Got a background in 3D and Programming, but I think the 3d industry has the same approach to problems as programming. Couple of frameworks and libraries and poof, you have an applications.

In 3d you grab a render engine, a light setup, some assets and poof, you have an image/game/animation. I miss the days that I 3d was exploring and experimentation. The alternative would be to dive into 1 subject (modeling, rendering, lighting, FX etc). But in my experience that just made me feel like a factory worker. Piece of concept art, here you go.

3D can really trap you into polishing a soulless turd, so I'm learning drawing. where you can't cut as many corners and enjoying the creative process again.

On the programming side I'm just enjoying work and learning on the job, also going back to the fundamentals like shell, sql and regex. It's amazing how much you can automate.

Especially resources for deliberate/edge practice.

Besides that all of those F2P games make you invest in their ecosystem. Battle pass here, skin there. Free unlocks when you play certain game modes. That is the real crack, including unhealthy conditioning.

So if you are working for companies like Respawn, EA or Epic (or similar). Scratch yourself behind the ears. I would say I don't have an addictive tendency, but the amount of effort it cost me to get away from apex is higher then I would like to admit. I noticed playing those games didn't made me happy anymore, but I still felt like I've invested so much in it that I had to keep going.

I'm happy that the game had so many terrible design choices for me to make it easier to step away. But the moment these companies figure that out as well, I think they will trap even more customers

This claim is based on some EA whitepaper on the topic plus the players' own observations of the match-making system.

I can't support or deny this claim as I haven't looked into EBMM, but the terrible match-making system is what turned me off of Apex.

Anyhow, here's a talk on engagement based matchmaking in Halo 5: https://youtu.be/0FoG4Jtpebs

Of course if you're trying to devise a serious ranking, fun isn't what you're optimizing for.

The old days where you joined servers, got to know names, and formed communities offered a lot more than win/lose stats. Ultimately, I would say that is far more "engaging" but they neither want to run servers for us nor let us do it ourselves anymore.

If anyone knows community that like building things like this, I couldn't find anything. (mainly because i have no idea if it has a name)

The Romac is a numpad version. Same techniques all around. Use a Pro Micro chipset and install the QMK firmware and you’re off.

I think mental models are important, and having a huge blob of unrelated roles, makes sense to the current development team. But won't, just like the old situation, to the new developers.

Perhaps it's just the clickbait article, but a better title would have been. "Homogenizing our wild-west legacy microservices".

For me personally microservices was a god send, working on getting stuff done, instead of dealing with ancient code that doesn't reflect the current business anymore.

I still buy in the thought of, if you can't develop a great monolith, you sure won't be great at building microservices. modular-monolith is the cool thing currently. Create a Monolith, without the shortcuts that create problems in the long run. Public interfaces are your most valuable pieces in the system. Worship them, code-review them, fight about them. Currently I could care less about the implementation itself. Does it solve our problems, is it fast enough, is it tested great, ship it. What language you used, architecture. database, I don't care. Just make sure it's a joy to use from the outside.

If more developers would spend longer on thinking about the problems and less with throwing large amount of code that makes them feel smart. Making a microservice doesn't fix that problem.

Think that what is missing is the stability that microservice are able to give in its most optimal form. Each service being the main source, the second it leaves the system it is stale reference data. Is stability important? use the old reference data, how fresh does your data really needs to be.

The thing I agree with, yes being distracted takes time, focus and productivity. I'm all for being more into more deep work etc. Also the part of people need to be proactive rings true of course. But I fail to see how something that evident really needs a graph.

But the issue I take with articles like this is that they think of humans as robots. That walk in, or sit in front of their computer at 9, type for 8 and then go home/stop working.

But let's be honest here, If you can keep highly focused for more than 4 hours a day you are a superhuman. I know keeping this in mind doesn't take anything away from the article. Yes we should focus more on Async productivity, but work our work is definitely not single threaded. We are humans, If I hear my teammate 2 desks over signing for the 3rd time I can do 2 things. Ignore it, not getting out of my flow. Or stand up, talk to him/her and see whats up. Maybe it's only a complain about Entity Framework migrations being a b or perhaps just tired, and gets annoying by small things because something happened last night and its time to vent a bit.

recently I've started listening to this podcast https://hurryslowly.co/ . Although I do not identify with everything discussed, I do think there is source of truth in a few episodes. It just makes me consider, are we optimizing the right things first?

I really wonder, if all this no meetings, no distractions is really the key to making us more effective at our jobs. You can't really measure it, does the hour in a meeting really makes you an hour less productive? Is it more like 15 min? Or did the distraction actually helped instead of bashing your head against the wall for over on hour trying to figure out the solution?

I wonder the same about all those gosu vim/emacs users, it sure looks fancy dancing with your fingers doing edits. But where does the real work happen? Is is the amount of lines written or the amount of quality information processed in my mind about the solution I'm looking for?

In the end..

- Be human - Try to have clear borders about distractions in your team - Turn all slack notifications off - Don't have meetings that could have been an email. - Don't send emails about stuff that could have been a meeting

I'm really curious about working in a distributed team though, sadly I didn't really had the chance yet. I think working remote has it own con's and pro's.

I do applause the auther for thinking about this, I think reflecting on how to work better is always a good idea. But It could also easily be a recipe for a burnout.

A "short-ish" article written in an afternoon has no hopes of being a tablet of truth, just some anecdotal examples and ideas I've experienced over the years.

I fundamentally agree with the "Be human..." part, that's all you need if common sense is common around your workplace. Unfortunately it often isn't and you need to offset the unbalance to find equilibrium.

It isn't perfect but we try to show how the meetings split apart your day and your capacity to do deep work.

I did the jobs you described part time while I was studying. Yes the jobs you listed are more physical, but you gain a flexible schedule and the chance to combine it with different things, art, writing studying etc.

I remember a conversation with a barber. I told her I was a programmer, she immediately reacted with, "I would never be able to do that, I need to do something more creative and social". That was a bit shortsighted from her side. But it also gave me a bit of insight that not everyone wants to sit in an office all day. People are really different, some might do it because they cannot do anything else. Other probably talk about you as you are talking about them right now.

Finally, remember that not all countries have the same social/tax system. I'm not sure where you are from, but when your coin is very strong versus the country you are visiting, it is already very skewed. Next to that countries like the US you get allot more "liquid" money. Money you can easily spend. Some countries actually tax more, giving you a more stable foundation, but it will mean you have less money after taxes.

Just treat everyone like they are human.

Why do you think this is short sighted? Genuine question.

I'm a about 2/3 of the way through my CS degree and I'm having second thoughts. I did lots of programming as a teenager, and I'm fairly confident in my software engineering ability and ability to learn.

The thing is... I don't find it creative. I don't get to socialise as much as I'd like, and fellow CS students are often pretty elitist and try to "one-up" people around them. I know this is a generalisation, but (anecdotally) I've experienced this much less in other fields.

I've really enjoyed pursuing entrepreneurship and hanging out with business, creative arts and philosophy students instead. I'm thinking that maybe I should've done a business degree and just developed my CS skills on the side.

I'm very much an extroverted "people person" and I feel that side of me is neglected in this field. I've had an internship and although I definitely talked to my team, it's not the same.

Am I wrong? I've barely worked in industry. I'm a bit worried about my career path.

(Not saying that any of the above is bad, just maybe not suited to me)

Because I do think my job is creative and social, and she just decided that my job wasn't, without trying to understand what I was really doing.

>> The thing is... I don't find it creative.

Well, the weird thing, is that I do not have a CS background, I have an Art background of all things, I choose to change careers. Perhaps from that perspective I definitely see all the creative decisions I have to make. Thinking about maintainability, solving technical puzzles, understand really what the customer wants challenging and supporting the product owner. I think creativity is more than deciding something needs to be red. Don't underestimate the amount of systems and process in "creative" design work. The "real" creative jobs are very rare. I was freelancing and at one point I was making a pack of rice dance for a fortune 500 company, I hated it.

Sure, I understand there are Elitists CS students, but I don't think companies will enjoy working with them. If they stay that way I really think they get a rude awakening at the end of the day, perhaps they can hide in their dynamic programming at Facebook.

I know this is N of 1, but a recent CS grad just left the company I was working for. He fled back the the academic CS world, not able to function that well in a company that also required engineers to understand and communicate with other people.

>> I'm very much an extroverted "people person"

There are plenty of places where extraverted engineers have a place. Perhaps go to a few technical meetups to get a different view of the work-field.

I do,i believe in the policy of no job is above or below any other job,work is work.Same reason i don't get the stigma around sex work,its work after all.

Its just that some jobs should be paid more and that some dev jobs can be bit overpaid.A great example would be chefs who work in hot environments unders stress aren't as well compensated when compared to software engineers top chefs are paid well but thats like the 1%

Now the important questions, where can I get the stickers for my laptop.

I tried to buy an article last year, I'm not 100% sure why, but I never succeed in reading the article that I wanted to read. I just wanted to pay like 10 euro's until i needed to pay the next 10. But they were already forcing you into a monthly subscription model.

Now they are just the dutch version of apple news, seems like a terrible spot to be in.

I didn't try the audio stuff yet, that might be interesting. I enjoyed the audio stuff from Audm, but I thought it was expensive to get a subscription. Also to much competition in the podcast space.

I think https://thecorrespondent.com/ is doing a better job at changing the world. It's clearer what you get for your money, and you actually feel like your supporting journalism. Not sure if I feel the same way about Blendle.

That said, i know some people who use it, but mostly because their jobs requires them to be up to date with most newspapers.

I disliked the pay per article model, because it reinforces how expensive news articles actually are in the real world (outside ads-sponsored, click bait articles). I also tried their subscription model, but disliked it even more because you could only read the articles that they (or some ML algorithm) selected. It seems that they now offer unlimited magazine articles (but no newspapers), but magazines do not really interest me.

In the end we decided to take a newspaper subscription again. The price is somewhat steep, but you have unlimited access, and most of the money ends up where it should go.

Then they could do a reward system for referrals and other interactions to get free tokens.

Drawing is a skill anyone can learn, you can learn to draw a cartoon horse in a day, but it's more valuable to understand how animals are constructed. That will give you a foundation to draw it from any angle no matter how bad or good your linework is.

[0] https://www.color-practice.com/sight-size.html