Surendhar Reddy

Perfect day

Peter Miles: Yeah, ‘cause you can’t just push the car hard the whole way, right?
Ken Miles: That’s right. You have to be kind to the car. You feel the poor thing groaning underneath you. If you’re going to push a piece of machinery to the limit, and expect it to hold together, you have to have some sense of where that limit is. Look out there. Out there is the perfect lap. No mistakes. Every gear change, every corner, perfect. You see it?
Peter Miles: I think so.
Ken Miles: Most people can’t. Most people don’t even know it’s out there, but it is. It’s there.

This1 particular scene from the Ford vs. Ferrari movie has stuck with me for a long time. I have always used this as a frame of reference to explain perfect moments in life that are not obvious to many of us.

. . .


While walking Eden, my housemate’s dog, I was thinking about my day and realized I had one of these perfect laps (days) today.


A perfect workday is when I have the right balance of exploration, challenge, and outcomes in the activities I choose to do.

  • I managed to fix and release a few tiny bugs and a new feature for Atlas.
  • I solutioned a feature to capture refunds for every transaction on the Atlas platform to help merchants reconcile financial reports.
  • One of our merchants launched their marketing campaigns, which resulted in the highest sales we ever made on the platform — this was also a great day to monitor the infrastructure and understand what type of surge in traffic we could handle. I learned how to tune our serverless Cloud Run2 instances to be more efficient and serve traffic surges like today.

A perfect personal day is when I make time for each of my routines — health, reading and reflecting (writing).

  • I ran 3.5 KM and did an adequate chest workout
  • I took Eden out for a walk — she peed and pooped (this is my private victory3)
  • I wrote this post

A perfect social day is when I make time to think about family/friends and attend to their messages or catch up with them.

  • I made time to checked in with family and few friends
  • I got back to every person who messaged me today
  • I initiated few new conversations to plan for upcoming weeks


Today felt like a perfect day; it was balanced by good learnings, outcomes, and some quality social and personal time.

. . .


Not all days are the same and are perfect; it’s hard to sustain these levels every day. But constantly optimizing and prioritizing things will pave a path for more of these perfect laps — the idea is to score as many perfect laps as you can and have a good race.

What does a perfect day look like for you?


Notes

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLHmFnim1Ws 

  2. https://cloud.google.com/run 

  3. https://surendharreddy.dev/2021/10/28/engineering-happiness/