Leverage Notes #7: Revisiting Old Reads And Code

This past week, I wrapped up the book Ender’s Shadow. I read the book back in high school. It turns out that I missed a lot of the subtleties in the text, like the Christian themes, the assumption that war is inevitable, and focus on mechanisms of propaganda. I previously wrote about this book in my article about story retellings and author perspectives (https://leveragenotes.substack.com/p/making-better-story-retellings).

Finding what I missed reminded me of coding an embedded modbus driver that I revisited 1.5 years later to fix a bug. Like with the book re-reading, I noticed a gap in how my past self approached the problem and how I would approach it today. Some of the code worked well but was hard to read. Documentation existed, but it was slightly out of date and confusing. While getting refamiliarized and testing the modbus driver over TCP/IP, I noticed some edges that I had missed and how my reliance on a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) library led to simplifying design decisions.

Both experiences show how our planning, interpretation, and implementation abilities evolve over time. It's helpful to look back and see how far we have come over the years. It’s a reminder to keep progressing and to trust in the zig-zag progress that makes up continual growth.

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