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Comment by shanemhansen | Hacker News Reader

As always there's a relevant xkcd. https://xkcd.com/519/

Too true. When I was 13 or so, I read the DOS 5.0 manual from cover to cover. If I recall, a lot of it was about batch files (autoexec.bat and stuff). Batch was really my first "programming" experience.

Then when I was 22, after a good computer science education, my first job was working at EA, and the build system involved a bunch of batch files. That knowledge from nearly a decade before came in handy! The CS stuff didn't come up until later.

I studied English lol. My whole career is based on my weekends. My education helps me write eloquent email responses, though.

Eloquent email responsed are not to be underestimated, being able to communicate in clear language is a valuable skill.

I find that clear notetaking is amazing in guiding discussions. Being the one who sends out the meeting summary with next actions and clarifying remarks or being able to refer back to meeting notes gives me an amazing power in making decisions or resolving disputes. Just because I'm the one who's writing stuff down, I'm somehow given the authority to say "this is what we decided at the meeting".

Absolutely! Can I ask if you are taking these nodes the old fashioned way with pen and paper or are you using a program to do this?

I myself have found out that during meetings I prefer to use a pen and paper but it is mostly just notes that I take for myself.

Touch-typing was probably the best thing that elementary school taught me :)

I am not who you were asking, but I exclusively use pen and paper during meetings. I try to keep my laptop closed and transcribe action items to a personal trello board after the meeting is done.

The trello part is more recent, but I have notebooks going back to my first internship in 2012(which I know isn't that long for most here). It's pretty interesting to see old notes I took and the problems I had at the time.

It varies. I'm often tinkering, which is a problem, I know. I've used a notebook, a Surface pen and One Note, a text file, scribbles on the agenda for the meeting (if there was one). It depends if it's a teleconference or not, whether my laptop battery is charged, if I can find a nice pencil, etc. etc. as well.

The summaries always go out as emails, of course, and if I paper note-take, I try to take a picture and upload it to onenote or sharepoint.

We use a record feature in Zoom for our teleconferences that we want to save, but notes are always better because you can review conclusions without the noise of skipping through discussions. It'd be amazing if there was an application that recorded meetings then summarized them.

I've found that the more attention I pay to my notes, the better I recall the topic at hand even without referring to the notes I've taken.

As a result I exclusively use pen-and-paper for meetings. I also started using fountain pens about two years ago and the discipline required to write well, especially with vintage flexible nib pens, helps keep me focused on note-taking.

I'm not a native English speaker. I could throw in that the best thing regarding learning I did (in addition to buying a home computer) was to get J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (which came with the adventure game) which in turn led me to read LOTR and then other books in English, and generally become much more fluent.

Later on, wasting time reading NNTP news at the uni was also actually a good investment for learning the language in a way that is useful at work.

For my kids, the games have again been the same thing, along with Harry Potter books.

That's interesting. Whenever my dad wants to become more comfortable with a new language, he reads the translated editions of Harry Potter, too! He's read "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" in Dutch, French, Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish, lol.

The mouse over text is even truer.

And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined

Wow, that is pretty weird. That was true for me in college. I was at home after graduating in January 2002, at the bottom of the dot com bust. It was hard to find a job then.

I took this world music course in college, and I remember I talked to this guy who was also a computer science major, and he told me he was going to EA. Probably 6 months later, I e-mailed him out of the blue, and that got me the internship which led to my first job.

So instead of all the computer science stuff, I should have just relied on connections from the world music course and on my DOS batch file knowledge from age 13 :)

Very true with perl, although for me it came a bit too late: Larry Wall published first version of Perl at the time of that course, so it obviously wasn't in the content, and I did the stuff with sh, sed and awk, and perl has unfortunately always been a bit of an afterthought for me (I have to look at a manual in some simple things where with awk I don't).

Seriously! I learned so much about scripting and networks in my high school programming classes because a group of us just wanted to play Quake 3 and CS 1.6 instead of doing assignments, and we needed to get around whatever software they had in place to monitor whether you were slacking off.

I'd add Typewriting. Not having to look at the keybaord (including my DAS Keybaord with no key markings) has made life sooooo much easier.

QBasic was nice, but no-where near as all-encompassing as touch-typing.

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