This, plus the multiple-cursors package, can save entire minutes off tedious file-renaming operations. (That may not sound like a lot but trust me every second counts when you're just renaming files.)
Chesterton's fence has long been a staple of HN discussions. Unfortunately, it involves no risk/reward analysis and it invariably leads to needless conservatism. That's probably not a big deal in medical research where risks are often high, but it's a problem when applied as a general principle.
(The opposite wisdom is probably grandma's ham [1]. Consider that if grandma had passed away, they might never be allowed to try cooking the whole ham.)
The point of Chesterton's fence is cost/benefit analysis. It's not saying the fence mustn't go; it's saying you need to know why the fence was put there in order to evaluate whether it's best removed or left in place - that is, your analysis needs to be informed by understanding of the status quo in order to be accurate.
Grandma's ham is a great example. It might have been some subtle trichinosis-related failure case that cutting the end off a ham reliably prevents, and it's a shame we had to lose your great-uncle Joe to find out about that. Or it might have been an issue of pan length. You can't know until you ask, so you ask if you can. If you can't ask, then sure, you do the best you can with what you have - I should like to hope there are no blind dogmatists here. But if you can ask, you'd be a fool not to.
On the flip side, as someone who's tried to change stacks or IDEs or other software a few times, there's something to be said for already having momentum using existing solutions. Sometimes alternatives can be a little better, but not better enough to justify the time/energy/etc costs of switching. And more often than not, alternative solutions have their own flaws too. I tried three times in the past week to switch my portfolio website (https://sdegutis.com) to using Jekyll or Metalsmith or Hexo, and each time it just didn't prove any better than my own hand-rolled Node.js site generator, and in most cases, it was definitely worse in some ways, at least for the specific requirements I had. So switching tools can be good, if it's legitimately better in some way, and not worse in any other ways. But that doesn't isn't the case as often as we'd like to hope.
Currently running into this moving from Vim to Spacemacs. Even with vim bindings, it works just slightly differently enough that there's a good chunk of friction. Specifically, mashing escape no longer reliably gets you into normal mode, bash is in a separate window instead of in tmux, some of my settings are different in ways I don't want to spend the time analyzing (probably scrolling? IIRC I set things up to center themselves as best they can in the window in vim), and the tab-completion for opening a file with :e is different through trying to be way more "helpful".
That's my same experience with programming. That's kind of what I was getting at in this article actually: that you get better by doing your best and making mistakes. Nothing beats hard-earned experience.
Good point. You're right that passion helped me to gain the experience I have now. But at this point I can't lean on that same passion, I had to find another motivation. I wonder how many people hit this same point and just let themselves fully burn-out instead.
Meh, joke sites like this aren't nearly as prominent as sites for apps, I'd really like a .app TLD instead. That said, the distinction between app and service is blurring a lot, so Spotify and VS Code probably both qualify for .app but one also has a web interface. Everything is confusing, let's just stick to .com
In my experience having switched from using one IDE to another a few times, the difficulty for me is usually that both IDEs do 90% of what I need perfectly (after a few days of tweaking), but the other 10% feels is missing and feels critical, and in particular, neither have the same 10% missing. So I kind of have to ask myself, "which critical features am I okay with giving up?" and I can't decide so I just stick with what I know and have muscle-memory for.
I'm trying VSCode now, but I still switch back to Sublime for SublimeGit. It's such an integral part of my workflow, and VSCode's built-in git is no substitute.
- You can easily see the status of each file (new, modified, or staged).
- You can easily stage all files, each file, or just specific hunks of specific files.
- You can stash and pop stashes.
- You can amend a commit.
- You can do all of that from the keyboard, without touching the mouse.
I imagine you can do many of those things with VSCode, but it's so effortless in Sublime. I haven't learned the same workflow in VSC yet, and since I do all of those things frequently, I'm really attached to SublimeGit.
In the same way, I use VS Code mostly now (for node stuff) but I still load up Emacs and use Magit whenever I need to do serious version control, meaning basically anything more than just "glance at the changes and commit everything."
I'm 40 and I've found out the hard way that 90% people under 35 adopt absolute statements for everything, as if they think they already know how the life, the world and the universe work. Good luck.
If you meant 90% of successful people's way is paved by those things, I don't agree: It is very easy to discount hard work and forgive our own laziness by zeroing in on 'bad' stuff.
If you meant 90% of the successful people got there by those things - then I would want to understand your definition of success. The folks I consider successful have always used their opportunities well, not just rode out the luck.
We all have low points in life where everything feels unfair. I am not going to tell you to shake it off because you have to find your way out yourself. I can indeed tell you that doesn't last long - It's a cycle. If you find a way to cherish the happier moments and remind yourself of them often enough, the bad ones don't feel long either. Keep that chin up!
I think it depends a lot on the field and where you work, and how you define "success".
I used to think the way you're describing until I got where I am and saw just how dysfunctional the system is in my field--the corruption and sheer luck. It gets worse the higher up you go.
I think there's also problem with these types of discussions because of survivorship bias, which is rampant in contemporary society. That is, the experience of individuals who either benefit from, or who are shielded from, these types of problems, aren't aware of them, and therefore have a different view. This isn't to imply that if you don't agree, you're corrupt, but I think some individuals by virtue of certain attributes aren't aware of the problems that ensue--notice that the OP included charisma in the list, which isn't an ethical problem among the charismatic necessarily but is one that creates ethical problems for those who are not.
I guess what I'm saying is that I appreciate your encouragement, but you have to keep in mind that things worked out for you. If they didn't, you might be offering a different explanation.
I think we tell ourselves that meritocracy works because the alternative is much darker and harder for us to wrestle with, because it invokes a feeling of moral obligation to do something to fix it.
In my field as I go up, what I see are people succeeding on the basis of popularity, which is not necessarily the same as contributions. For some, this is because of outright corruption. For others it's because of something many would consider ethically problematic, even if unintentional. In still other cases I think there's just basically luck, in the sense that they applied for jobs at the right time and where they ended up just happened to be exactly the right fit, which was not what happened to others who then languished.
I have very close friends who I would consider as successful as they possibly could be in their field, but not once would I ever say they are really deserving of that success more than many others. My convictions over time have only hardened, because I've seen their reversals switch due to natural experiments of sorts, where they are repositioned for reasons outside their control.
Maybe someday I will end up seeing things as you're suggesting, and I'm just in a dark period of my life, but the way it seems to me, it's like a curtain was lifted and there is a very sinister wizard behind it.
Very possible and true in general that successful people attribute success to hard work (who wouldn't). I have had trust fund folks defend their situation similarly as well.
But my point is to take the focus away from them and their life and point it at self. It has always helped me to assume that the world is a place where hard work wins against all odds because then my search is for hard work rather than luck.
I don't have much other than internet encouragement :), So good luck. I really hope you turn it around!
What do you think about the idea of just actualizing your own potential one step at a time, rather than comparing to other "successful" people and what they do?
I think that is cynical, but people have to realize "Intelligence" itself is not enough. You can either work on your soft-skills or you can put together a well rounded team working for you. For a small up-start relying on a friend or family with good soft-skills is a good start.
I was recently tapped for a VP position at a bank and out of curiosity I checked it out. An initial meeting later I could see I wasn't a good fit.
I think there is a fundamental difference between myself and the people who are successful in such environments and I've been trying to figure it out. They all seem very confident, polished, with expensive clothes, but is there something deeper there involving people handling and politics that I just seem incapable of understanding or emulating?
20 years on, working mostly for startups and basically avoiding politics for the most part, I wonder if I've actually neglected a key component of my on the job learning by not exercising the soft skills more.
Really recommend Peter Drucker's books. It's not about Alpha at all, it's about effectiveness which also doesn't come naturally but can be habitually trained.
I don't think it's that bad. Most of the successful people I've meant were actually brilliant and deserved their success. There are exceptions of course.
