jeresig

There are a number of technologies that I'm interested in right now (machine learning, "NoSQL" databases, graph databases, computer vision analysis, Node.js, amongst others) so I will just casually read about these things as time goes by. When the time comes for a new project I'll try to use one of them (but usually only one, too many new technologies and you're spending too much time just learning APIs). This has helped me to continually pick up some new techniques. Not sure if this is a silver bullet but it's been working pretty well for me. I try not to stress too much about jumping on the latest tech - I'd much rather wait and have others try it out and let me know if it does/doesn't work!

Haha ehhh I think you're reading into this a bit too much. It is possible to love more than one thing - I love helping educate people and doing it at a scale that Khan Academy can provide. I also love building reusable JavaScript libraries. I also love building tools for Art Historians. They all shouldn't be to the exclusion of each other and, in fact, there's often overlap. Part of the fun in life is embracing that and trying to make the most of it!

Yeah, that's always the hardest part. Messing around on HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc. and/or watching TV - it's so easy to not even realize that you're procrastinating. I find that when I realize what I'm doing I can usually extract myself and get to work - the hard part is just getting to that point!

I think you might be conflating things a bit. The guilt about a lack of productivity already exists (daily work, or not). Doing daily work helps to mitigate it to a large degree. Naturally if I get sick I'll be comfortable enough to "let it slide". If anything I'll be eager to get back to work right when I can.

I do agree that breaking things into tiny tasks is the best way to go, it's helped me tremendously. More than anything else though it seems that passion is the largest "secret ingredient". If you're not passionate about the work it just won't happen, regardless of what happens in your life.

I'd agree with you if my primary desire were to improve my ability as a programmer. Unfortunately, at least at this time, it's not. My major concern is getting meaningful work done. I spend far too much time thinking and reading about technologies, techniques, and planning for the future - more time needs to be spent on actually implementing all the amazing stuff that you want to exist.

Perhaps surprisingly I feel like this process has allowed me to come to these conclusions even more quickly. If I spend five days in a row working on the same thing it's a giant red alarm in my mind. "Is this the most important thing I should be working on? Why did I just spend five days working on it? Should I move on to something else now?" I'd contrast this with before where if I only worked on it every weekend my ability to make those realization would be on the scale of a month, rather than a week - allowing me to adapt and respond much more easily.

I agree, definitely. I tried to emphasize how important it is to make this a lifestyle change (equivalent to dieting or exercise) rather than just a "check the box" tactic. I've absolutely broken streaks in the past (especially for dieting and exercise) - but I feel confident about this one because I care about it so much. I just can't let it fail!

Personally I like to do my side coding project in the evenings. I find that if I do it in the morning it's too "all consuming" (I'll end up working on it to the exclusion of my main work.) For me morning/early afternoon is my prime coding time so it feels right to devote those hours to my job. I concede that the weekday side project code won't be the most amazing ever, but it's something and it's moving me forward.

An important change that I made, compared with these techniques, is that I require myself to write meaningful code. It's certainly much harder to do that but as a result I find myself developing good time management skills. Knowing that I have to be mentally "present" for my work forces myself to schedule and plan my days better, resulting in higher quality work all around!

This release is absolutely phenomenal. As liuliu mentioned in the release notes most of the pre-existing implementations are either not-that-good, closed source, or their datasets are closed. This is, seemingly, the first good open source deep learning classifier out there! There is a whole cottage industry of commercial deep learning image classifier services springing up (like http://www.ersatzlabs.com/) but this will surely make this technology even more accessible. I can't wait to use it in some of my side projects!

That's correct. We already have an excellent implementation of what we're testing so there's no need to use what the interviewee made (this is simply an interviewing tool).

Sure we go! At least 3 people on our dev team are remote, myself included.

Agreed. (I hope that wasn't in response to the blog post, which was in strong agreement with you.)

You should probably read the blog post. "And to clarify, some people seem to be getting caught up in the terminology – I see many people using ‘Github’ as a placeholder for ‘any OSS activity’, I hope no one is being that literal."

Absolutely! Poking around I found one module that could do it - I'm sure there are more (and better ones, too): https://github.com/wellawaretech/node-zipstream

In the example there you would .pipe() out to an HTTP response rather than a file, presumably.

The original Learnable Programming article is a response to the work that we did in building the Khan Academy Computer Science platform - which is exactly that. An educational real-time environment for writing and manipulating code: https://www.khanacademy.org/cs

There was a discussion about this recently saying that it was highly unlikely. All the source was in Git and every git commit references the previous commit, making it highly challenging to modify an old commit without also modifying the commit id. More details: http://archive.is/Khq7R

Naturally - but there are extremes and it's still the very beginning. There are definitely people earning very little (arguably EVERYONE is earning very little - even the top people are receiving just over minimum wage in the U.S.). Up until now there hasn't been a tool to have this consistent weekly donation for Open Source contributors. But given the growth that we're seeing on Gittip I hope that we can get to the point where people are seriously considering quitting their jobs to work on Open Source full time. It's doubtful that this will affect me now -- but I would've killed to have had this back in like 2004-2006.

The old reality (people giving money to Open Source projects /developers sporadically) was bad. The new reality (consistently giving small amounts of money via Gittip) is better. The future (large amounts of money, equivalent to a paid job, in a consistent manner) will be even better. I'm pushing Gittip because I see it as the best way to bring that future about. It'll take a lot of work but it needs to happen - for the benefit of all Open Source developers.

I'm really happy that you've signed up!

Amusingly I'm in a very similar boat to you. I'm fairly certain that almost all the money that I'm receiving on Gittip is due to my work on jQuery - which I haven't actively worked in quite a few years.

One way in which Chad explained it to me, that resonated, was that Gittip can be better thought of as a "genius grant". People are giving you money not to support a specific thing (otherwise Gittip would be project-centric, not person-centric) but to support YOU and the things you want to do.

It's kind of crazy because I'm fairly certain that I'm getting donations because of my work on jQuery and not for my current side-project research into Japanese woodblock printing - but people don't seem to mind! (And I've made it clear on my profile what it is, exactly, that I'm working on right now and what I'm using the money for.)

I have a full-time job at Khan Academy and I'm well paid so I don't need the extra money - but it is appreciated. I'm re-donating a portion of the money that I get. Additionally it's paying for my extra server costs for my side projects and it's probably even paying for a good chunk of my monthly utility bill. I've been trying to think of other ways in which I can use the money that'll have a more obvious "money in -> using money -> output" pipeline but I'm not sure what that is, yet.

Let's hope you'll be able to keep your account open and find good uses for the money!

That's true - although that should be an incentive to write and release good Open Source code! Even if a single person gives you $0.25/week (the minimum amount) you'll get $13/year. We're attempting to give most developers at least $1/week - and I should emphasize that this is only from Khan Academy. Just because we're giving this amount it doesn't mean that these devs won't get money from other sources. I, personally, receive donations from a couple dozen users on Gittip with a wide variety of amounts (most being in the $0.25 range).

It's very defeatist to give up before even trying ("only" a cup of coffee). Why not aspire to more?

Depends on the developer, but in the case of jashkenas we're trying to give him $15.50/week, which is $806 per year - certainly nothing to sneeze at! That's almost a new Macbook Air! Or, if he's so inclined, a large yearly donation to the charity of his choice.

There is definitely a snowball effect though. Once I signed up for Gittip people started to give me tiny amounts (like $0.25/week). It built up-and-up over time and now I'm getting a non-trivial amount of money per week, which is awesome! It's helping to pay for all of my hosting costs and then some.

Huh - it does have an RSS feed though, it's just the one provided by Wordpress: http://blog.jquery.com/feed/

If you put http://blog.jquery.com/ into your feedreader it should be able to just automatically detect the feed (it's embedded in the page using a <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" .../>).

Agreed. I chatted with Chad Whitacre (the creator of Gittip) recently and was impressed with how "all-in" he is on this. He's receiving 100% of his funding through Gittip, taking in no outside contributions and even doing no outside consulting work. He should certainly be lauded for this, few have the commitment to execute. I assume at some point either Gittip will be bringing in enough money to allow him to do this forever or he'll have to bail/get a side job. Not sure how long that'll take but I really hope he succeeds!

I've been watching Gittip and have been very impressed with how they're attempting to run an open company:

http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-compa...

It's fun to read through their bug tracker and read discussions with their payment processor and look at debates on how different corporate minutia should be handled.

https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues

Even if you're not interested in Gittip (and I am, I think it's a very interesting funding model) the open company model that they follow should be quite inspirational.

I've gotten this reward from Google devs twice now. First time it was tricky to find some things on the Google store: But I managed to get myself a nice medium-weight Google jacket and a Google cutting board (!). The second time was even trickier, I already had everything I wanted. I ended up getting my girlfriend a Google jacket as well - thankfully she liked it! Amusingly we get asked all the time if we work at Google, because of the jackets, which is not true. I considered lying to the strangers that asked but reconsidered and went with "I have a friend that works there and he got me the jacket." I've even had one lady on the subway start asking me questions about the Google search engine, unprompted. Tech-branded outerwear definitely results in some weird conversations.

I should mention, weird Google loot not withstanding, that I think this program is awesome. Giving Google devs an outlet for giving something back to the Open Source devs that they like is really appreciated. Obviously financial contributions are even better but that can be logistically tricky and this seems like an easy middle-ground.

I don't work on jQuery any more but I (and I know many others on the jQuery team) all build web sites as part of their day jobs (and, thus, need to continuing supporting IE 8). It's going to be a very long time before support for the 1.x branch is dropped. But hopefully soon, death of IE 8 willing.

Very cool, sounds interesting! I'll touch base!

I absolutely agree - for those that are in the realm it's a great time to be involved. I'd also argue that the intersection of art + tech is still, very much, a hyper-niche in the larger tech world (which is largely what this article is portraying, for better or worse). It's unfortunate that so much of "art" is conflated with "high-net-worth individuals being told what art to buy from dealers" which is a minute aspect of the art world to focus on.

Thank you! I agree that art + tech can serve as good complements to each other. They definitely exercise both sides of your brain, which I appreciate!

I don't really get the impression that it has any impact in the contemporary art world, although I would love to be proven wrong.

The closest thing I can think of was the recent Tumblr Art Symposium: http://hyperallergic.com/tumblrart/