73,784 karma · joined February 21, 2007
Personally, I'm partial to path which can do almost anything and tends to be less verbose than other methods.
Long time student, but I see that I still have lots to learn.
I suck so much at drawing and dislike images so much that for ease and performance, I built my entire side project with svg.
After today, it looks like I have quite a bit of refactoring to do. Thank you, OP!
I don't pay attention to what anyone says about the economy, the market, or anything else macro, especially on the internet. And I have gone through times that were much much worse than now.
I never worried about losing any job because I was certain I could find another. The longest I've ever been out of work was for a few weeks.
A few tips:
- Have x months expenses in the bank. Take the pressure off.
- Have multiple resumes ready to go, programmer, analyst, sys admin, manager, even data entry.
- Stay in touch with your network. Not to get a job. Just to stay in touch.
- Keep your skills fresh. Always have a side project.
- Remember we're not in energy, education, or manufacturing. Their cycles are killers. Our in tech are not. Everyone else depends on us.
- Fuck anxiety. We build stuff out of nothing. We're stronger than bad news.My next phase is to put the PICK-generated svg into codepen and provide links to show how to draw the art with code.
If you have concerns about doing that, you can just download it from my website at
http://eddiots.com/UVTE_WINDOWS_11.4.1.zip (You may have to cut and paste this link into a new tab. HN doesn't seem to like this.)
If you have any problems or need the UNIX version, just reply here or contact me. email on my profile. Let me know how it goes.
I HAVE to code in PICK.
"Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it." - Charles Burkowski
(Funny, they named the current support company "Rocket".)
Here's the link to the current Universe trial version (free and good until 04/2025. Get it, install it, and make something with it. Please don't let that part of you die.
https://www.rocketsoftware.com/products/rocket-multivalue-ap...
This has accounted for about 90% of everything I've built since 1985.
Pick code generates my side project: https://eddiots.com/1
November 30, 2023
1. Don’t exercise to be strong. Exercise to be healthy.
2. The best place for ideas is where ever works best for you.
3. What she said. And carry and pencil and pocket-sized notebook everywhere. People say I have a great memory. It's a hack, not a gift.
4. In relationships, the most important thing is love. If you have it, no problem is too big. Without it, who cares?
5. If sex ever becomes hard work, become a hooker. You might as well get paid.
6. Consider a pet before having anything else.
7. At any age, if you take care of yourself, you will not experience irrational weight gain. Nothing happens out of nowhere for no reason at all. There are no rewards or punishments, only consequences.
8. Sometimes in life, the best thing to do, is to <insert whatever works for you>.
9. In a long term relationship, be either "all in" or not. If you're "all in", be "all in".
10. Learn the difference between issues and details. Issues matter. Details don't.
11. Allow aquaintances to come and go. True friendships are so rare and precious, never lose them. (I learned that the hard way too many times.)
12. Give every "no show" one opportunity to apologize. After that, ghost them. No matter what happens, it will be for the best.
13. Never allow anyone to "make you feel" anything. You must always decide how to feel yourself.
14. If you're too stupid to use a condom, you get what you deserve. Unfortunately sometimes your child gets what you deserve too.
15. The more you know, the lower the percentage of everything there is to know will be known by you.
16. Don't pick the phone up in the first place. (There, you just eliminated the need for 4,528 "put your phone down" rules.
17. See #14, #15, and #16.
18. See #16. See how easy.
19. Apply #16 to social media. Except Hacker News.
20. If you're older than the author of a listicle, you have automatic permission to build upon it with your own listicle.
OP, thanks for the nice list, and the opportunity to play along with good clean fun. :-)
I got so tired of hating Scrum with passion, that I pulled a 179 and wrote a comic book about it.
In your honor for your courage and honesty, adrianmsmith, it's free, today only. All enjoy!
This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics.
It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs.
Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day.
So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore.
I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore.
I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.
Yes. I see it more and more these days, especially among recruiters and HR departments.
I believe there's an inverse correlation between the value one places on green squares and their understanding of what it actually takes to build software...
If you inspired others as well as you insprire me, you would change the world.
Oh wait. You already are. And you already are.
I sort of anticipated this. I wrote the comic below just for times like this. Please stay in touch and let me know if any of this grows on you. I sure hope it does. That's what helped me get through it all.
I added a "Show SVG Markup" button toward the bottom of every page so you can see how I did it. This may be a little less overwhelming for some people that View Page Source.
It's Sunday. I should be drinking beer and watching sports but I'm married to my fantasy project so these things happen.
I didn't think rss was important any more. Thanks for setting me straight.
And thanks again for the kind words. Please drop me an email (on my hn profile or in the footer of every eddiots webpage. I want to stay in touch with any hn friend who uses the word "fantastic". :-)
Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)
You didn't miss anything.
I just added this: http://eddiots.com/rss.xml
Is this sufficient or would it be better if I added anything else?
I just added this: http://eddiots.com/rss.xml
Is this sufficient or would it be better if I added anything else?
I've been programming my entire adult life (and then some). I worked at many enterprises and SMBs. As the character who I live vicariously says on https://eddiots.com/1, "I love programming but I hate going to work." I'll never stop programming but the people at work have worn me out.
I've been posting here for 16 years as well as several other sites. I've always had something to say but have found it increasingly harder to say what I'm thinking without sounding like I'm preaching. Thus the comics. Might as well get it off my chest in a way we can all have a little fun. If I wasn't able to laugh all these years, I probably would have gone back to work at McDonalds.
It's all software driven with only html, css, and svg. (I'll have the markup on every page next week.) No images or media queries. I kept it simple and post something new every weekday. It's just something I have to do. (And way better than all those CRUD apps and standups.)
Thanks to all of you for your kind (and other) words. My jokes are like the weather. If you don't like one, just click for another. Maybe that one will connect.
Reminds me of the president of a software house that wrote inventory software for large commercial warehouses. One of his customers required "Box ID", an essential capability that not only tells you how many we own, but exactly which boxes they are in. Everyone has it today.
These people attempted to satisfy this customer, but after a year and nothing to ship (it's not that hard!), they backed out and cried, "We'll never do Box ID again!"
I wonder what that guy is doing today.
And I wonder what OP will be doing tomorrow.
I prefer to share my experience here:
You mean like how I.T. management treats programmers over 50?