Reading this comment had me cheering “yes, a thousand times yes” but then it occurred to me how often I turn to an O’Reilly book instead of a concrete project and I wondered why.
I think I subconsciously avoid new projects to learn something programming-related because of how often they end up unbounded in time due to one of the fundamental attributes of writing software: unknown unknowns. The kinds of sticking points in a project that could take you minutes to figure out, or days, or even weeks.
I have limited free time and I want only so much of it to be _more_ programming. (I’m a professional software engineer) If I can’t be certain I can timebox a new pet project with _some_ degree of successful outcome, I think I’m low key anxious enough to avoid starting it.
Does anyone else struggle with this? How do folks overcome it and work on new things without them taking over?
I run into the same thing with projects of many kinds.
If I want to do something like move a light fixture in my house, it seems like it should be fairly straightforward. Choose where I want the new one to be. Create hole. Move wires. Connect fixture.
But it only seems that simple because I'm ignorant. I have to install a new junction box, which requires having a joist nearby, or adding a cross-support between two. Am I going to need to move any insulation? What insulation do I even have? Is the existing wiring long enough, or in the right place, or am I going to have to replace it? And I need to pin the wires down every so often? What? How? Where? Where do I even find that info? And never mind patching the hole I'm leaving behind. It's not just eyeballing a drywall patch. I can't match the old texture of the ceiling, even if I thought it was plain. My patch is really noticeable. And on and on.
Unknown unknowns take what I thought was going to be a little afternoon project and turn it into asking all my friends for recommendations of people who aren't booked 6 months out and are willing to handle a tiny little project cleaning up after my ignorance.
Taking on projects before I even know what I don't know has gotten me into more trouble than just about anything else.
I've never nearly burnt my house down taking notes from a book and hiring a professional to do the actual work!
Limit the degrees of freedom. If the goal is to learn a new programming language, pick an interesting problem that you’ve already solved (e.g. todo list manager, pomodoro timer, etc.). If you want to learn a new domain (e.g. networking), pick a familiar language. Choose boring tech for everything else—-things like deployment, monitoring, etc. If your goal is not learning k8s, just SCP stuff to a VPS. It can be crappy. Crappy is how you learn.
It’s like you’ve seen into my very soul. I often struggle to isolate individual problems within a new problem space because my brain prefers to see the interconnected web of what could be if I just did this thing right. Excellent advice.
It replaced my lifelong fear (terror?) of death with what I can honestly say is now curiosity. You can experience only so many deaths in your mind before you learn to be comfortable with the idea.
I'm watching the Netflix doc "How to Change Your Mind" about this subject. They use similar language: e.g. that psilocybin causes terminal cancer patients to view death with "curiosity". I find that really interesting, because implicit in this "curiosity" must be the idea of consciousness existing after death...otherwise what would be curious about it? You just die and there's nothing otherwise. So I wonder if, e.g. atheists or non-spiritually inclined folks have the same experiences in these drugs.
I’m basically an atheist and ketamine assisted psychotherapy did change my background fear of mortality very much in a before and after sort of way. It felt more like a different relationship to time and free will. Like a realization that the universe existed and unfolded like a cellular automata and I was integrated within that. Talking to the very experienced therapist afterwards he summed up my scattered thoughts as, “you resolved your determinacy.”
I still don’t believe in an afterlife other than in the abstract sense that that the brief existence of me as a point of consciousness was impacted by all that came before it and will have had an impact on all that comes after. I would say more calmness and more acceptance are better descriptions than curiosity.
Like a lot of psychedelic experience, there’s an underlying neurological phenomenon and common subjective experience that gets differently interpreted based on your background beliefs. It’s like the DMT experience of entities is very differently interpreted as inter-dimensional elves by those DMT smokers who have read a lot of Terrance McKenna, as plant spirits by Amazonian ayahuasca drinkers, and as channeled spirits or Christian saints by Daimistas.
After my spiritual experience 2 years ago, my latent worry / conceptual fear of death was also replaced with curiosity. But I was coincidentally faced with death recently and was disappointed to see my primal terror is still alive and well.
At times I’ve become convinced that all of experienced reality is narrowing to a point and about to wink into nothingness, and myself along with it. It’s hard to explain, but it’s very convincing at the time. So as I experienced this sort of unraveling of the universe I have to confront the idea of my own non-being. Until I come out of it and realize it was all in my head :) Even my early, terrified experiences felt like therapy, like the pain was well spent, so to speak.
Sure, I was just curious. So essentially throughout the experience you felt as if things were sort of 'narrowing' and, inevitably, you would too. And with this repeating over and over again it forced you to confront and eventually move beyond a fear of death?
The point isn’t how similar (or not) the experiences in my mind are to actual death, it’s that at those times I’m convinced I am experiencing not just death, but total annihilation of my consciousness which is my personal best guess about what happens to us when we die. It’s not the moments leading up to death I’ve feared, it’s non-being and attachment to my own thoughts.
So then when I’ve experienced a series of “welp, here we go, I’m on my way to nothingness” and dealt with that terror in those moments, I’ve had the opportunity to accept that fate and even embrace the unknown.
And now that I’m not gripped by existential terror when I think of my own death, I find myself wondering if I’ll be surprised to find something else on the other side of it. And that’s way more fun :)
I’m in the process of identifying communication gaps in my org and possible tooling and process solutions. Stack Overflow for Teams is high on my list of tools to evaluate and it feels like a Slack integration would be important so your comment finally prompted me to look into it.
I too was homeschooled for most of my youth all the way through high school. At the time I welcomed it due to some pretty bad undiagnosed anxiety and ADD, but it in no way prepared me for life outside my nuclear family, nor did it provide me with much of an education that I didn’t explicitly give myself. My parents took me out of school for religious reasons primarily, with this vague notion they’d protect me and my sisters from secularism, while proving us a “better education.” As it turns out they were woefully under qualified to teach us anything past maybe grade 7, after which we were handed text books and encouraged to learn, instruction not included. Meanwhile I learned very little about social survival, or science, or life outside of the home. While I may have been protected from triggers to my anxiety, it actually got worse in ways because I was never challenged to grow, and it set me back in my social and emotional development many years. Subjects that the conservative Christian community considered risky (evolution anyone?) were either omitted or presented in such a corrupted way as to be worse than useless.
I love my parents, they tried their best, but there are very few scenarios in which I would encourage someone to homeschool their kids, if for no other reason than most parents aren’t trained teachers who actually know how to educate properly.
It’s a mistake because it is anti-user and diminishes their brand.
If they are struggling then then should work on quality, improve recommendation, and lower costs. Making a shittier product is only going to accelerate their death spiral.
I used to recommend Netflix to everyone, it was great. Now I recommend to no one. Soon, I’ll probably anti recommend.
An example of something that should be simple is to fix their recommendation engine. The nail that made me quit Netflix was they would recommend stuff I didn’t want to watch. And they would recommend whatever dumb new content they created. And I would find out about new shows on Netflix that seemed interesting to me through my feed on torrent tracker sites.
Netflix knows what I watch. They know what I upvote and downvote. They should be able to predict what I will like and show it to me in a list. They keep showing me stuff I don’t want over and over and that’s dumb and made me quit their service.
Jesus, then just don’t use their ads tier and you won’t ever have to see ads, or even evidence they exist. It’s not “anti-user”, it’s anti-prepend, apparently, and it ain’t all about you and your particular life circumstances. Some people can’t afford (or justify affording) Netflix but would enjoy watching Netflix content. This will allow them to.
And supporting ads and improving recommendations aren’t mutually exclusive, and to suggest the former will prevent the latter is a false dichotomy. How long have you thought that their recommendations have sucked? Months? Years? Always? And in all that time they didn’t improve things to your liking. How does building out an ads tier change that?
As a front end dev I am all-for vanilla JS. I hate maintaining a webpack, postcss, dependency hell. I still long for the simpler days of plugging javascript into a static page for some helpful dynamic utility.
Where I find vanilla JS struggles is (for example) rendering a big tree of data, and then needing to update some data dynamically within the tree without re-rendering the whole thing. You end up with some horrible queryselector hell, or keeping some immense table of pointers to the elements. Fortunately for us, we have some tiny libraries like lit-html that can help accomplish this. In the theme of grug I think the ideal solution is somewhere in between.
“Can do” doesn’t always (or even often) mean “can do well” or “can do well according to our needs” or “works for all our use cases” or “works for all our users” or…
If vanilla JS checks off all those boxes for you, that’s genuinely fantastic and I’m happy for you. And a lil envious tbh. But there are a myriad reasons I/we currently can’t justify ditching the build toolchain, and most of them relate to scaling in a way that fulfills our requirements. I can’t imagine I’m alone in that.
I wouldn't call that stability. You might. I have the luxury of never caring about problems like that. Most people can probably achieve it now that IE is officially super-dead or whatever.
FTA: "recently answered some questions via e-mail".
My guess is the interviewer just sent off a list of questions and Watterson answered the lot of them at his leisure. They just happened to all center around how desperately we all want more C&H.
Am I the only one who read it as funny satire? For some reason I don't read the author as being serious about his animosity towards IE6 users. It's just taking the typical "you're using an old browser and should upgrade" message several steps further for the sake of humor.
I've found your app addictive and useful (I'm prepping for the GRE), but it's a bit buggy in FF 3 on OSX and on my iphone.
1) animation on the word/choices occasionally flashes repeatedly, usually around 5 times in a row, but sometimes requires a page refresh to get it to stop
2) I've found that after a point some of the words are repeated more than 3 times and if I answer those words correctly for the 4th time I get a point reduced from my "words mastered" count
I think I subconsciously avoid new projects to learn something programming-related because of how often they end up unbounded in time due to one of the fundamental attributes of writing software: unknown unknowns. The kinds of sticking points in a project that could take you minutes to figure out, or days, or even weeks.
I have limited free time and I want only so much of it to be _more_ programming. (I’m a professional software engineer) If I can’t be certain I can timebox a new pet project with _some_ degree of successful outcome, I think I’m low key anxious enough to avoid starting it.
Does anyone else struggle with this? How do folks overcome it and work on new things without them taking over?