bcater

It's like magic, but real.

You're right; I don't want to write scripts to rename a bunch of files in asm. Still, programming isn't easy, as evidenced by how few people there are to look up to in the field relative to the number of participants, many of them themselves somewhat proficient.

Our modern languages let us do things that used to be hard in just a few lines, but that just means that we imagine more ambitious projects - so ambitious, in fact, that we coin all sorts of terms like "Test-Driven Development," which is itself nothing more than a moniker for "We know that we're not going to get this right the first time, and even if we get it right later, we should frequently verify that something else doesn't break it." Yes - programming is so easy that changes far away still break things, and despite a lot of theories on modularity and the like, we still don't know how to do it in practice.

We all want to figure out how to write better software, but despite all of our languages and methods and collective experiences, we're still not very good at it. That last clause well describes something hard, not something easy.

But maybe it's the stress that has so positively impacted my health. Yes, you read that correctly: stress has made me healthier. Work can be frustrating, leaving me feeling like a caged wild animal, ready to run 100 miles, wanting nothing more than to get away and to get away fast!

To be fair, it takes me a full week to run that far, but I'm still at a start-up, so I'm sure it will go by faster in the future. In the meantime, I probably won't be getting too fat. You don't have to, either.

As a point of information, it's unusual to think of anaerobic respiration as an emergency source of energy; you tend to think of emergency situations as necessarily involving adrenaline, which increases heart rate, dilates blood vessels, etc. The biggest energy source of the 100m and 200m sprints is phosphocreatine, a very useful fuel for anaerobic metabolism; unfortunately for sprinters, it can be depleted in under ten seconds of top physical effort. (Incidentally, A.V. Hill received the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology for figuring out the proportions of aerobic and anaerobic metabolism that contribute to energy production in the various distances of Olympic footraces.)

This, of course, is all to say that sometimes lies aren't really malicious - as he says - but that it's simply easier to say simple things than complex things. Since it was tangential to the discussion anyway, it's no big deal.

And if you disagree (as many experts do, even amongst each other) about the role of phosphocreatine, I'll be perfectly content with you calling me a liar :)

It's from a coach from long ago, but it has served me well many times outside of running.

I heard that Justin from Justin.tv sold his first startup on eBay, but that could be entirely fictional. You might want to e-mail him to find out.

Your brain is no different in its need for rest than your body. I've discovered that I need a break at about 3pm every afternoon, so I find a quiet place to lay down, close my eyes, and think about precisely nothing. After ten or fifteen minutes, I am ready to go back to thinking very hard. I've had co-workers who choose to sit at their desks all day looking very diligent rather than rest when they need it, and they are far less productive. (Of course, there are a few out there who don't seem to need to ever rest, and they're much more productive than I.)

You're not being paid to log hours; you're being paid to accomplish something. If you meet or exceed your employers' requirements for you, then they are getting their money's worth.

Over the summer I worked for a company of a few hundred people that didn't use project management software (except when contracted externally) because if you needed something, you just went to the appropriate person and told them. It got things done fast.

Take Netflix as an example. I haven't the foggiest idea how they seem to always know what movies I want to rent (though I have my hunches, since I'm a nerd), but that doesn't matter to me because they always seem to suggest great movies.