Here's a super easy way to invalidate the disk cache, which is useful for testing IO performance in the real world, where you can't rely on all of your reads being served up from a super-fast RAM cache rather than a vastly slower physical disk drive.

This will free up everything in the disk cache:

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Or if you want more control over exactly what is being freed...

1. This frees up the pagecache (e.g., cache of contents of files):

Specialization. Most of the people who work for big companies do it. They're good at this one specific thing the company needs to get done. They work with other people who are good at other things.

On one hand, specialization is necessary and useful. It doesn't make sense to try and train everybody to be good at everything. As they say, jack of all trades and master of none.

I've been programming a bit today and I am enjoying myself and focusing for hours at end, which has lately been next to impossible for me when working on other things (e.g., website design).

It's made me think about why I'm having such a hard to reproducing the focus and satisfaction I feel when I'm programming when I'm doing non-programming stuff.

Fact is, I've noticed I find it much more difficult to get in the zone when I'm not programming. I feel slow and unproductive (compared with development) and that leads to low morale and avoidance/procrastination feedback loops.

Sometimes working on big projects can be frustrating. I think that's mainly because it's easy to get so immersed in detail that you lose sight of the big picture. A big project tends to break down recursively into sub-projects, and sub-sub-projects that you only realize are necessary after the "direct approach" turns out to be not a shortcut but an illusion, something that starts out looking like a shortcut and turns out to be a dead-end or actually a very long way around (e.g., fast short term results that are unsustainable in the long run). Then you have to turn back.