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Monthly Log: 2024-02

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Original language: Chinese . AI translations: English , Japanese .

The first monthly recap was already half a month late, and I somehow kept the momentum going by only starting the second one when March was almost over (

Same structure as the previous one. Roughly speaking, it breaks down like this:

  1. Input
    Reading: professional books, novels, good essays, all of that counts as reading
    Anime: new shows, old shows, TV series, movies, just a record of what I watched
    Others: films, dramas, and anything else that doesn’t fit above

  2. Random Thoughts
    Maybe I’ll write down whatever has been on my mind

  3. Output
    Maybe blog posts. Or maybe nothing at all, because my skills are still too weak (

  4. Travel
    If I went anywhere, I’ll write about it. If not, then there is nothing to write

  5. Misc
    Odds and ends that don’t belong to any of the categories above

All right, on to the actual post.

Input

Reading

I barely read in February. I only finished one book: The Mythical Man-Month.

The book is so famous that I had heard of it long before I ever touched programming. In a field like IT, where everything changes at high speed, a book published in 1975 still being treated as a classic decades later is proof enough that it has real weight behind it.

Before opening it, I assumed it would be some dense, forbidding technical tome. Once I actually started reading, though, it felt closer to a collection of essays bound together. Drawing on his own experience, the author talks through the various difficulties in software engineering and the ways they can be solved, mitigated, or sometimes simply endured because there is no real solution.

I only have a little over a year of experience, so there were parts I still couldn’t fully grasp. But there were also plenty of passages that hit home immediately. Maybe after I have worked on more projects, I’ll be able to come back to this book and understand it more deeply.

If I were taking notes, I could probably just paste the whole book in here. There is barely any fluff in it; almost every page feels like a takeaway or a warning (lol). So here I’ll only paraphrase the two most famous chapters: The Mythical Man-Month and No Silver Bullet.

  • The myth of the man-month
    The author’s point is that man and month are not units you can casually swap around. A task that takes one person six months is, in most cases, not something six people can finish in one month.
    Here in Japan, the idea of the man-month still seems deeply embedded in practice. I don’t have any grand answer to that, especially since I’m still a beginner myself and can’t think of a clearly better way to estimate work.
    At the very least, the lesson is easy to remember: man-months are not interchangeable, and adding more people to a late project often makes it later still.

  • No Silver Bullet
    The author predicts that within the next ten years, no single advance in software engineering will produce an order-of-magnitude increase in productivity.
    His argument is that the difficulties of software development can be split into essential difficulties (complexity, conformity, changeability, and invisibility) and accidental difficulties.
    Most technical breakthroughs so far have addressed the accidental difficulties, while there is still no tool that can drastically solve the essential ones.

    To be honest, I still don’t fully understand this part. My experience is too limited, and I know almost nothing about what software development looked like in 1975. Object-oriented programming, which the author mentions in the book, has long since become standard practice.
    Even so, I feel like I can vaguely see what he means: the hardest part of software development is design, not coding. Or at least that’s how I currently read it.
    I’ll probably have to revisit this chapter again later.

Other takeaways include things like:

  • Turning a program into a module in a system costs at least 3x more effort. Turning it into a sellable product costs another 3x. So going from a program to a system product costs at least 9x as much.
  • The gap between excellent programmers and poor ones can easily be an order of magnitude.
  • Small teams structured like a surgical team are usually best.
  • Preserving conceptual integrity in system design matters enormously.

There are simply too many points worth noting. I plan to write a separate post later with the passages I highlighted while reading, plus some of my own thoughts.
More importantly, these are only my impressions from a first read. When I come back to the book later, I want to keep updating those reflections. It might be interesting to leave a record of how my understanding changes as my experience grows.

While looking up material after finishing the book, I unexpectedly ran into 编程随想’s Douban review: 人月神话(不朽的软件工程名著)
Thinking about what happened to 编程随想 left me with a complicated feeling.

Anime

  • New shows I picked up in February

    • 僕の心のヤバイやつ
      I watched the first episode back when season 1 aired, and at the time it was just too painfully awkward for me. Even more embarrassing than Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions. I knew its reputation kept improving after episode 1, but I still had no desire to continue.
      I had no plans to watch season 2 either. Then I happened to notice on Bangumi that season 2 had climbed into the site’s all-time top 100, which honestly shocked me. What kind of monster was this? Was it really that good, or just massively overrated (
      I clicked into a random episode from the middle of season 2 and ended up having a great time. So I immediately went back and caught up from season 1. Season 1 is still awkward, but if you can endure the early stretch, it keeps getting better.
      Season 2 also very obviously got a budget bump. The OP looks gorgeous and even a little showy. Maybe the production side saw how unexpectedly strong the response to season 1 was and decided it was worth investing more.
      Season 1 still felt a bit thin visually, while season 2 is much more stable. It also cuts down a lot on the moments that made me recoil, which improves the viewing experience by more than a little.
      What I liked most is that the humor doesn’t come from reducing the characters to idiots. It comes from the interaction between the leads, plus a lot of tiny details that quietly make you grin.
      The emotional writing is delicate too. You really do follow the two of them through their hesitation and those tiny little steps forward. At least for me, the sense of immersion was surprisingly strong.
      It’s the kind of anime that makes you happy in a very direct, uncomplicated way. Really good.

    • 愚蠢天使与恶魔共舞
      Pretty fun. A straightforward comedy, and the OP is good. I watched a bit.

    • 反派大小姐等级99～我是隐藏BOSS但不是魔王～（悪役令嬢レベル99～私は裏ボスですが魔王ではありません～）
      I like the heroine’s black-long-straight-hair design. In similar stories I’ve watched before, the heroine usually doesn’t get much of a romantic thread with a male lead, but this one very clearly has a guy who looks like he’ll grow into that role, which feels a bit unusual.

  • Still watching

    • 狩龙人拉格纳
      Good story. Still following it.

    • 勇气爆发 Bang Bravern
      Still watching to see what kind of nonsense it decides to pull next.

    • 事与愿违的不死冒险者（望まぬ不死の冒険者）
      Has enough story to keep me going. It’s fine.

    • 治愈魔法的错误使用方法
      Also has enough plot to keep watching. It’s fine.

    • 我独自升级
      Mainly here for the fight animation.

  • Put on hold for now

    • 金属口红

  • Want to watch but still haven’t started

    • SYNDUALITY Noir 第2クール
    • 药屋少女的呢喃
    • 不死不幸
    • 迷宫饭
    • 佐佐木与文鸟小哔
    • 葬送的芙莉莲

  • Revisiting older stuff

    • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
      It finally hit streaming. The visual style is gorgeous. I barely remembered the plot, so I rewatched it, and honestly the visuals alone already justify the revisit.

Others

Recent films and shows. I’ll try to avoid spoilers.

  • 劇場版 少女☆歌劇レヴュースタァライト
    Revue Starlight. Forever peak.
    I must have watched the Revue that begins around the 17-minute mark of episode 1 of the TV series dozens of times by now. It’s just that good.
    The movie came out in 2021. I wasn’t in Japan yet, so I missed the theatrical release. I did have access to the BD later, but I kept putting it off because I wanted my first viewing to be on a big screen.
    This time I finally got that chance. I caught a revival screening at Ikebukuro Shin-Bungeiza. On the little stage in front of the screen, they had placed Karen and Hikari’s capes. In the center was the Position 0 emblem, with three beams of light shining down on it. The atmosphere was incredible.

    As for the movie itself, while I was watching it I kept feeling overwhelmed in a good way. “This part is so cool.” “I don’t really understand what’s happening, but this part is so cool.”
    But once it was over and I tried to think through what the film was actually saying, I realized I had no clear grasp of it at all.
    It felt like getting drunk on something very strong

  • 排球少年
    I haven’t watched the TV series, and sports anime usually isn’t my thing, but it’s still worth seeing. A group of like-minded friends, rivals who genuinely respect one another, and that pure competitive spirit. That’s a kind of youth I’ll never get to have (

  • 布达佩斯大饭店
    The story itself feels like almost nothing, but the centered compositions run through the entire film and leave a strong impression.

Random Thoughts

Even though I’ve already lived in Japan for a year, my Japanese still hasn’t improved very much. I don’t really need to use it in daily life or at work, and the leave it alone and hope natural immersion fixes everything method has not worked out especially well.

Some recent experiences made me feel very clearly that I still need to study Japanese properly. So I’m thinking of starting with anime shadowing practice.

Output

Nothing this month. How delightful

Travel

I basically didn’t go anywhere in February, and I barely took any photos either. A pity.

Misc

Tokyo finally got snow at the beginning of February. This winter has been fairly warm, so I think it might have been the first snowfall of the season. It started around noon and kept getting heavier, and by evening the wind had picked up enough that it almost felt like a proper blizzard.

I wanted to go out and take a few photos of Tokyo in the snow at night, but after freezing for a couple of minutes I gave up and ran back inside.

Unfortunately it didn’t last long. By around midnight it had mostly stopped, and rain started later in the night. When I got up in the morning, there was barely any snow left on the ground, so I dropped the idea of going out to take pictures.

Still, it snowed at least once. That makes winter feel complete enough.

Closing

I somehow managed to force out the February recap before March ended. Advanced procrastination is not an easy illness to live with (

I thought I wouldn’t have much to say this time, but once I actually started writing, I still ended up rambling quite a bit.

In a few more days March will be over too, which means it will be time to create yet another new file.

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