1,436 karma · joined January 17, 2016
Giving capital to people who are not financially literate will likely end up with that capital quickly moving out of their hands to people who are financially literate.
I know fairly smart people who understand calculus but just cannot accept that there is a problem with paying interest on all of their purchases.
They simply do not understand that eliminating high interest debt as soon as possible (or never acquiring it in the first place) is essential to ever having financial security.
Honestly it sometimes feels like the normalizing of financial illiteracy is intentional, although I'm willing to accept that the lenders of high interest debt are just taking advantage of the situation they've found.
i think if i try to push them to learn programming, they will lose interest because i will be turning their 'fun' into 'work'. it is better for them to go at their own pace where their interests take them. if they ask for my help (they both know i could teach them programming), i'd be delighted to help them.
and minecraft is really fantastic. from the base game, to advance features like command blocks, to the ecosystem of plug ins and online multiplayer adaptations. really an impressive creation.
It turns out a lot of what they were doing while "playing video games" was learning how to make really complex and unique game scenarios using minecraft command blocks and redstone -- essentially creating both a RPG PvP arena and a multilevel party dungeon crawl w boss fights.
I run a small minecraft server for them to play and experiment on and I've resisted the urge to try to teach them anything about setting up and running servers, backing up data, or using text editors with syntax highlighting or source control to edit and preserve their command block commands.
I just show up for demos and let them know how cool what they're doing is and backup and reboot the server as needed.
I've messed up plenty as a parent but i think not trying to turn their interest in programming within minecraft into a learning experience has been one of my better decisions.
1. good logging is the most important part of the app. whatever the app is meant to do is secondary. the app should be a logging app first, and then a backend service to sell widgets second.
2. assume performance requirements for request latency and transactions per second will be at least 3x whatever the product owner tells you at the start of the project and plan accordingly. never trust any suggestion that you can 'ignore performance for now'.
3. the UI may be more important than logging
someone then removed all of my logging because it was ugly.
and then had to put it all back in when another bug was coming from the same terse beautiful code.
Well put.
This feels like some bizarre end game of "information wants to be free" where instead of railing against content owners expecting to be paid for content people are railing against the idea that content creators can have any control over their creations whatsoever.
That doesn't make them a hobbyist. It makes them bad at their job.
If you equate people who are bad at their jobs with hobbyists, it implies that hobbyists are bad at what they do which is simply untrue. Many hobbyists are very very good at what they do and they are usually free from the constraints that come with a job (e.g., doing what your manager thinks is important rather than what you think is important).
i'm ok with pushing the importance of accessibility for "websites intended for the general public", but there are a very large number of web projects out there with a very targeted audience that simply do not have the same accessibility needs as a large retail or informational or government website. Internal webapps for known users are what a lot of us are working on, and accessibility is often not much of a concern.
If you regularly get paid to do something, it is your job.
Maybe you are good at your job. Maybe you are not. Maybe some people think you are and others think you aren't.
If you do something without getting paid to do it, it is likely a hobby.
Maybe you are good at your hobby. Maybe you are not. Maybe some people think you are and others think you aren't.
I get paid to create, update, and maintain software. That is my job. If I'm doing my job poorly, that does not make me a "hobbyist". It makes me someone who does his job poorly.
One of my hobbies is playing guitar. And no matter how good I get at playing, until the day someone pays me to play the guitar, I'm still a hobbyist.
There are many hobbyist guitarists whose musical skill level is equal to or greater than the skill level of professional guitarists. And while you may sometimes hear a talented hobbyist guitarist lament that some untalented guitarist became wealthy playing simple songs, it would never make sense to anyone to claim that the 3 chord playing rock star could or should be denigrated by labeling him a "hobbyist".
Update Text For Button -- started 5/10, completed 5/11
Update Color Of Button -- started 5/11, completed 5/12
Update Margins Of Button -- started 5/12, completed 5/13
Update Border Radius Of Button -- started 5/13i assume any linter for this code will one day become sentient.
I run a small server and have a few odds and ends and get emails at $5, $15, $50, $75, and $100. Haven't broken $75 limit yet...
I feel like a lot of people who tried their best to comply w safety guidelines during the worst of the pandemic are having trouble getting back to more normal life even if they've been vaccinated, so hopefully this will help.
So, ask:
Did everyone in the meeting contribute or learn something they couldn't learn by reading?
If the answer is 'no', there were too many people in the meeting or it should not have happened at all.
I've been in so many hour long meetings with 6-8 developers plus project manager, supervisor, and maybe one related person and at least 6 of the devs say nothing. That's 6 hours of dev time lit on fire each time.
The best meetings tend to be ones where stakeholders can share information and come to a decision that pushes a project forward or where there is valuable training or a useful presentation.
Also, if your meeting ever includes the phrase "well, we've got 20 minutes left so let's take some time to discuss <this thing unrelated to the meeting>", it was a terrible horrible no good bad meeting.
an immutable config object/class created on startup that reads files/env vars/whatever and has appropriate assertions to ensure good values were used and crashes the app for missing/bad values usually keeps things sane.
an app where each subcomponent has its own config that it gets in its own way usually leads to confusion and delay
An expert is someone whose statements are valued because they are trusted to offer valuable insight and expertise.
A liar is someone whose statements have no value because they cannot be trusted.
A person with expertise (useful domain knowledge) cannot be considered an expert if they are not trusted.
Their expertise can still be acknowledged, but once they have lied, their statements cannot be trusted and the listener has to be concerned about the motivation behind the statement rather than reassured by the expertise of the person making the statement.
It does not matter how brilliant a car mechanic is if my first thought after him telling me "your car needs new brakes" is "does my car really need new brakes or does my mechanic have a boat payment he needs to make this week?"
I can understand why this is confusing to people.
I'm trying to picture the car that is worth only 5 * monthly-lease-price when it is 3 years old, and the only way that makes sense is if the car is expected to require very significant maintenance costs beginning after year 3.
Monthly leases are usually a small percent of a car's new value (e.g., 3% over 36 months would exceed the cost of buying it new even ignoring lease downpayments, fees, etc).
Over 36 months the car should depreciate and the lease costs as percent of current value will naturally rise, but this scenario presumes monthly lease price reaches 20% of the car's value which is absurd.
"Passionate" has nothing to do with taking satisfaction in performing an interesting job well and being fairly compensated for your efforts and having some appreciation for the opportunities you are given.
It has everything to do with feeling such strong emotions about something that you make decisions guided by emotion rather than logic.
Although I suspect the never ending abuse of the word will eventually change the meaning to actually mean "moderately enthusiastic about and interested in".
Sort of like how in English "awesome" has been degraded from "that inspires both fear and wonder that I do not normally experience" to "that pleases me somewhat".
Nothing like tracking a bug to 1 line and finding out the line does 12 different things.
Persistence in the face of frustrations along with an actual enjoyment of creating things with code is what got me through.
Programming seems like it would be a dreadful job for someone who didn't get some satisfaction out of typing code and then watching as your code does stuff. Definitely not for everyone.
In my case, I didn't start out wanting to learn programming. I wanted to create a web site for a business idea I had. To do that, I started learning javascript and python. Pretty soon I realized that I was much more interested in learning more about programming and web development than I was about my business idea and that I'd rather get paid by someone else with a business idea to write some code.