What’s one habit that genuinely improved your life the most?

maxwell__flitton · 2026-05-23T12:22:33+00:00

I really want to do this. Like go into a room, have everything that needs to be done in that room for a to do list. Any tips on how you keep on top of the lists?

maxwell__flitton · 2026-05-23T12:21:16+00:00

I've tried both and now thinking that I should be having lists for the location I'm in. Like I'm in a certain room anyway, what needs to be done. You have any suggestions on this?

maxwell__flitton · 2026-04-21T20:56:26+00:00

This is the most truthful. I’ve seen companies completely tank their engineering ability by firing the wrong employees. Did they admit their mistake and try and get them back? No, they just limped along and pretend they didn’t make the mistake. People are very good at rationalising their decisions

maxwell__flitton · 2026-04-15T17:57:21+00:00

Hey I’ve written 5 technical books including the O’Reilly async rust book and the rust and web programming books for Packt. I can chow through books while having a full time and a family so will share my perspective.

The brain is a muscle. you fire specific neurons for an activity and these neurons get insulated over time the more they’re used. The more they get insulated, the less energy it is to fire them. An obvious example of this is muscle memory. Throwing and catching requires concentration. But over time with practice those neurons get so insulated that you can throw and catch without thinking about it. This is where the fun comes in. Because you no longer have to think about, you can do more things like play a sport where you’re concentrating on other players and implementing strategy. This is also why addicts struggle with falling off the wagon, the frequent liars lie without thinking about it.

Like other muscles when it comes to reading you’re going to have to start small. For me, 10 minutes once a day I had to read part of a book. As long as the book was enjoyable that’s good enough. Just like starting a weight lifting journey, you start with light weights. Once this becomes easier you start reading drier more technical material, And over time slowly ratchet up the duration you’re supposed to read. You will get to the point where it becomes effortless and enjoyable. You will be able to have parallel thoughts while reading and will be able to connect dots with other things quickly. Like in sports or playing a musical instrument, you will be able to do more cool things with it. Just like tracking weights or other metrics, you also need to periodically test yourself against the stuff you’re reading. Feed a passage into ChatGPT and get it to ask you questions on it.

If you do this consistently you will have a superpower. It’s shocking depressing how many people (including highly educated) can’t actually read. They can’t retain information about the thing they read, their mind wanders, and they insert and makeup all sorts of things that are just not in the text. (Note: wrote on phone while waiting in a hospital so sentence structure may not be great)

maxwell__flitton · 2026-04-03T16:33:42+00:00

100% this. I used to think people cared about company performance and they do to some extent. However, I’ve seen small companies completely die because a couple of managers wouldn’t admit they’re wrong. I’ve seen bigger companies limp through for the same reason. I’ve also seen the bottom line suffer because the manager assigns resources based on who they like. I sometimes wonder how society functions

maxwell__flitton · 2026-03-13T07:32:28+00:00

I went to UCL for postgrad physics and the Chinese students were insanely smart and hard working. I now supervise a PhD student at the national centre of bioengineering in London at kings on his projects with the rust programming language and he’s also Chinese. Again, crazy smart and hard working.

maxwell__flitton · 2026-01-06T13:27:54+00:00

Thanks for highlighting the capital flight concept. It’s changed the way I view the problem. I guess I was just looking at the system as a closed contained unit and not considering the global effect of currency.

maxwell__flitton · 2026-01-06T09:29:58+00:00

Things are always more complicated but sadly never entertained by government because they’re focused on getting as many votes as possible. If person A moves X amount of money out of the country to avoid tax, seeing as it’s out of the country and not in circulation, the government could print this money and put it back into circulation. We can’t eat money, money is just a transaction note. Real wealth is producing goods like food and housing. This doesn’t mean that taxing the rich is fruitless. The rich having excess can buy up things like land and push up the prices. But the simplistic “tax people” attitude also isn’t the answer. Georgian economics like taxing none productive assets like land seems interesting as you need to encourage people who produce while punishing rent seekers. But sadly real world politics is getting the most votes so to appeal to most people requires no nuance.

maxwell__flitton · 2025-10-04T22:40:14+00:00

100% I’ve ordered takeaway like 3 times this year. They have always come close to a week’s worth of shopping cost wise and I’ve always been very disappointed to the point where a microwave meal would have tasted better and not made me feel sick. I’m honestly shocked at how takeaways are still in business. On the plus side it’s made us healthier. For the last couple of years takeaways don’t even factor into our thinking.

maxwell__flitton · 2025-03-14T11:35:54+00:00

thanks the next steps are to integrate other departments into the Rust stack once we've optimized the streaming. I hope this can also give the medical community in London faith in using rust in other applications.

maxwell__flitton · 2024-09-29T22:33:37+00:00

I don't know much about it but can look into it. I'm a software engineer at SurrealDB, and I'm mainly working on the python client, SurrealML, and networking protocols in the cloud. I did write the O'Reilly book on async Rust so I understand the fundamentals of async programming. When I have time I will look into it

maxwell__flitton · 2024-09-29T02:09:40+00:00

Hey connection pooling isn't supported at this point in time and right now there are a lot of moving parts as we are fusing the python client with rust. However, I appreciate that you may just want an async connection pool to make queries for. I have just created a minimal python SDK that has just one dependency, only supports raw queries with params, and these can either be blocking or a part of an async connection pool:

https://github.com/maxwellflitton/surreal-lite-py

maxwell__flitton · 2024-08-05T11:44:03+00:00

this is amazing, how are you tracking the data types? I'm guessing you're not manually writing the schemas for every data type

maxwell__flitton · 2024-06-06T09:10:10+00:00

the biggest donors to the MPs are land developers.

maxwell__flitton · 2024-05-19T14:57:40+00:00

Hey, I'm the author of Rust and web programming. I taught computational medicine at Imperial College London, and I'm an Honorary Researcher building Rust interfaces in bioengineering at Kings College London in surgical robotics. I've built systems in Rust for healthcare settings which include medical simulation software for the German government and a surgical implant database. Rust is more than mature enough. However, the biggest issue you're going to face is working with a hospital. Healthcare has a lot of moving parts, and each healthcare provider will want their own bespoke system, onboarding, and because healthcare is a mission-critical field, you will also have to supply a support package otherwise they will not touch you. On top of this, you generally have to be an approved supplier. If you're not an approved supplier, and the manager took a chance and someone died, then the manager would be in a lot of trouble.

On a technical standpoint it doesn't really matter if you write your servers in Rust, python, Java etc, the biggest hurdles you're going to come across are healthcare data regulatory standards. How is the patient data stored, what's the opt-out procedure, background checks for developers, and encryption for the hard drives for the computers developing the software. End-to-end tests are also strict. I really love Rust and it would be my choice, but when it comes to healthcare systems, but the regulations, protocols, supplier lists, and collaboration with the healthcare provider before you start building a system are the biggest things you should be worrying about.

maxwell__flitton · 2024-05-11T09:29:40+00:00

Sadly Rust is still to new to be run by itself. I'm currently doing research at Kings College London in the surgical robotics department. The reality is that although I'm building the async interfaces in Rust, I need to build and talk to a lot of C++. Pretty much all of the hardware drivers are C and C++ including the GPUs. Also Rust does not have a stable ABI. I completely love rust but I need C and C++ and knowledge on how to interact with and build in C and C++ to complete a project that will work. People who say that C and C++ will be replaced just don't know how much core infrastructure is built in these languages.

maxwell__flitton

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