minute_forest

Just go for it and let the compiler tell you where you're wrong and guide you to something that compiles. If you can already program you'll pick up the other concepts in no time.

For example instead of taking a high level language view of a var containing a piece of data, you'll begin to visualize a variable points to a place in memory with data associated to it, and can work from there whether you want to move, borrow, or drop it. Lifetimes lets the compiler know how long should that point in memory last within the program before being dropped. But most of the time you don't have to worry about it thanks to lifetime elision.

"The Book" is the best place to start, then there's Rust by Example that shows code snippets. The Reference goes into the why. Rust for Rustaceans helped me understand how to put projects together, but if you like reading source code of different crates you'll see a pattern that they follow. Blessed.rs is a website for the most popular go-to crates in the ecosystem. Reading the std lib is also good to see what already exists instead of reinventing the wheel.

I came from an Elixir background so things like immutability and pattern matching already made sense. What great about rust IMO is the type system, programming with structs and traits, and knowing that if it compiles it should for the most part work if there's no logic bugs.

I would say that i have a good sense of time. IE guess the current time +-15 minutes at my worst guess. +-5 minutes if I'm processing it harder. If i had to distill my intuition into words it would be to be aware of the rhythm and rate of change that you are generally aware of.

Also as primitive and out there this might sound but look at the sun, take a mental note of where it's at in the sky, how your surroundings are lit by it, face north or south, look at your shadow, and look at a clock as a marker. Now looking at the clock might sound like a cheat but it's to build a mental relationship with where the sun is in the sky along with a unit of measure that's not jabbing a stick in the ground. (that's what looking at your shadow is for)

Probably took me a good amount of years to be good at guessing the time with on and off practice. Also by making it a game when someone asks you for the time, to just guess and then look at your phone to see how close you were. With daily practice you'll pick it up right away.

edit:

To add to more to this. Maybe playing with your perceptions in order to dilate your sense of time might be a route to explore.

The very first question is why do you want to meditate in the first place?

If... "I want to quite my mind." Good luck with that! Trying to quite the mind just makes it louder. Or even worse, throwing trash in the closet until it piles up and you're living a lie and going crazy. Our minds, considering that you are a human too, is not meant to be quite. It's more like a tool that evolved to sense and experience abstractions. Have a bunch of stuff in your mind? Too much to handle? Sit down, do nothing, feel everything and cry it out. Why? From my finite observation, sitting down, doing nothing, feeling everything and crying it out, is to allow you to slowly and gently follow the threads of thoughts, memories, and emotions, to find the mental kinks within yourself and be able to come to terms and integrate it into your being. Sometimes it's joyful, other times you will enter to dark places that will give you the temptation of getting up and doing something about it. Don't. We know what it feels like. It hurts, bad. But you must sit still and feel it out. That rash decision will only make things more painful. As long as you practice sitting down, doing nothing, feeling everything and crying it out, the mind doesn't become something you fight to shut up, but instead something you roll with.

"I want to be more mindful." Why? Do you have a disciplined mind that can be concentrated to a single point? What good will it do to let it run wild without knowing how to get a grip on it in the first place. What will you do when you are diving down the pit of psychosis at 50000 mph? Can you snap out of the signs that lead there? Like the warping of the visual field? The spiral into vexing confusion that blurs the senses? Western new age hip plastic spirituality messed up bad trying to make mindfulness/vipassana meditation as the gateway to everlasting inner peace where the gods/daemons/demons/buddhas/devi/[whatever higher or lower dimensional beings here] fart the scent of flowers upon our noses and everything is all well and fine until you circle back to the beginning, again and again and again, and again. And again. And maybe this app that told you that you meditated for 20 minutes and gave you an award badge like a treat to a dog for doing so well. Then the thought pops up if you are even doing mindfulness properly, and another, and another, and another. You wanted to be mindful, you ended up confused instead. How about doing the exact opposite? Concentrate on that pen right next to you. With your entire being. Then come back to mindfulness. You'll notice single pointed concentration and mindfulness leads to the same place. But samadhi meditation is easier to practice for someone that didn't grow up with Southern Buddhism. Since it's only relaxed concentration. But it builds the necessary skill of being able to tug the leash when the mind is running too loose.

In simple terms from this fleeting being tapping away, meditation is the practice of bringing our identification aspect of ourselves beyond our minds and back into our senses to have an observation without an attachment to the preconceived notions that come up and layer upon our direct experience. Thoughts and concepts are a There-ness within the Is-ness of what we are experiencing here and now. Meditation is to strengthen this mode of awareness.

Disclaimer. I'm not a certified anything. Just a practitioner. Never met any of my teachers beyond the books and talks they created. Mindfulness meditation isn't for everyone, you want inner peace go do something else that won't make you deal/play with the worms in your mind on solo mode with a manual with a bunch of holes in it.

Peace and Love

Yeah, why not? My first language was JS but i use Elixir daily and it definitely made me a stronger dev. What hooked me into Elixir was seeing it for the first time and getting really excited by being able to read the code line by line without knowing the syntax and getting a good sense of what was happening.

But three things i think that really matters for someone to pick their first language are: 1. Is syntax and data types easy to grok right off the bat? 2. How fast are they able to make a mental map of the flow and transformations of data only by reading the code? 3. Are the docs easy to read and navigate, and do they instill understanding?

Elixir definitely is for someone that wants to learn it, and are okay with the fact there might not be many resources to learn from. But what i gathered so far is most of the resources and the community really seek to help someone get a deeper understanding of the language and think about the things that go beyond languages like system design and code quality. Yeah there isn't many packages and libraries out there like the more popular languages to put stuff together, but that's where the fun begins. It's like being in uncharted territory where one is forced to engage with what they're doing and learn how to really build stuff from scratch.

For someone thinking about elixir as a first language, hacking around a basic module and testing it out in the repl to building a web app with Phoenix is a great way to learn.

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Depends on location

Technologies: Elixir/Phoenix/Ecto, Vanilla JS, THREE.js, CSS/SCSS, Git, more in résumé. (Willing to learn anything that is the best tool for the job at hand, but really loving Elixir)

Résumé/CV: Available on request (It's a blue-collar-career-changer type. Please don't get your hopes up)

Email: hi @ blankstate.xyz

_________

Self-taught with about a year and a half of development experience. At this point my motivation is to build something cool. My code is boring and pretty spaghetti, but that can be fixed with mentors and daily improvements to make it even more boring and less spaghetti. I find refactoring enjoyable. Currently reading up on ML, Rust, and more Elixir to build a smart control system for fun.

Oh hell yeah, imagine hundreds of adrenaline junkies hanging out in inflatable space habitats and jumping off platforms into Earth's gravity with these things, turning it into a sport where which ever space diver that lands closest to the target wins. That and other derivatives will be a multi-billion dollar market right there.

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Certainly

Technologies: vanilla JS, Elixir/Phoenix, Linux, HTML, CSS, GLSL

Resume/CV: Available upon email request

Email: hi@blankstate.xyz

About:

Currently been teaching myself how to program for the past 10 months and now looking to get my foot into the door.

I have strong soft skills that are used to find and understand the problems at hand. Alongside a mind that is always looking for simpler, but effective solutions using the resources available.

I have a background in maintenance and repair in the automotive and manufacturing industry. And prior to that, worked as a QC technician working with CMMs in my family's now defunct machine shop.

Open to learning anything whether it's connected online or offline.