Tazkiyyah

Abstraction: Selective ignorance of certain elements in order to focus on other elements. In software development, abstraction means you zoom out and see the big picture. You ignore minor implementation details–what are the little pieces? How do they work?–and focus on the whole. These are the systems and how they fit together, and this is the overall goal. When you employ abstraction, efficiency increases. No longer bogged down with function pointers, memory management, or 16-bit register values, you focus on how to make your software work better.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover or a man by his beard, because what’s behind the beard can be weird.” Apply this to your lives, and you’ll find that, bi ithnillah (by the permission of Allah), you will never be surprised or dissapointed. When you make great assumptions about people, where can they go except down? Great assumptions often lead to great letdowns. Wallahu ‘alim.

“If you fear the creator, you will never fear the creation.” -Imam Anwar al-Awlaki If your heart trembles in fear of Allah (سبحانه وتعالى) and awe of His majesty, nothing in the dunya (world) can ever overshadow that fear. The dunya can throw a bigger army at you, better weapons, everything and anything. And if you fear Allah the way He deserves to be feared, none of that can overshadow your fear of the Creator.

MultiTimer, a lightweight application, allows you to track your time commitments to multiple items simultaneously. You type in the timer label, set the inital time and count method (countup or countdown), and the application handles the rest. In particular, if you need to track (and, optionally, aggregate) time usage for multiple projects, you can assign one timer per project and track your time use per day. Or per week. Or per month.

This article by Steve Pavlina explains how to effectively manage your life by focusing on tasks based on their long-term effects. The article defines three categories of tasks, and allocates your daily time to each of them proportionally based on their expected benefit. “A” tasks yield benefit in five or more years, such as learning a new language. “B” tasks yield benefit in two or more years, such as training for a marathon.

“Very few things in life are worth crying over.” Ponder it. Very few things in life are worth throwing a fit over or complaining about. In Islamic work, especially, people attach importantance to things that aren’t issues, tempers rise, fights break out, and brotherhood dies. And in the end, Allah (سبحانه وتعالى) controls over all things. So sit back, chill out, and let it run by you. No harm done, right?