288 karma · joined October 10, 2011
People also forget how bleak the iPad app market was for the first year or so. They also forget that VR has existed for the quest for the better part of 12 years and there are .... 4? 5? very good apps.
Even now there's nothing -incredibly- compelling for the Quest. I'm not a hater, I've owned 5 of them starting at DK1.
If you look closely, the chomping visual doesn't -actually- match up with the chomp sound, it's closer to if there was a track of chomping at a certain chomps per minute that gets toggled on/off if pacman is chomping. Same with everything else-is, so you mute/unmute sounds when the event happens, rather than trigger a sound play.
Or so it sounds and seems to my ears and eyes.
I believe he meant all of the countless bots and apps and "remindme" etc 3rd party functionality that developers have added on to twitter.
At some point I'd be un-surprised to see all of those removed, and replaced as internal for-pay functionality, given the way things are going.
I am -genuinely- open to suggestions on how to get over that I just can’t currently justify making everything harder “for a short while” when that short while feels like it could be weeks or months to catch up to fluency.
I guess if I had any kind of advice for that kind of thing it might be this: I've realised that even in my fun projects, there's a 10% crappy annoying tedious thing that -very- frequently stops me from finishing the fun projects.
A potentially bit good of advice would be to do that thing first, use all the "new fresh code base" enthusiasm to BURN through the code you're gonna hate so that it's just fun from then on.
If I go the other way around I -inevitably- forget some stuff that is crucial for the front end implementation, whereas it’s hard to forget how it supposed to work for the user.
1. Anybody want it?
First I pitch the rough idea to a few paying customers. If they are lukewarm on it I set it aside.
If they are warm on it I set it aside.
If they say they want it I set it aside.
When some time goes by and they check in and say “whatever happened with (feature) I consider it validated.”
2. Be bad at it
Give myself permission to make the absolute worst version of it.
That frequently involves writing a one page max description of it, and then asking myself “okay how much of this could I cut before it was literally doing nothing.” But if I’m feeling bored I just start coding.
This version has no error checking. No tests. No capacity for large requests. No logging. Nothing. It just prays beyond all reason that the user doesn’t do anything silly that breaks it.
3.beta test the MEV
I just made it up. It’s not a real acronym. most execrable version. It fits because it does feel like something I excreted. I hate it. I’m embarrassed. My impostor syndrome is no longer a syndrome it is just accurate identification and classification.
I give it to those users who were interested.
I watch them on hot jar.
4. Tea leaves
This is the hard part. If they are enthused great. But if not You kinda have to sense whether or not their dissatisfaction is because it’s an MEP.
If you’ve done it right, however, and found something they super want they will actually struggle through it to get that thing done. Sometimes the MEP isn’t far off from an MVP. Sometimes their satisfaction is enough to convince you not to do the rest of the stuff you thought was necessary in your on paper Valhalla take.
5. Users of Software
I often forget that your average software user does not have our relationship with software. They don’t see the amazing version in your head so the crap version feels like magic.
You’d be surprised how hard people will work with a subpar system with the hope that it’ll work out for them, both from optimism but also from a lack of viable alternatives.
Or maybe you’re not that surprised because you’ve voted in America zing I went political at the end.
Here’s a great, actionable, talk he did at the equally informative Rob Walling’s conference.
(I have followed this advice, and it has brought me a level of success and comfort I didn’t know I could have, as an admittedly run of the mill developer)
I'm curious what the general consensus is as to why they would do that? I doubt it's an accident but I guess I can't rule it out.
My suspicion is eventually the brain says “oh you care about this? Okay cool I’ll hold on to them for longer.”
Give it a couple of weeks you might be surprised.
Furthermore, this “take” requires a level of historical naïveté that borders on pure narcissism. A lot of social “fixing” looks like an “over correction” in the short term, but in the long term that’s just how things get dealt with.
As a loose metaphor, If you put your hand on a stove you don’t lift it a millimeter off the heat source, right? That would “fix” it.
Surprising no one, I couldn’t find a single essay from this concerned citizen about the death of George Floyd, or anyone else for that matter.
But he found plenty of outrage and cultural commentary for the temporary death of the commercial viability of his outdated sense of humor.
That IS funny, actually.
All of this is just to make sure my trajectory is generally correct.
WEEKLY Then, on Sunday I print out a weekly calendar broken out by hours, ~7a-11pm. Not because I intend on working that whole block (yikes), but so that at the end of the week I can see where my time actually went.
DAILY I start each day with an hour of something that has absolutely nothing to do with work or coding. The last two months I've been learning Ableton, and I make myself generate a song snippet every morning. It can be crappy, it just has to be done. Turns out, that time adds up (WHO KNEW) and now I'm pretty decent at Ableton. Before that I spent time on a (rented) piano. If I save it for the end of the day I never do it or I'm too tired to enjoy it, so why give my 'joy/curiosity' the crappiest version of myself?
Then the next ~4-5 hours I dedicate to mentally engaging tasks. "Hard" attention heavy work. 25 minute blocks w/5 minute breaks to stretch, email, text, drink water etc. After each block I write on the hourly calendar what I worked on, both to keep myself focused, but also so that I have a sense of having done -something- besides grind endlessly.
By then it's ~1-2pm. I take a 20m coffee nap (most days) and then give myself the freedom to consider my workday done (if I want), or if I wanna work more, the next ~4-6 hours I do the boring brainless stuff. Minor bugs. UX tweaks. Email templates. Blah blah. A lot of this time ends up being "eaten up" talking to users, but that's fine.
Then at the end of the day I take a glance at my hours and see how I felt about it, and write down, on the back of my Monthly/Sprint calendar what my day actually ended up being about.
You could be VERY plain looking, and unable to dance at all, and chart in in 1965.
I didn't see Onward, but between that, Coco, Soul, and Inside Out, those are four moves that grapple pretty heavily with mortality, death, the afterlife, depression, which I'm assuming sails over the head of most kids.
And even their earlier ones like Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and Up have pretty serious things to say about childhood illness/"deformity", the role of the critic, and tragedy that similarly seem to be aimed -just- over the heads of kids.
I think I'd need a definition of what a "great" childhood story is, but I'm pretty sure that neither Disney nor Pixar has "controversial" as part of their DNA. Much to the relief of parents everywhere, that's simply not what they're trying to do, so to judge them for not doing that is confusing.
Perhaps you're looking for something more along the lines of A24 (Moonlight, The Florida Project, The Witch) from... Disney?
("Up", which you cited as the last Pixar movie that was 'worth it', is in fact largely a conflicted parent/child relationship)
It reads as if what causes you 'grief' is actually the intended format of the content you are consuming. Yes, it's nice that Wall-E had a layer of critique of rampant consumerism (among other things), but it also had a joke about an unkillable roach too.
My hunch is that the -primary- intended audience for these films spends a lot of time dealing with "conflicted parent/child relationships", and that you are simply not the intended audience.
I don't mean to be overly critical of you here, I think if you take two steps back what you're saying is "the majority of these kids movies don't speak to me."
A movie being "worth it" is pretty different from a movie "speaking to me", which is so subjective that it is hard extract actionable insights from. It's a hop, skip, and a jump from saying "I don't know why you like this flavor of ice cream, because I don't like it."
There are 4.4 million software engineers in the United States. I would imagine most of the work that is generated by them on a day to day basis moves the needle of their careers forward. I could be wrong, but I bet most of them are employed, and getting paid for it.
At the very least I bet that more than half of them get paid for more than 5% of their workdays, right?
I doubt the same can be said for music producers, at least the ones making hits that the OP was referring to.
I can co-sign on this part of his premise. I worked for a music producer who has a number of #1 hits (Beyonce, Fergie, John Legend etc). He wrote >1 songs per day almost every day for over a decade.
His success ratio (hit vs placement vs nothing) was much lower than any mediocre software engineer trying to make working software over the same period of time.
It feels safe to say that in a 365 day period, a software developer can reasonably expect significantly more than one of those days to be used in 'working software' right?
First scenario that comes to mind: The insurance company that gives you an extremely high quote because you come back as "high risk" from a 3rd party company that they use to vet applications, and that 3rd party company uses your genetic predisposition for a condition.
I have my preconceived notions of what I'd find, but I think it'd be better to let the data speak for itself.
My email address is just philip at mccarty at gmail, and I would be happy to talk to you on phone/skype/zoom so you can see if you feel comfortable with me using the data for that purpose.
Or we could find a way to anonymize the data, as the personally identifying information isn't necessary for my analysis at all.
- privacy@sift.com
- returnactivityreport@theretailequation.com.
- privacy@riskified.com.
- privacy@kustomer.com.
- https://zetaglobal.com/ is a form.
Do you find it harder to enjoy movies?
Typically the score does so much _work_ in the name of emotional manipulation, that I wonder if it would make movies less enjoyable.
More specifically I wonder if you would like certain movies (Spielberg) less and other movies (Er, Um. Who doesn't use scores that much?) more?
The damage to this rim is something that would cost a non-significant amount of money to replace or repair.
I'd argue that very few (if any) people would knowingly and willingly pay full price for a car with this kind of damage.
You included.