a-saleh

When I was in college, I did enjoy my 17in, 3kg (6.6 pounds) notebook a lot. Was considering buying additional kilo in batteries :-)

I was in lecture-halls all the time, so there usually was power, and having the extra screen real estate was nice.

Damn! It is beautiful. If I were to become a manager, where my greatest contribution will be sending the best damn meeting-minutes I can, I am buying this.

But I already have Onyx Boox for my note-scribbling-on-e-ink needs, and if push comes to shove, I can run termux from there :D

I have been on L2 and L3 on-call duty in my previous company, and some of the times these dashboards were life-savers.

Is the queue growing? Certain node not processing all it should? e.t.c

Alerts actually did go out of prometheus.

Hindsight is 20/20 and I remember i.e. having to change alerting on median aggregate node memory spiking to alert on any of the nodes spiking. Seems obvious in retrospect, but if we only have alert, I don't really know.

And there were parts where the dashboard wasn't obvious in retrospect, in the more complicated parts of our data-pipeline,ad there Graphana really shines.

I would look at several things

1. junior positions available (you already did that)

2. local community/meetups available (bonus points if you have friends that could tutor you)

3. other paths to tech companies (i.e. have seen people starting as manual testers/doc-writers/L1 support, transfering later down the line to more technical positions, but not every org supports it)

Despite the bad rap it has gotten in its early days, PHP is fine and if you can learn it, you will be fine. Laravel and Symphone frameworks are used to-date and there still is a vibrant cottage-industry around wordpress-plugins.

Similarily, I know people that only know C# or only know Java and they get by just fine.

On the other hand, once you learn your third language and maybe expand to some more niche languages (i.e. I remember when I finally learned SQL, or dabbled in Clojure for a work project) you will realize it is not about the language.

I am not an expert at any of the languages (and somebody payed me to produce code in at least 8 of them) but I can manage and the pay is good :)

Not saying you should be jack-of-all trades, master of none, but if you are anxious about choosing your first language, I don't think it is as big of a deal in retrospect, as it might seem to you ;)

W.r.t. grand-fathering, I have seen approach, where the free users can keep their account free forever, but they don't get any of the new features, but with a path to upgrade if they choose.

Yep. That is why we mostly end up in the music section :) You don't really need to rebuild i.e. the guitar for it to be a prime noise-maker :D

I'd go against mindstorms, that is way to advanced for a 4yo. If you want to go lego, Boost or WeDo is better :-)

I especially went with Boost because I remember debugging minstorms at school and I really didn't want to interupt our play-time with a debugging session :D

I did buy my kid Lego Boost.

I chose this, because I like robots as well, we already have Lego, she loved playing with duplo and with help could manage to build a smaller 5+ lego set.

It is not cheap, but you can build several things out of it (I remember a Jhonny 5 style robot, a buldozer/tank(?), a guitar and animatronic cat.

The programming interface is simmilar to Scratch Jr, and she can manage it fairly well (mostly playing with the sampler set included with some of the builds, i.e. when robot-cat is supposed to sing :-)

The builds itself are fairly complicated so you'd be doing most of those.

Snap Circuits Jr. look more 5+? My cousin has that, and likes it, but he is well into school.

I found backgamon to be fairly complicated and never really got my kid to play anything abstract, closest I got was with Hive, but that quickly devolved into stacking cute little bugs on hexagons into stacks (not that I am complaining)

It either needs to be fast, reflex games like Hali Gali, Dobble, e.t.c. work well, or with interesting enough theme, i.e. she actually likes to attempt to build a giant sprawl in Carcasone :D

But I will definitely check out robot turtles :)

There are degrees. I remember a friend that had a degree of intolerance, and definitely wouldn't accept a bun, but wouldn't have to care about reusing a frying-pan.

So, if you need to check for every 'might contain traces of wheat flour', that can be tough.

On the other hand, I live in czech republic and while I am lucky enough not to have celiac disease, I see enough friends managing it as annoying, but not terrible.

You can get gluten-free bread in speciality stores (and if you get on a pre-order list, you can even get freshly baked once a week), you even can get gluten-free pizza, if you ask around (well, your mileage may vary, if even traces of gluten are a problem, at some places they still had just a single oven)

Due to EU regulations, you should be able to see in restaurants if a thing contains gluten. Colleague that had celliac disease and went with us for a lunch always doublechecked, often just ate a salad, and preferred a vietnamese place, because their dishes (and noodles?/pasta?) is rice based :)

Even more interesting is, that the research I shared claims 'just type-out a transcript and don't try to summarize/structure your notes' is better than 'by hand, and summarize' ... but both agree writing by hand forces you to have more structure and summaries in your notes :-)

Most of my meetings are throug video, so having half-screen the video-feed and other half some sort of note-pad is fairly useful :)

a) figure out how to make the "messy and dangerous" doable.

b) I had some success by playing boardgames (even Carcasone) at this age, with some rules-simplifications

c) sometimes we played games on my phone, Monument Valley, I love Hue, Chuchel ...

d) Buying and launching a model rocket was a success, if he'd enjoy watching from the distance and then trying to find the rocket again :-)

e) in simmilar fashion, building a kite (or buying ... tbh I usually do both, because building is fun, but the store-bought actually works :P ) ... but you need good wind-conditions to fly it

f) museums are surprisingly good these days, especially modern technical museums can often entertain both 3yo and 30+yo

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/488e/c93cf68806bd8ac63fc7d0... ... interesting research that suggests that trying to type-out a transcript with a keyboard might be more effective.

I remember my mind being blown when in Discrete Math 101 we learned that natural numbers are isomorphic with whole numbers. Was it, you map 0 to 0, even n to n/2, odd n to -(n+1/2) and all of us were like whoa and the TA is like "wait till I tell you about diffrent cardinalities" :D

Noted :) I hope prof was more tongue-in-cheek 'hating the game, not the players', but I can't be certain after 10 years :P

This reminded me of our Analysis prof. "I really hate Iternational Mathematical Olympiad. The problems there give you the false impression that math-theorems have elegant solutions. No. You are usually banging your head against the problem, and when nobody is looking you use dynamite!" - especially the "lost in a jungle" part of the quote :)

I think we try Scratch once she learns to read :-)

Nice! I was wondering if would try something like this, but in the end, I takes me too long to create something entertaining even with a nice game-engine such as Unity.

So far I opted to play with Scratch Junior, as that

a) runs on my tablet

b) is simple enough for my kid to do most of the scene-building/programming herself :)

c) the block-language is simmilar to the one used with Lego Boost that we have as well :)

On the other hand, it is kinda limited, and we are only able to do simple point and clicks, so I might try Godot now, and see what can we make of it :)

This was one of the reason, I started looking at APL, to be able to write code better on paper.

And a reason why I like applicative programming in haskell with all of its squiggly <$> and <*>.

Another interesting idea might be to look at TLA+, because it reminds me of the way I used to scribble out basic ideas for physics simulations, i.e distance with accelerating velocity:

s' = s + v /\ v' = v + dv

I am considering organizing book-club to go through google's SRE book and workbook.

Our manager is running one right now, but he usually proposes books about team-work, e.t.c.

Just finished 'Turning ship around', next on the list is probably 'The phoenix project'

Do you have a community, where you'd learn together?

I wonder if it weren't more efective to i.e. buy books and organize book-club with your colleagues.

I bought Onyx Boox, that runs Android 6, and that means I can read pdf, login to Kindle, Play Books, e.t.c.

For pdf's I usually just use SyncThing (but I don't have bookmarks there), for the rest I use the various apps. I am considering trying out Mendeley again, that is geared more towards researchers, but works cross-platform :-)

It was possible to setup Light Table to work like this. The project is unfortunately dead.

Wow that is a giant difference, especially in cognitive capacity. I.e. by 11 you should be able to understand more or less anything (i.e. including abstraction, recursion, e.t.c) ... but a 5 yo might just be comprehending the number-symbol/object-count correspondence.

you could try to approach with a single theme? I.e. I heard from talk by Felienne Hermans, that her code club used alot of sprites/images from the Donald Duck comics, as everybody was reading that, and then you could scale by ability?

I.e. younger kids could do just animations, older kids interactions?

Alternative could be, sometimes things don't form a system, because 'system' could imply more order and predictability than there really is.

Sometimes stuff just happen, and if you try to look for the system behind, you would see patterns that are not really there.

I would say this is what leads to magical thinking, right?

And I even like magical thinking, all those little nudges where I take a wrong turn, but then meet an interesting person and thing to myself "turns out I was supposed to be here", despite the my second thoughts being buzzkill about "that is not how world works!"

Tldr: for your first Python web-app, you will be fine. Focus on learning programming, and there are easier ways to learn Linux than installing it.

If you go for i.e. game-dev, with Unity or other game-engine with windows IDE, you will have it easier on Windows.

Certain ecosystems, like .Net with the full Visual Studio are more suited to windows development.

Certain ecostystems are very cross-platform (i.e. Java ecosystem, including the other JVM languages like Scala, Kotlin, including Android-dev here, client-side web-dev) and you don't need to care as much.

Client side in general, you will be fine.

Server-side, with cross-platform, you will be mostly fine, but you will start running into issues where not everything will work as well on windows (i.e. once I used smaller python library, and the creator never tried to run it on Win, and it worked only on linux) ... but for large projects (web-servers, database-lbiraries) you should be fine.

Windows now has some support for running linux shell with "windows linux subsystem", or you could install virtualization software (I usually opted for virtual-box) and try out various distributions there)

Once you want to run the thing somewhere public on the internet, it will in the end probably run on linux one way or other, but there are services like Heroku that simplify that to a level of "do you have a git-repo public somewhere? we will take care of the rest", and often have free-tier for people trying stuff out.

In hte end, knowing linux is very useful. But it is not necessary to start.

Art of the propagator

It is like a discovering a new programming paradigm. Something new and different, not a Lisp, not a Datalog, weirdly distributed, with interesting properties, but powerful. There are adjacent things, BLOOM project and Eve language seems to have discovered something simmilar, and Edward Kmett working on his new language is using propagators quite heavily.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/755c/48fd10aa303497ef849977...

Sci-fy to go with it: probably Ted Chiangs Stories of your Life (or its movie adaptation Arrival)

Out of the tarpit

I thing this is a paper that might have lead to Clojure, React, Elm, e.t.c ... but not really, a weird parallel reality where we really like reactive relational databases.

http://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf

With some risk of 'no-true-scotsman', more I look at soviet/cold-war era, more it seems like Russia was exporting weird meld of cult-of-personality, imperialism and fascism?

To me, if reading about Gulag destroys left-wing for you, is like if realizing world was not created in 6 days destroyed your faith. Like what was your belief in the first place? But I had simmilar moments as well :)

I did hear that SSSR does still have fans in some western countries, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn has really good antidodes against that, I myself am a fan of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"