift would ask if I wanted to join the event.

When I clicked “Join Event” Zwift dropped me straight in the middle of a peloton, in some 430th position out of 493 total riders. I had about 5 seconds to get my cycling shoes on and start pedalling. Tick tock. I quickly slipped into my shoes and without tightening them I jumped on the bike and started pedalling. Nice! On every single upstroke, I’d rotate the lace tightening thing on my shoe to get it tighter. I eventually got it in after 30 or so tries.

I felt fine. The group’s pace was 2.3-2.5 w/kg but some of the riders were pushing 3.1 w/kg. So I started to follow them. Big mistake. It was here I realised I hadn’t connected my Garmin. *click* *click* *click*. Ok, its connected and I’m good to go. I started pushing it. 3.1 w/kg. 3.5 w/kg. Really pushing it to 3.7 w/kg. My position in the race kept changing. 410/493. 390/493. 362/493. Keeping this pace was hard so I slowed for a bit. It felt like only a few seconds but a few minutes had passed. I started pushing it again to a maximum 3.5 w/kg. I was flying up those flats at 27-29 miles an hour. I didn’t even know it and I when I checked, I was at 270/493. Woot! I eased off slightly to recover for a bit. I was only about 10 minutes in.

It was here that the fatigue from the previous day started to creep in. It wasn’t like hitting a wall, but more like someone stacking bricks on my rear pannier while I was cycling, slowly slowing me down. Suddenly a few guys passed me. I slipped from 270th to 280th. What’s going on? I checked, I was doing 2.3 w/kg. Ugh not good, need to keep pushing. For some reason this time it was hard to keep up 3.5 w/kg so I settled for 3.2 w/kg instead. After passing a few riders, I was at 272th.

When I started the race, with the adrenaline rush that I had, I thought I could make it to the top 100. Now, that wasn’t looking so good. Keeping position within 270s was proving to be hard work. My heart rate was at maximum to begin with, no point in checking that. I had no idea what else I could be doing. Looking at my power chart, I wasn’t doing too good there either. I started to see signs where I kept dropping power. I’d do 3.2 w/kg and it’ll slowly taper to 3.0 w/kg. Slowly getting slowed down. But the mind is a powerful tool and I kept pushing.

The slowly slowing down got me back to 300th position. I could really feel the fatigue. The torn muscle fibres, tired heart petitioning for me to stop. I was willing to slow down but mentally I was set. I’d rather pass out on this bike than give up this race. Even though it’s virtual there are 493 other cyclists riding. If they can do it, I should be able to as well. Sure not all of them rode up the Alpe on the day before but some of them surely did some sort of hard workout. If they can do it, why can’t I?

Two-third of the way through the race. I kept bobbing back and forth between 300th and 320th position. I was stuck in a group of riders and I was struggling to break out. I could see the next group ahead but could not conjure up enough energy to break away. I did a few attacks, ride up to 3.1 w/kg, almost get to the next group, and then slowly go down to 2.8-2.9 w/kg because the body couldn’t keep up.

Eventually, I found the pace I could rely on. It was 2.7 w/kg. I could sustain this pace for at least until the end of the race. I wasn’t too far. I just had to HODL the watts. 5 minutes to go, I ramped down slightly, just a sliver, hoping it was enough to build some recovery, enough for me to break out at the end. I slipped to 312th/493.

After grinding for four and a half minutes of pure suffering, my time had come. 30 seconds to go, maybe too soon? I didn’t care. I attacked. I conjured up the watts with all the energy I had. HR was screaming at 185 bpm. I looked down. My trainer indicated red – I was pushing it hard. I looked up. I was advancing in the peloton. 310th, 309th. 308th. I finally broke away from the group. I saw a rider trying to pass me from the left. Not today. The clock ticked to 0. I finished 308th.

Conclusion

I know it wasn’t a race, just a group ride so the results don’t really matter. But the position data made me competitive and it mattered to me. I’m sure even if I didn’t have the position data I would’ve found something else to be competitive with. But the best thing about this ride was that if I didn’t have it scheduled, if I wasn’t riding with 493 strangers on the internet, I would’ve done nothing today. I would have watched Netflix, probably done some shopping and found some other topic to write about on this blog. The social aspect of this platform made me go out of my comfort zone to push myself beyond my limits.

Now whether this is objectively good for my fitness or not is a different question. Should I have done an intense group ride after riding all effort up a flipping mountain? Probably not. But did I do it? Yes! Do I regret it? Hell no. Now I can order the greasiest burger or the fattest pizza and not feel bad about it at all. Although I’ll never do that, probably will cook something healthier to support my recovery.

I hope you enjoyed this post. What did you think? Do you like working out? Have you done something stupid like I did? Let me know in the comments!

On working from home

2nd October 2020 / Leave a Comment

Read this post on my new blog 👉 https://gears.substack.com/p/on-working-from-home

So it took a pandemic to force realisation on employers with corporate staff how their workforce could operate remotely. Believe it or not, at one of the companies that I worked for in the past, I did ask whether I could work from home ONE day a week and was denied that opportunity. There were people in my org who were working from home regularly once or twice in a week so I found it weird why I was denied. When I pointed and asked why can they do it? The unofficial answer was that they had kids and lived far away so it was ok for them. Ok, so I can work from home ONE day a week if I got married, had kids and lived in the middle of nowhere and I can’t now because I’m single and I live in the city? Sounds like a bad deal to me 😂

Welp, here we are in the middle of a pandemic and now everyone is working from home. I wonder what the situation is like at that company. Are people forced to have kids so that it’s ok for them to work from home? I can only wonder.

Anyways, my current company has been pretty generous in allowing for such things. My manager (and the company in general) has a hands-off approach – as long as the work gets done, it doesn’t matter where I do it from. While I absolutely LOVE working in the office, working from home definitely has its perks.

🏢❤️ Reasons why I love working from the office

My company’s office is based in London. It’s a brand spanking new office on the 16th floor, managed by some of the best people I know. Incidentally, I live in London too, and not in the middle of nowhere. Yes, it is expensive to live in London but we’ll get to how I manage that in another post.

☕ The coffee machine

The coffee machine in my office is out of this world. I’ve been told its very expensive, costs several arms and legs but it is really worth the expense. It makes all the usual drinks, plus the best hot chocolate ever. However, just when you think its pretty good, it amazes you with its Bluetooth capabilities. It comes with an app that lets you create a custom drink. You can choose the level of foam, the intensity of the coffee shot, amount of milk etc. It also has a steamer that you can use to steam your mug before getting coffee in it so that it doesn’t cool down the coffee too much.

But this is not the only reason why I love the coffee machine. Its the conversations and the random collisions that happen around this wonderful machine. I work in Software Engineering, as a Software Engineer so I’m quite further away from the end-user of the product that I develop. But when I am at the coffee machine, I get a chance to meet some of the brightest minds who do work directly with the end-user of my product. They tell me things that I wouldn’t even know to ask. Things like what the customers are doing outside of what the product offers. Where the industry is going. What is going on in the customer success org. These are invaluable insights.

In addition to this, I am able to offer what it is that I am doing, where the Software Engineering org is going. Where the general tech is going. What is possible, what is not possible to do in the current product. How easy it is to implement something – this is surprisingly important because sometimes non-technical people think something is really hard to implement in the software but a lot of times its not, its just a simple code change that can unlock whole host of capabilities for our customers!

🥪 The lunches

I live on my own, and no this is not going to be a sad story with a slow violin 🎻 playing in the background while I harp about how difficult it is to live on your own in a big city. Actually it’s pretty great but again we’ll cover that in another post.

I love cooking because it gives me a good break from working, and when I think really hard about it, subconsciously it gives me a chance to be the computer, to simply follow instructions from a recipe book or memory than having to think too much about it. That aside, I also love to eat! For all the high-intensity workouts that I do, at a subconscious level, I do them so that I can enjoy food afterwards. Working at an office in Central London means that there are always some cool lunch spots around. Think of a cuisine and it’s most likely within 10 minutes walking distance. On my first month, I’m pretty sure I didn’t eat two same cuisines in the same week.

What’s better than the food are the lunch time conversations. These range from random non-work related conversations about Brexit or some new game that’s coming out in the week, to something specific that’s happening in a little country that no one has heard of. I can’t search on google for stuff like this. A lot of times during these lunch conversations I’d make a note to self in my head and then google the crap out of it on the weekends, going head first into a giant rabbit hole. Knowledge is awesome.

🏢👎 Downsides of working from the office

💸 Expensive

Yes, those sweet sweet Vietnamese curries that I devour for lunch add up over time. Are they worth it? 100% but when I do the math, they do add up. I’m eating in Central London, it is going to be expensive.

Also travelling to work is expensive too. Not too expensive compared to the normal London standards, I am definitely not taking a black cab to work every day, but expensive compared to what the travel costs might be if I was doing the same commute in a smaller city or town. The London underground is pretty efficient at getting people to work on time – on most days; however, the monthly subscription isn’t cheap. Now I don’t remember how much I used to pay, maybe £150-£200 a month? I switched from taking the tube to cycling to work almost two years ago but it was definitely an expense that I thought I could cut at the time.

🚃 Travel

Getting to work is fun. On some days I feel like a real grown-up with my laptop bag and headphones on, walking to my nearby train station. Hurr Durr look at me, I’m an adult going to work 😂

What is not fun is getting squished in London underground carriage under some giant 6 foot something person’s armpit when it’s already stuffy inside because it has been raining all morning. Also, the whole queuing to get into a carriage is pretty tiring. Watching the tube arrive, only to see it jam-packed with people already on it, hoping that group in the middle might get off at this stop so that I can find a 5”x5” space to stand.

While I did want to highlight the travel aspect, as not everyone cycles to work, I’ve not had such issues since I started cycling to work. In fact, these issues have turned into fuel for me to continue cycling to work. On days when I feel like not riding my bike, I just imagine that picture of me in the tube, cramped in a tiniest of spaces, and suddenly my legs don’t feel tired anymore.

👋 Interruptions

Now this is not the case all the time. My colleagues are pretty well disciplined in that I don’t get random taps on my shoulders all the time. The typical “hey I want your attention but don’t want to disturb you” is someone’s head coming up the horizon like a meercat, hoping I would notice. Occassionally someone would tap on my shoulder or wave in front of my eyes, but usually these methods are reserved for when my attention is really needed.

The issue with interruptions is that it breaks being in The Zone. When I am in The Zone, my mind is usually holding the context of what I am working on. The context of the application, the customer use case, the testing, the code framework that I am using, all the changes I need to make, in sequence, tracking errors and the mental list to fix them, and in what order. This is just scratching the surface. Ask any Software Engineer and they’ll tell you how important The Zone is in gettting stuff done. When someone taps on my shoulder, all this, the entire mental universe of things comes crashing down and vanishes.

Surpirisingly, this is fine and in the subsequent times I get interrupted, it gets easier to re-create the state of mind that is being in The Zone. However, it gets tiring and causes mental fatigue that builds up over the day, until at the point when one’s too tired to do anything.

🏡❤️ Reasons why I love working from home

I live in Greenwich, a borough pretty close to Central London. My neighbourhood is pretty quiet, mostly residential with a few shops and nice restaurants at a stone’s throw. I moved into my current place only last year so I am still pretty new to the area. Since it’s only been a year, I am still setting up my place. It’s sort of good that I was forced to work from home because it has made me rethink how I should organise my living space. Initially, when I set out planning the home furnishings, my priorities were different – they were designed around not being at home all the time. Now it’s different because I need my home to be able to support me if I have to work from it all the time.

🌌 The Zone

Working from home is completely different compared to working from the office. Sure I’m doing the same work but its the environment that makes it different. Living alone 🎻, my flat is very quiet. It makes it easy for me to slip into The Zone where hours go by like seconds and work gets done quicker than ever. It’s a mental state of absolute focus. I usually get into it when I have a clearly defined end goal. Like designing or implementing a feature from end to end. It is great to start my day, pick up a task, get in The Zone and then end the day having either done the task completely or made significant progress on it.

Interruptions that break being in The Zone when I am working from home just aren’t there. Occasional delivery guy delivering something or a neighbour needing a chat are things I can usually work around. And since they are not that frequent the mental fatigue build up over time is pretty small.

💰 Savings

I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t true: working from home has saved me some money. Not as much as I thought it did, the main large expenses are still there but some of the medium to small ones have disappeared. For example, I don’t buy lunches anymore, I cook at home most of the time. So while my monthly grocery expense has gone up, the lunch expense going down has added a decent boost. Apart from that, there aren’t many savings that I have made. Also, the cost of not having to buy lunch is offset by me ordering food for delivery on few of the days. This has increased the cost because the food delivered is more expensive than the cost of me walking up to a place to buy lunch.

🛋 Comfort

Now this could vary depending on your setup – for me, it is more comfortable working from home. My chair, table, monitor, the whole setup is tailored to my liking. Sure it might not be objectively the best but I’ve designed it to be comfortable to my liking. Occassionally, if I get bored, I move over to the sofa with my work laptop and start working from there. Or work from the balcony during summer.

Having said that, the comfort of working from home came at a cost, both financially and physically. I have suffered from RSI in the past so it took me a while to adjust everything to my liking. While I did this, my RSI got triggered a bunch of times when I suffered from wrist pain, only to figure out that the source was the height of the chair or not having a separate keyboard to work.

🏡👎 Downsides of working from home

🤫/👋 Too quiet / too many interruptions

This one’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Since I live on my own, I find my surroundings to be too quiet. Maybe its because I grew up in a busy home but I like ambient sounds during the day. When I grew up, my dad conducted most of his business from home and my mum was a full-time housewife so while they ensured quiet surroundings when I was studying, there were always few ambient sounds of my mom cooking or my dad opening/folding newspaper to read etc. Here in my London flat, sometimes I find it to be too quiet. Not that I want to live in a noisy neighbourhood but maybe I’m now used to those ambient sounds of people being around me.

I know some people who are living with their families are finding it difficult to work from home. Partly due to interruptions from their kids who were at home all day when schools got closed and also from their partner / rest of the family members. It can be difficult if there isn’t a separation of space, between a dedicated working space and normal “living space”.

⚡️ Over working

While being in The Zone has it’s perks, this is one of the downsides. I’ve had days when I’ve forgotten to take both lunch and dinner. I’d get out of The Zone at 9pm only when I realise I’ve been struggling to see because the monitor is too bright and I’ve not turned on the lights. Also I am hungry, why am I so hungry?!

It’s not just being in The Zone. It’s also to do with not having to travel. When I am working in the office, having to get home is almost a driver for me to wrap things up and call it a day. That physical separation of 6 mile bike ride gives me good time to start unwinding. At home there is no such thing so it is easier to keep working. I sometimes find myself starting work at 8am and finishing at 10pm! It’s not a problem for me personally because I love what I do but it’s not good for the long term health and longevity. I know this sort of behaviour causes burnout and it’s not good for anyone.

🏃‍♂️ Workout discipline

Maybe this is just me that has this issue. Since I bought myself an indoor bike trainer, working out when working from home is a little more challenging than going out for a bike ride. Also since I have lost that morning and evening bike ride to/from work, I sort of feel extra pressure to step up my indoor bike workouts. Usually when I am working from the office, I’d get 40-ish minutes of free workout every day, just riding my bike to work. Then I’d go to a nearby gym and workout from there for an hour. That would make total of 8+ hour work week just working out. Pretty good!

Now that I am working from home, I’ve lost that ride to work workout time. Sure its not super intense but it still burns more calories than me walking within my flat. The indoor workout time is about 1 hour a day which would make it 5 hours spent working out during the work week. Nowhere close to the previous 8+ hours.

On top of this riding bike indoors is less fun. I use Zwift so its definitely more fun than staring at a blank wall but its not as much fun as riding outdoors. However, it is a whole another level of intensity. On London roads, I can never ride continuously for an hour with an average speed of 22 miles an hour on a bike. In Zwift, I can. It is very good for building fitness very quickly. However this step up in intensity and a step down in time spent working out during the work week is hard to put in numbers and therefore hard to compare to see whether I am doing enough.

Conclusion

So there you have it. My thoughts so far on working from home. It has its ups and downs. While I do wish the office would open sooner rather than later, I wouldn’t attend the office if the COVID restrictions are in place, limiting interactions, no access to kitchen etc. Because thats why I go to the office in the first place. I can do my work anywhere, I don’t need to be present in the office to do it. But it is the interactions and conversations that I value so much more than anything else.

If the restrictions were to open, I’d prefer a mixed appoach, where I work from home on days when I need to get certain things done, and go into the office for most of the other days. Although, not sure where I would draw the line of going and not going to the office. Maybe we’ll discuss that in another post.

What are your thoughts so far? How do you feel working from home? Would you rather be in office? What are your hacks to get more out of your work from home life? Please write a comment below. I’d love to hear about it.

On quitting Social Media

23rd September 2020 / Leave a Comment

Social media has made the world smaller. It has brought great minds together, resulting in many unexpected connections and collaborations that would not have happened otherwise. It has brought great content from people’s personal lives in the palm of one’s hand. Birthdays, pregnancies, celebrations, you name it. Sadly it does not discriminate and has also brought hypersocial people closer too. People who like to post anything and everything on social media. Had a morning coffee? Got to post that on Facebook. Went to walk by the river? There’s a filter, a caption and a hashtag for that! More power to them but it adds time to the lives of those who are connected to them.

If you’re following one person and spend let’s say 5 seconds (probably more) looking at their one post, for 200 friends (on average its probably way more) each posting an average of 3 posts a day (include posts, sharing of links and sharing of other posts), you’d be spending a whopping 3000 seconds per day. That amounts to 50 minutes of your life spent every day on following people. And this number does not even account for all the notifications for likes, comments, likes for the comments, shares and direct messages to personal or group chats!

Imagine all the time saved if you just quit social media! I’ve seen YouTubers bragging about quitting social media, who quit because a large portion of their 200k+ followers commented this as the next thing to do on their video. Apart from the irony and the typical: I had more time to do X, Y and Z things, there doesn’t seem to be anything super game changer. I mean, I’m hanging on to the edge of my seat waiting for someone to quit social media and solve world hunger and cure cancer. Any day now!

Quitting the Instant life

So I thought I’d try it. Not go completely cold turkey – I live in the UK on my own while the rest of my family lives in India. Social media is one of the best ways for me to connect with them. But I sought for a way out of the Instant life. The life of constant Instant notifications where every single like, comment, like on comment, share popped up on my phone as if it is the most important thing for me to focus on.

So about a two and a half years ago, probably more, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. Within a week I came close to reinstalling it. The only reason why I couldn’t was that my old phone didn’t have the space available. It was a really old phone with 16GB internal memory, 9 of which was used by the operating system and other built-in system apps. Buying a new phone just so I could reinstall Facebook seemed absurd so I kept it uninstalled and moved on with my life.

The next app to go was Snapchat. At this point I wasn’t thinking about reinstalling Facebook, just looking for my next victim of an app to delete and remove from my life. I still had the Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp installed – mainly because I used those for video calls to my family back in India. But over time I did tune notification settings, mainly around the group chats. Some people who get added in group chats feel like they have to contribute every day by saying or sharing something. This is fine and it is great to have someone like that but getting an audible notification on my phone for a post about how Coca Cola breaks down your internal organs just like how it cleans a rusty nail is not what I would call urgent. Besides, I found that if there was anything important, I usually get a direct message anyway. Also, I can always catch up at the end of the day when I have time on all that was going on in the group chats. There is definitely some good stuff in there, it’s just not urgent.

Time went by and I uninstalled Instagram. Same thing. I found myself spending hours catching up on the “Stories” and photos. Either my life isn’t as interesting or I don’t know how to work the platform but I never had much to post.

Where’s my free time?

At some point, I looked back and thought – I have uninstalled all these apps, where is my free time? Where is my 1 hour every day that is freed up? Well turns out, the reality is that time tends to “fill up” in any given space, just like air and gases fill up any and all available space. Those blog posts and youtube videos do not tell you this. I am not solving world hunger, nor am I curing cancer. Why not? – I asked myself.

Well, the mind is a funny thing. Procrastination is an art form that our minds have perfected. Have an hour to kill? Oh, what’s on TV? No TV? How about the newspaper? No newspaper? What about the book? No book? Staring at a blank wall it is!

Procrastinators are going to procrastinate no matter what. I found myself doing this all the time. After spending some time dissecting this, I found that the 1 hour of expected free time was filled up thusly:

Slightly longer video calls with family
Some more time in prepping my workout setup
Listening to audiobooks
Cleaning
Walking
Tending to plants
Longer time working
Longer time cooking
…

Of course, this is a very dynamic list, sometimes the time is used up in catching up with friends on a 1:1 basis which is even better. Sometimes it’s used in walking to a place than taking a bus. There are all sorts of use cases. But the point is that it’s not like a single 1-hour block that I have left in my day. I have plenty of things that I shouldn’t do but I’d rather do than do what I am supposed to do. Quitting social media did not change this at all. It merely removed one aspect. Plenty of others very quickly gobbled up that space.

So, if you’re thinking, GOD! I can be so much better at whatever it is that I am doing if I just quit social media, just wait and see. Unless you really want to do what it is that you’re trying to do, it won’t happen no matter how much time you have left in the world. If you’re looking to catch up on a side project, try taking a week off of work. See what that does to you. Do you make strides? Or do you procrastinate and fill that completely free week up with filler stuff?

People complain about time all the time! If I just had X hours more, I could do Y and Z. Earth could have 30 hours a day instead of 24 and people would still be complaining about lack of time. It is not the lack of time that is the problem, it is the lack of initiative and discipline.

On consenting to cookies

6th September 2020 / 1 Comment

Alright lets talk about cookies a second. Remember the EU Cookie Directive? All those pop ups asking to allow cookies are a direct result of that cookie directive.

State of things

Yes it is a little bit annoying, especially if you’re visiting a website only momentarily to look something up and the pop up covers your entire screen preventing access. To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to them. In fact, I didn’t even read what the pop up said, instead my mind would seek a way out of it by looking for a highlighted button with words like Accept/Allow/OK/Dismiss just so that I could get to the content that I was trying to view. In all fairness, this was the case because I didn’t visit the site expecting to agree to some contract but to view the content of the website.

As an Engineer, I know what the cookie directive says. I know that I shouldn’t agree to it unless I really do but in most cases, like most normal people would treat terms and conditions, my instinct is to find a way out of it. So lets look at what the cookie directive actually says:

“Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information, in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia, about the purposes of the processing. This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.;”
https://cookiepedia.co.uk/eu-cookie-law

So to comply with this, websites started putting up those annoying pop ups so that they can provide “clarity” into whatever use case they have of storing cookies on my computer. How do they do it? Well, usually, these things have two action buttons, Allow All or Reject Cookies. I don’t know about you but it feels like a red pill / blue pill moment to me.

https://i1.wp.com/davidmmasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/red-pill-of-awareness-or-blue-pill-of-unconsciousness.jpg?w=700 — Blue pill / Red pill

There is however a third option. It usually resembles “Manage settings”, “more options” or in cases when they really don’t want you to click on it, “Learn more”. When you click on this option, the pop up usually changes into something a bit more helpful.

Now that makes sense – this is what BuzzFeed wants to do with my cookies. Note that everything is “Off” by default. This is what is supposed to be the default, but if you remember the previous screen, the primary button, designed to draw your attention and make you click was the Agree and Exit button.

What would happen if you clicked that? Well I checked and in this case, it stored 34 cookies in my browser – in addition to you permitting all the above use cases. Whoa thats a lot of cookies. No wonder my computer is fat! What if you clicked Disagree and Exit button? 4 cookies. Thats it. If you clicked More Options, here again, the primary button is Agree and Exit, seems like they really want to store cookies in your browser! Alas, if you click that, your browser will have 34 cookies again, same result as if you never had clicked on More options in the first place. Although, if you clicked Save and exit, the number of cookies stored are only 4. Here’s a small list to help you with the math.

Agree & Exit: 34 cookies
More Options -> Agree & Exit: 34 cookies
Disagree & Exit: 4 cookies
More Options -> Save & Exit: 4 cookies

Now BuzzFeed is actually one of the good websites so they have a direct option to Disagree & Exit which effectivelly turns off other cookies. Here’s a website called Healthline.com who don’t provide this option:

When you click Manage Settings, you get a nice page with all fancy cookie use cases turned off by default:

Had you agreed to the first pop up and clicked on “Accept and continue to site” you’d have consented healthline.com and its partners to do whatever they want to do under “Special purposes” and “Special features” (+ all the other use cases they have outlined) and received 12 cookies stored in your web browser. On the other hand, if you go into “Manage settings” and click “Save settings”, it’ll take you to anon.healthline.com – which is an ad free version of the website. It still stores 7 cookies but they are not storing any third party or marketing cookies on your web browser.

And of course, this is assuming the websites are actually complying to the cookie law and aren’t doing naughty things anyway. Of course there’s no real way of knowing that. Websites could store cookies in your browser to track you and still send your information to the third party, via a serverside route without you knowing it happened at all.

Reflection

The thing about this that is striking to me is that for most people, the EU cookie directive has become more pain than something that actually works. From a consumer standpoint, it is merely an annoying pop up that gives bad user experience. Users just want to find the quickest way out of it and the website developers are happy to provide that – using the same dopamine driven design psychology that they use to get consumers to “Buy”, “Like” and “Share” things.

As an Engineer, this is annoying on several levels. It interrupts the user experience flow. It breaks immersive experience. It is annoying to implement. And even after all that, it doesn’t give users what they deserve because they accept everything without reading anything.

I’ll explore the potential solutions some other time, but for now, the only real approach is to “take control” by reviewing the cookie consent and proceeding in an informed manner. Whether you’re on a well known recipe website just cheekily reading that korma recipe or sifting through tons of web pages trying to figure out whether aliens really made the pyramids, take a few seconds of your time to review what you are consenting to. Or better yet, if you’re only browsing to check something quickly, use something like Firefox Focus (or incognito/private mode in your favourite web browser), which effectively gives you a disposable browser where when you’re done with your session, you can wipe the slate clean.

If you want to explore the wonderful world of websites and the cookies they work with, you can try https://www.cookieserve.com. Type in a URL and it’ll explain which cookies serve what purpose. Its not bullet proof but is good at catching google and facebook cookies if a website is sneakily using them.

You could also use browser plugins that prevent tracking cookies from being stored. I use uBlock Origin (chrome/firefox) which is a general tracking blocker. Additionally, if you use a modern web browser like Mozilla Firefox, it comes with tracking protection baked in and turned on. Not sure about Google Chrome, it probably doesn’t since Google’s revenue depends on Ads. I’ve heard of an alternative called Chromium – which is supposed to be the core open source version of Google Chrome without the Google stuff but I’m not too sure about it so can’t strongly recommend.

Documenting project information with Maven

12th March 2018 / 1 Comment

ManthanHD

Findings, thoughts and observations from the eye of a Software Engineer.

On riding in my first ever virtual group ride on Zwift

Introduction

buzz buzz buzz buzz

Conclusion

Like this:

On working from home