Seonglae ChoLooking the past and future events at the same time without isolation
Reflective writing
- Descriptive (minimal) - What When Who Where - Looking back
- Reflective (maximum) - Why How So what - Analyzing & Projection
Hindsight (Retrospective, Regret)
Insight from behind events
Your feelings and emotions are very strong right after the event, but you can reflective more objectively after a bit time later. Reflecting later could enable considering several aspects such as cause emotion changes with critical tone stepping back.
Critical reflection (objectively)
- making connections between events and ideas
- refining and reformulating ideas
Framework Models for reflective writing
- Experience → Observation → Conceptualization → Experimentation → … (Kolb, 1984)
- Descriptive → Feeling → Evaluation → Analysis → Conclusion → Plan → (Gibbs, 1988)
- What → So what? → Now what? → What → … (Rolfe, 2001)
- Reporting → Relating → Reasoning → Restructuring (Ryan, 2013)
We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience. - John Dewey
Balance between "diving deep" and "stepping back" is crucial. In other words, it's important to work hard when needed while regularly questioning and reviewing your path to prevent losing sight of your direction.
On Stepping Back
The other day I was playing around with Claude Code, experimenting with porting
some C code to Rust - not for any particular reason, just because I was curious
how well it could do. As these things happen, I got more and more invested in
the process, instead of just letting Claude do something and noting what
happened, I kept poking in and adjusting the behavior, "no you can't pretend the
result is 0, try again" - the usual stuff when you're trying to get an LLM to do
something large or novel.
https://rjp.io/blog/2025-05-31-stepping-back