I doubt I will ever be able to keep up with verbalizing or writing down everything going on in my mind - so many tangents, all at the same time. I live life like life is in my mind - I am a round-robin scheduler of thoughts and ideas.

I need to review everything Jude has done for math this year and plan a 1-3 hr session review with him tonight. I used to be a very highly paid math tutor - for GCSE Math, the higher tier. My kids used to ace their math within a month. I used to fail at math, and my aunt tried to tutor me (she got me an A in a 2 hr session). But I was stubborn and my mother finally found a math tutor that I absolutely loved. It taught me one lesson young - everyone is teachable, the mix of personalities and communication just has to be right.

As a math tutor, you need to read the kid, test them constantly for holes, trip them up and then patch those holes. You also need to understand how they see the world and explain math to them that way. It is the fastest. What it will do is get you those aces but what it does not do is teach you the critical thinking required to acquire any skill on your own.

Jude needs an A and I have told him that it is personal for me now, that if he fails, I will take it personally so please work with me - or don’t and bear the natural consequences of that. He gets to choose if he likes winning or losing. That will be my morning - I took the GCSEs last month myself and, it reminded me of how much I forgot. I am rusty in my pivots required for math tutoring.

I need to reroute my DNS to the new Netlify site, fix the recipe component template so it displays the recipes well, maybe add a filter.

My morning chat with Jon was about AI coding assistants this morning - how I use them, I really use them as a pair programmer (junior pair programmer on things I want to learn, expert on skills I want to build upon). We are also talking about Jude - he is learning to program, levels below a junior programmer.

It hit me that the difference between a junior and senior programmer is elegance.

Once you see it, you strive for it every time you code. It may be why technical interviews are so difficult, you only get to see the slice of them in a slice of time , they come in these forms:

• the hesitant programmer who only sees the flaws because he strives for perfection,
• the slow programmer because he is iterating for elegance or perfection,
• the haggard or emaciated programmer because he tirelessly toils to get to the elegant solution he believes is within arms’ reach, sidelining balance and healthy habits he knows he needs,
• the confident programmer who has most recently reached his milestones,

and, it iterates and cycles because it is a constantly growing process. Sometimes it grinds you to a nub. Most great programmers who work tirelessly, have sat in their chairs unshowered, shoving whatever they can get in their mouths, undistracted because they don’t want to lose that train of thought to the solution to the problem they are solving, withering away, till their backs break. Their muscles atrophy, their spinal disks bulge, and their doctors recommend fusing their spine to relieve the back pain they experience from forcing themselves to sit in a chair for the time it is required to refine their art.

Then you have the programmers who are in it for the money, they memorize the tests, they network go the social route. Ultimately, what we do has to benefit the business as it is the part that brings in the money. I hope my sons don’t take the CS route, I hope they do something that permits them physical activity, the sun, talking to people.

I saw how hard my aunt worked as a teacher, without the digital platform to help analyze, grade, schedule. It is a tough job as well. Frankly, life doesn’t have to be pushed to this extreme. I don’t want to be a specialized machine, doing only one job that well. I want to do things well but many things - impossible I suppose when you take in consideration what you put your time into is what you become.

I don’t want to be the Butter Robot in that Rick and Morty episode.