Two books about to be published in this genre which I am excited about:
(1) Software Development Pearls: Lessons from Fifty Years of Software Experience (Karl Weigers). I enjoyed his books on Requirements and Software Engineering Culture
This zinger really applies to my work place "Lesson #7. The cost of recording knowledge is small compared to the cost of acquiring knowledge"
(2) Code That Fits in Your Head: Heuristics for Software Engineering (Mark Seemann). His previous book on Dependency Injection was good
Please read The Captive Mind for the version based on true events.
Spoiler: the Poles discovered that a political movement with methods and motivations which should sound very familiar didn't turn out to be the good guys after all.
When I was around twenty my Mom used to call me every other day or so just to have a chat. One day, after she asked me how my day was, I shot back something along the lines of: "I don't have anything to tell you, really. You're calling so often that nothing new manages to happen in between the calls." So, she stopped calling. I would go home every other week as usual and everything seemed fine. It was only much later that I found out that she basically cried for three days straight after that call.
Some time later there was a period when I would contact my parents every few months or so. Not really on purpose. Simply because other things simply took more of my time and attention, and calling my parents wasn't really high on my list of priorities.
Only when my son was born I started to realize what someone goes through as an individual and as a couple once a child comes into their lives. How it changes things. That not being thrown out of the window at 2 a.m. as an infant is already a blessing. I'm sure that thought has crossed the mind of many a young parent with a screeching infant on their hands in the middle of night. So, I felt ashamed of myself, and grateful to my parents for being there in the first place, and being decent at being parents as well.
Now I've made a point to myself to call them up at least once a week. As in, I have set up a reminder for that. I now know how much they value this. But it's not only for them. I realize very well that one day I will wake up and wish to call my parents to have a chat about something. But there simply won't be anyone to call anymore.
I'm not passing any judgement at all on people who have abusive parents. I have no idea how that feels like. I'm just happy that I didn't end up accidentally getting estranged to the decent parents that I have. At some point it really was going that way.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that Christopher Alexander makes this point in one of his books, maybe A Pattern Language
He says that suburbs are configured "wrong", in a way that's antithetical to life.
Because the children go to school somewhere nearby, where they are babysat, and the fathers (at that time) commute to work in the city.
And the children have no idea what their parents do, and that is alienating. The configuration of space diminishes people and relationships. They don't see their parents enough and they don't learn from them.
Children want to learn from "real" work, not the fake work of school, which is why so many of them can't sit still in class, and get poor grades despite being smart, etc.
That work/suburb split definitely describes how I grew up, so I remember that point very distinctly. You are supposed to jump through hoops for 12 years, and then apply to a place where you jump through 4 more years of hoops, etc. But you are confused about how the world actually works. It's not a good way of teaching people to be adaptable to the world.
Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work.
My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she would set up a coffeeshop at home and charge her mother and I for drinks. I think this says something about how much she saw the inside of coffeeshops while I was programming there.
The main obstacle to still using the play-better-until-it's-real path, is that we don't have a good way for kids to see what adults are doing, in most jobs. Otherwise, their natural instincts are still to "play" at doing what they see the adults doing.
I stayed in a small town outside Chablis, France, many years ago. I rented a room above the only restaurant in town. There were a few businesses, mostly food-related and clothing repair. Everything just seemed slowed down. I watched a man in waders unload a dead boar he had just shot to the butcher at 9am. I watched two other men repairing brickwork on a foundation. I watched another woman tending a large garden, then go to work at a bar/restaurant. The stores were open for just a few hours. The shelves were free of random plastic trinkets and gadgets.
It just seemed like it was 1/10th the normal speed, somewhat Luddite... and every task seemed oddly fundamental.
I've also encountered towns like this in Spain, Greece, Austria, Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Uruguay, Thailand and Cambodia.
After reading these comments, I would never have believed that so many small towns exist that seem untouched by 24-hour stores and everything cheap and on-demand. It sounds inevitable that everyone is eventually pushed into hyperinflationary always-working mode. But yet, these places persist. I might even chalk it up to depressed economies and "third-world" nature, but my samples include all sorts of economies.
I think we choose what kind of lifestyle we want, but it needs to be done at the community level. Without going all "we should all be farmers hippie dippy portland nature fetishist", it does seem like decisions have consequences and it is possible to steer away from hyperactivity.
I recently stopped ignoring recruiters but I instead respond to say "thanks for reaching out, I'm actively looking, but if I'm going to invest the time in learning more about the opportunity, can you tell me the salary range for the position? I need to know if I can afford to take the role"
Most of the time they give a range.
Even if I wasn't looking, I'd have picked up valuable market insight.
Charles Taylor, the philosopher, covered much of this about twenty years ago with far less snark and buzzwords. I strongly recommend reading The Ethics of Authenticity. It’s all about the trend of individualism and how it precedes social media by...centuries.
I am sorry about the position you're in. For the last several years I have been balancing taking care of my terminally ill wife who recently passed away, all while working remotely in the web hosting industry. It's hard to balance. Harder than you think. Setting boundaries will be vital to being successful in any WFH role.
Now that that's out of the way: You need to focus. You've described your abilities and that's fine, but you lack focus. Your qualifications are great, but your presentation is all over the place. You need a single one page resume that focuses on one aspect of your knowledge and experience, and lightly mentions the others. Make multiple resumes, each with a focus on one thing. Use the resume that's best for the job. I recently saw somebody who must have had 20 different resumes to match the jobs they were applying for. It worked.
Also, you might consider looking into the Web Hosting business. If your temperament is as you describe, and you like talking on the phone or live chat, most web hosts will overlook any technical gaps. Those can be taught. In fact that can lend to your focus! Focus on the fact that you know things that can't be taught: Customer Service, talking down angry customers, talented writing, friendly and always willing to find a solution under dire circumstances. Those are GOLD. Once those are on the table, the rest is negotiable. I'll email you a link to at least one that is hiring full remote entry level.
Additionally, you need to step up your confidence level. Let an employer know that your family is important to you and that you're dedicated to working hard so that you can support them- and leave it at that. They don't deserve the other details, and they aren't relevant.
First real job I had there was this guy who had one specialization. He was in charge of some software that drove tape drives.
Every outside new manager would come in and in some form or another look down on this guy in some form due to his age and generally not doing "a lot" of tasks and new products.
It took the local VP to come down and regularly high five him after his product git rave reviews from customers (regularly) and make the point every time some manager didn't get it.
That guy's code, documentation, everything was rock solid, and the number of support cases for everything he did was so low that the dude was without a doubt the most productive person as far as income goes. You could sell the product that he worked on and just rake in money with almost no costs after that. Almost everything else had a lot of support costs and etc.
Meanwhile the guys who were doing all the new stuff, sucked at trying to juggle 12 things because it looked good on a resume.
If someone has a recommendation for how to build/architect large GUI applications like Photoshop. For e.g., how to think about Undo operation right from the get-go . I think that would be amazing to learn if there is a course like that.
Stanford's experimental operating systems course[0], where you buy a Raspberry Pi and write your operating system on the bare metal by using the reference specifications.
"You should take this class if: 1. You write code well OR (you don't yet write code well AND have a lot of time to devote to the class); 2. AND you find these systems topics interesting.
The people that found the class valuable in the past were entirely drawn from this demographic. (In particular: I would not take this course if you were looking for an easier way to satisfy a cs140 requirement.) We are trying to go as far as possible as quickly as possible with a group interested in doing so." [emphasis mine]
Destroy All Software screencasts by Gary Bernhardt has some great content. Besides the typical CS degree, I felt that these videos were most pivotal in me writing better code.
If you take some of their online courses or a MicroMasters program and do well in them, they'll probably admit you to the online Masters program. Note: I work at edX.
For example, employers have little patience with candidates who didn’t pick the most prestigious possible college or job, but were swayed by other considerations.
I don't think this is true, at least in the tech industry. Based on my time involved in recruiting at Google and Facebook, the elite tech employers are quite happy to hire candidates who have an unusual resume, as long as something stands out that prevents their resume from being thrown out in the first place. For example, someone who worked at a low-status job for four years out of college, then worked at a hot startup for one year. Or someone with no college degree who spent time working in "low-status" tech roles but has one popular GitHub project.
You have to go through the standard "tech interview" grinder, but it's very possible to succeed at that without having a high-status resume. Indeed, the great benefit of having such an onerous interview process is that it provides an opportunity for people with unimpressive resumes to stand out as an impressive candidate.
There's a famous paper by Dijkstra where he claims that using anthropomorphic terms for computers is a sign of immaturity of the discipline. I used to think that was a bit extreme, but the more people keep talking about fucking AI, the more I'm convinced he was actually right.
Machine learning is linear algebra, nothing more nothing less. Making a model, using it wrong, and then complaining that "the model failed" is a unique kind of stupidity that's becoming more and more popular with "hoi polloi" due to garbage articles like this.
There are supplements, backed by research, that practically remove all of the negative side effects of adderall. To start with, the sadness you felt on vyvanse sounds like dopamine depletion. You want to be taking l-tyrosine to make sure there’s plenty of fuel for the amphetamine to work with. ALCAR + ALA counteract the psychomotor agitation and tolerance formation. Magnesium + zinc help with muscle cramping. Selenium is neuroprotective. And of course you want to make sure you’re getting enough electrolytes (sodium + potassium) and balancing your intake, as a general rule for life, but especially if you take stimulants.
With the aforementioned supplement stack I’ve been able to go off doses as high as 60 mg of adderall per day without any significant withdrawal symptoms. It’s been a complete game changer in terms of making this medication a sustainable option for me. I will say as a caveat that things which reduce drug tolerance formation also typically attenuate some of the effects. In my case, ALCAR + ALA basically erase the potential for euphoria but don’t seem to diminish the mental benefits.
The multiplicity of casual friendships online has led to an interesting new phenomenon: Because people preferentially broadcast their successes, we tend to get the feeling that everybody else is more successful than ourselves. I don't think you can avoid comparing yourself to others; what you can do is try to keep in mind that life is a mix of good and bad, and even if all you manage to do is avoid the worst of the bad, you're doing pretty well.
Take me for example. I started university when I was 13, won the Putnam competition when I was 18, went on to a doctorate in computing from Oxford University, and single-handedly bootstrapped a successful startup. I think most people here could tell you that much about me; but I doubt many could tell you that I'm 34, that I'm socially awkward and stutter when I'm nervous, that I'm diabetic and wrestle with this life-threatening condition every day, that I'm 20 lbs overweight and due to my sedentary lifestyle have the cardiopulmonary fitness of a typical 50 year old, or that I've been dumped by every woman I've ever dated.
When you inevitably compare yourself to others, remember that there's probably a lot you're not hearing about them.
The appropriate phrase I've found to be effective for when someone is wasting my time is "this seems to be out of scope for me right now". It forces someone to justify why this waste of your time is somehow relevant, which they usually can't do.
Ex: "I'll leave you guys to finish talking through this one as it seems out of scope for me right now. I'm going to get started on previously-discussed-priority-item."
For someone to ask you to remain on the call after that is implicitly saying their discussion is more important than another item that has been agreed to be a priority.
If this resonates with you, or you're thinking about therapy, I recommend reading 'The Drama of the Gifted Child', by Alice Miller.
Don't be put off by the title, it's a great read regardless if you're think you're gifted or not. Gifted in this context means something closer to 'sensitive'.
This, together with therapy, has significantly improved my life.
"Democracy in Chains" is irredeemably flawed, and has been completely discredited by a series of prominent reviewers.[1][2] There are many more reviews which reveal the scope of fabrication in this book, but it suffices to say that the work should be considered 'fiction', perhaps in the 'fantasy' category.
I'm a software engineer, and I've been keeping a "lab journal" on and off for the past decade or so. A single markdown file per day, with the date as filename. First thing I do every day is copy the previous day's entry, give it a once over & remove what's no longer relevant. This helps me remember what I've been working on, and it's a track record of sorts.
There's a todo list at the top of each day's entry. But the rest is mostly free-form. Some days don't contain anything. Others contain meeting notes. Design ideas. Results of experiments. It's all plain text, so it's easily grep-able. Sometimes I look back at them to answer "why did I do that"-type questions. Sometimes $manager wonders what I've been working on or why it's taking so much time. I can just point at the journal and say "I've been doing 3 meetings every day and I've been onboarding people so I haven't had time to work on XYZ".
It's not much effort. And imho it's definitely worth it.
Having become very interested in police brutality for obvious reasons, I recently finished Danger, Duty, and Disillusion: the Worldview of Los Angeles Police Officers [1] by Joan Barker, an academic book from 1999 that takes an anthropologist's view to understanding the LAPD after the Rodney King riots, and pretty much the only work I could find that tries to understand the police officer mindset holistically.
It is utterly fascinating and I highly recommend it, but one of the most interesting takeaways (consistent with this article) is that police officers quickly become utterly disillusioned with the integrity of the police department as an institution. They complain about unfair recruitment and promotion policies, injured officers who become "disposable", an emphasis on quotas instead of applying the law consistently, on politicization of policing priorities, and above all the city always settling cases against police misconduct so that accused officers never get a chance to clear their name in court, when innocent.
With this mindset, when they don't trust their own institution, the only people they trust are fellow officers -- not captains, not management, not the department, not the mayor. Which aligns with this article -- that Marines view the Marines as a trustworthy institution, while police don't see their own police department in the same light.
Now obviously police misconduct and brutality exist and are a huge problem. But the book very much opened my eyes to the idea that it's not only the behavior of police officers that needs better standards and accountability -- that treating police officers themselves better and more fairly may also be just as necessary to achieve full transparency and accountability. What if the "blue wall of silence" dissolved because police officers trusted their own institution, rather than just each other?
2. Practical Python Programming.
Over 13 years in development and taught to more than 400 in-person groups, you'll learn the fundamentals of Python programming. Now released under a Creative Commons licenses.
As an American, I traveled in northern India for three months in 2004, two of them sedentary in Mcleod Ganj. It still resonates both from the contrast of India itself, but also in how I was able to happily fill my days without screens and fill them with friendly people. I'd amble around with my legs not unlike the way I amble around the Internet today. I'd 'waste' a half hour hanging out with strangers over metal cups of chai.
At the time, I had a Palm Tungsten and a foldup portable keyboard and would every day or so write a blog post on it. I'd send it out by putting its card (SD?) onto a USB adapter, dragging that to a slooooow Internet cafe where I'd hope I could connect to my Movable Type (Gatsby before there was reasonable JavaScript). If it didn't connect, no bigs.
It might have been the peak happiness of my relationship with the Internet. Just enough.
Did several months on one of the more remote islands in the Falklands - population: 6 humans, several thousand penguins and several million petrels. Apart from a rotary phone and generators the only other tech experience was the International Space Station flying overhead one night.
The first couple of weeks were a little interesting but after a while you realise that if it was important then you'd hear about it eventually.
(1) Software Development Pearls: Lessons from Fifty Years of Software Experience (Karl Weigers). I enjoyed his books on Requirements and Software Engineering Culture
This zinger really applies to my work place "Lesson #7. The cost of recording knowledge is small compared to the cost of acquiring knowledge"
(2) Code That Fits in Your Head: Heuristics for Software Engineering (Mark Seemann). His previous book on Dependency Injection was good