ninjakeyboard

I bought my kinisis used I should say! It was $200 plus I think $50 and several months to get the blank keycaps ordered (was hard to track them down in canada - had to go through another supplier as kinesis won't ship them direct and it was a special order)

I did a few things to stop my RSI pain:

1) Use an alt keyboard layout. Use colemac. It's easier to learn than dvorak and decreases finger travel at the keyboard

2) Stop using a mouse. I used a trackball for a while but it has its own issues. I use a cheap wacom bamboo tablet now. It's far and above more ergonomic than any other device I've used as a pointer.

3) Use a kinesis advantage. Blank keycaps for style points.

4) Use your left hand. I use the wacom bamboo tablet with my left hand (I'm right handed.) This has had amazing results for me personally with the wacom because my left wrist does not bent/turn at all - I move entirely from my elbow primarily because I'm not that dextrous with my left hand.

I did them in that order but I'd recommend swapping the keyboard and mouse first, as they have the biggest bang for the buck in terms of ergonomics. The alt keyboard layout is marginal. Left hand was big for me personally.

All of these items take some time and effort, in particular learning another keyboard layout. And the kinesis also has a relatively steep learning curve relative to other keyboards. Don't do it all at once - it's a multi year journey but hey - no more hand pain! I still use a regular tenkeyless mechanical keyboard and mouse at home in the studio, and obviously carry a laptop for work, but my use of these is fairly infrequent relative to the 40+ hours a week at my desk at work.

I work at a profitable product startup that has managed to avoid raising series A. As long as we can maintain the level of growth (which is honestly close to breakneck with integration work for each customer site) I think it's feasible to avoid raising/diluting while continue to grow but it's not the easiest experience I've had. Lots of blood sweat and tears, particularly from one of the founders.

I know some people might think the payout could be better raising series A and hiring to support growth as is the more common road. The founders are going a different route and so far it's going well. We can hire when we need to so not to worried there. I don't know if this is a weird case?

Thanks Graham. Perl was the first language I worked with professionally. It got me my start into software development all those years ago. Cpan was my first look at what dependency management might look like.

I authored and co-authored some books.

I wrote a book on Akka for Packt that has made maybe 5k. Packt is out of India and they have some different standards around topics and contents, but the experience wasn't much different from O'Reilly overall.

And there was a mini book for O'Reilly that netted a couple k, mostly because of later sponsorship. Writing a book is a really tough experience. I found it taxing. It's interesting going to meetups and having people come up to me and shake my hand though saying they read my book.

I'm not super super happy with either book tbh. It's just such a crazy process to try to get something you're 100% happy with, and once it goes into print that's it forever more.

I would say the impact on my career has been noticeable maybe? You become an expert on a topic by writing well on it because you're forced to fill in all the gaps as you go, and then people give you the credit because you have a book. It sort of happens together when writing a book - becoming an expert and receiving the trust because you're an expert. Even if you thought you knew the subject before, you might find you didn't as well as you do at the end of writing on the topic.

I started using Cathode a lot. It has terrible input latency, destroys my battery, is very hard to read, but coupled with some cherry blue switches it really brings me back to a better time.

If I ever need to blow off some steam, I just start smacking the "degauss" button.

Puts the meta key in the wrong place but I'm usually using vim for remote editing anyway.

What stereoisomers are used?

Yo dawg! I heard you liked leak memos, so I put a leak memo out on your leak memo.

Ya +1 I've been working with elixir lately and the `=` operator in erlang/elixir is the first thing that came to mind when I saw this.

I have a chinese hakko clone I got for $120 - it's good enough for my use.

Get a small airfilter/fan if you're going to solder a lot.

+1 I was using thicker solder for a while and it was a mess. Getting thinner 60/40 flux code made a HUGE difference in my ability to build boards.

It doesn't have to be super thin but thinner is 100% better than thicker.

We have accents up here??? Why did my mother never tell me this?!? I thought you guys had accents!

I'm trying to learn right now. I'm probably doing this backwards but:

I'm starting by soldering together kits for modular synthesis. That's teaching me all of the technical skills and ensuring I have the right tools. Some friends to help correct my shitty habits have given me the right skills and equipment to build.

Then I know how to assemble things, so now I'm trying to build my own very simple circuits. Once I can breadboard them, my friend can help show me the ropes to get PCBs printed and then I can manufacture my own things.

Finally, the troubleshooting exposes you to a bit as you have to understand what's going on.

Learning and watching on the side take the basic exposure and distill knowledge from that.

The odersky one is good.

Is there some other correlation between owls and being owls that's excluded from this study? Do they tend to use drugs or alcohol more? Do they tend to date more? Do they tend to watch more television? Play video games more late at night?

This is an interesting study that doesn't necessarily suggest later class times will fix the issue but this could be a bit of a "wicked problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

+1 - this article makes me think of my journey into emacs

Ya for me that book didn't resonate at all. I thought it was a piece of trash and don't understand how anyone could actually go in without some skepticism about the shit he's feeding you. I still vape, have to wear a nicotine patch at work to focus, etc, so obviously my attitude toward that book was the problem. IMO it's just a bunch of drivel but if people read it and believe it they swear it to be true. To be clear, I'm not knocking the book but just highlighting how my attitude differs and accentuating that to state that attitude and willingness are probably a big part of the success. vapes with cynical expression

Aphyr needs more upvotes :)

EDIT: never mind - on the three year view he's in the top 10

Ya I used to pull an all nighter once a week. It has a lot of long term deleterious effects but it does the trick for a day break from depression.

I went the other way - I was a business grad and transitioned to a software developer. IMO the soft skills are important no matter what. To be a real thought leader in business it's important to step away from the work and trying to think about the problems you're facing (people problems for example) in lateral ways. A lot of very technical people have a hard time stepping away from the work IMO. You just need to trust people to do the best work that they can. There is a great quote from Steve Jobs: "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. You hire smart people and let them tell you what to do."

I was going to make a comment about using Slack from emacs but of course I'm not the only one. :)

I live and breathe this stuff. Started working with Elixir more recently but have worked with Akka for years. IMO BEAMVM is a great piece of technology and is worth looking at.

Funnelcloud | Toronto | Competitive Compensation, Smart Team

Small but profitable and growing startup is building event oriented systems for manufacturing system analysis and control (formally called an MES - Manufacturing Execution Systems.) We use scala/akka, elixir, kafka, and timeseries tooling. It's an IoT type of problem space.

Looking for fulltime engineers in Toronto with scala, elixir, clojure or any FP background preferably, but Rubyists with interest in learning elixir and functional programming may fit as well.

Mail jason at funnelcloud.io

The princeton one on coursera is really great and easy to read. Buy the book and take the course. Sedgewick is my hero. It doesn't require a lot of math in contrast to the Stanford coursera one. It's much easier for the general person to follow IMO. https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-part1

If you read hackernews from emacs, it doesn't matter if you read everything. Everyone around you will fear you. https://github.com/clarete/hackernews.el

Catch the highlights! There are some tools that will send you eg newsletters with the top items. You can't read everything! Better to both consume and to also produce. Doing one or the other too much is worse than doing the right amount of both.

Assuming author will see, year of approval for mpeg2 is listed as 1004 at the end of the article.

I worked in video for a several years - sorry to hear about your issues.

Try to give scala a whirl. It's pretty nice.

I wrote a book on Akka with many years of experience with it and I have been using Elixir professionally for 7 months or so on greenfield/replatforming efforts and I have to say that the BEAM VM is really an incredible piece of technology that leaves Akka on the JVM in the dust in several aspects because the VM is actor-model native. I wish there was a statically typed language that ran on BEAM but Elixir and Erlang are great technologies to run in production if you can accept some of the associated risk of newer eco-systems in Elixir (but erlang has your back!).

That's fair - thanks for the comment. It makes sense - then there are no opinions or variation so "this is the way" and all code looks like that.