psmithsfhn

i haven't lived the zoom lifestyle yet, as my only pandemic gig was phone-only.

but i def feel like zoom is over-relied-upon. why else would _so_ many people have zoom fatigue?

then again, this is prob more about team-building exercises than zoom.

i do wonder about the actual effectiveness of said exercises.

i know, 'studies say' -- but....i'm skeptical. i guess i have to read some of those studies.

i wonder if, for the time/effort/money put into teambuilding exercises, could we not just give everyone a 4-day work week?

a part of me is thinking

"ugh, why couldn't we get a tax credit for, you know, bike bikes? non-electric bikes?" :-D

but i'm not hating much -- a small step in the right direction -- i'll take it!

and i was skeptical e-bikes improve health much, but again - baby steps - i'll take it -- it does appear that they do something, and getting more support for allowing people to bike (i.e. bike tracks) is a big deal.

I suspect the answer is, like most things, 'politics'.

So, to me, for instance, take the biggest problem the world currently faces - global heating.

I think everyone knows the two or three things we would need to do to 'solve it': - carbon tax - carbon capture - energy reset/clean/green/conservation/etc.

But it's only partially 'solved', same as robocalls.

There are just too many people making too much money, having too much success, with robocalling to stop it.

i think this sounds very reasonable.

for yourself or others, do you think your workload would be reduced?

or, would you be able to get the same or more done in 20% less time?

sounds like a good idea to me.

i wonder if a 4-day work week would actually be attractive to employers, especially if they could take a cut (back) of salary.

maybe even something like....it's a 20% work time cut, so maybe for that, i'll need to give you %30 of my salary, which is a lot.

but if some of the studies are to be believed, then productivity can go up with a shorter work week, so salary should actually be _increasing_.

but...you got to get the deal done. so...

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

it's great. seems to be something there for everyone.

fans. musicians. political people. artists. lovers. writers. poets. workers. NJ enthusiasts.

i suspect not.

they seem to show up a lot for me, still, for....almost any search i do.

and looking thru a lot of posts on idiehackers and related, it seems to be the number one place that small companies go to to get attention.

so, the quality may be 'finished', but...they're still highly relevant for most of the web.

i use a super-simple 'email myself' app to type up a quick message so that it hits my gmail and i process it later.

usually that means looking at it, looking it up, figure out what, if anything i want to do with it.

i might delete it. i might archive it. i might bookmark it.

i might put it in my 8-mile-long notepad as 'idea: do this cool thing' so that i can find it later and see how bad of an idea it was, or on the very rare occasion, rethink thru it again, and/or even try to do something with it, bounce it off a friend, etc.

in the end, my two repositories are: notepad (which right now is 'Text' program on my Chromebook, backed by a google doc -- i.e. where the content/file actually lives) * gmail, just in my Archived email

i've never actually known the value of 'innovation management'.

always assumed it had more to do with PR -- "hey big company x, capture the _brilliant_ idea of your _brilliant_ people and make enough money next quarter that you won't get fired, or at a minimum you'll contribute to this idea of the company as being an egalitarian place, democracy, etc."

not hating, that's just my general impression.

Been working on a service to let you listen to the web -- similar in function to the audio part of the Pocket app.

Mostly using AWS Lambda and SNS.

Some occasional weirdness in stringing functions together -- might do more with Step Functions.

But weird part is some calls just seem to hang and never return -- unless they get a clean/new function of their own.

Using Pythom 3.8 with Boto3 library.

But generally amazed with what Lambda seems like it might be able to do if I can get it humming.

http://readonthegoapp.com/

No.

That's what I want to believe anyways.

It would be interesting to see an actual study, though.

Team A does project 1 with Scrum.

Team B does project 1 without Scrum.

Let's say over 3 months.

Who wins?

We could look at time to finish, bugs, code quality/resilience, etc.

I know there is a 'study' out every other day from some Project Mgmt org saying, "500% of IT Projects are fail!", but obviously we need real studies.

I plan on launching a B2B and B2C solution soon.

My strategy in a general sense will be to:

    * re-listen to all the Indie Hackers podcasts and take notes

    * stay patient

I heard one guy say it may take months or years, but as a B2B, you will absolutely win, eventually, you just have to keep at it, keep iterating, etc.

And, in the beginning, anything more than a 0% interest in your product is great.

In short, a lot of the advice is....plan to keep working at it for a long time. If you can achieve that, there is a good change that you will be successful. Most people give up way too soon.

Mark Cuban says this a lot, too.

whenever someone makes blanket technical statements in this crazy boasting fashion, i think of Yeats:

> ...the worst are full of passionate intensity.

that said, it's difficult to feel sympathy for people supporting a platform that encourages terrorism, murder, etc.

laravel spark

better, why do they still make car horns?

i've been in this position, and on the other side - where i wanted to pick up someone else's idea/tech and run with it.

in theory, we'd figure out a way to split equity/etc.

now there are sites that let you sell project sites, etc., so that's prob a positive.

Dropbox locked me out of my account years ago and I'm sure they have locked out thousands of other people too.

I suspect loss of trust helps a company go into decline, especially when the company holds a vital assets.

A job market with a lot of interesting opportunities, but 1 hour outside of a major city, and your career will be secondary to...a job market with lots of interesting opportunities?

These all seem weirdly incongruent/confusing/confused. And probably impossible.

But happy to be wrong.

Maybe i'm just triggered because I love LA and hate it less than most other cities.

And the sunk cost fallacy is mostly false -- i've never actually seen a useful example of it that is academically rigorous -- even after looking at Dan Ariely's examples.

tony hsieh tried to retire early. didn't work out so well.

one strategy for how to deal with problems is to try to fix them.

another strategy is to run away from them.

sounds like The Second Coming poem ("the centre cannot hold") by WB Yeats, 1919:

https://poets.org/poem/second-coming

  The best lack all coviction, while the worst
  Are full of passionate intensity

I am about to look for a new job and i'm hoping there are some companies out there that don't video zoom -- i feel like the video part is bad info, wasteful, stressful, etc.

optics

I have not seen a single serious critique of the 1619 project yet.

So far it's all just hyperbolic white supremacist right-wing fox news-speak.

I do understand the seriousness of the situation though -- the 1619 project is an absolutely devastating portrait of america and its white supremacy.

It's a welcome corrective to the lies we still tell ourselves and teach to the children of america.

This is exactly what we were hoping for and expecting

Making driving cheaper so you get a lot more driving

Have the tesla haters been proved fucking right yet?

i feel like the times i've seen this here like 50% of folks became farmers

50% become woodworkers

and the other 50% became stay-at-homes.

Dropbox locked me out of my account.

I only have about $20k worth of dev work locked up in it, but it's gone.

Fuck dropbox.

i've been there. here. :-D

the last time i strolled into this, i was reading (listening to audiobooks) and heard the word 'ennui' (ahn-wee).

i was like, i've heard that word, but....shit, this description of it...this is me! like, exactly!

so that was cool. another +1 for reading.

i'd been in that state before, but didn't know what it was called, didn't know other folks had felt it, etc.

and then I stumbled upon the word 'ikigai' -- again (japanese for 'reason for being').

and that was kind of interesting.

it reminded me of the few times when i'd felt like, 'Fuck - _this_ is the shit!'

and those were often times when i was doing some project -- typically a side software project that would inevitably do absolutely nothing -- but sometimes other offline stuff, like volunteering or bike blogging or some other hippie do-gooder shit.

and i remembered reading about how the puritanical american psychotic mentality of beig dedicated to overwork and 'achievement' was part of what is making the world a terrible and worse place to live for most people.

fortunately i have at least one friend who thinks about things other than money, so i could talk to him about trying to do important work instead of just work.

and i remembered a lesson i learned when i was actually full-on depressed as opposed to just bored/not motivated -- start doing more of the things that you like, and less of the things that you don't like.

one of my recent insights is that, "I should do something mid-life crisis-y". and there are a few reasons for that, but one of them is, whenever you are learning something new, there's a pretty good chance that it's going to make you feel good, just because it hits something inside of us.

and another aspect of it is that, when you do some of those new things, inevitably it seems like at least one of them is like, "Holy fuck - i can't believe nobody managed to covince me to actually try this earlier". and now there's a new world that is open to you.

like, riding a bike. if you haven't ridden a bike 10 or 20 miles, just buzzing around town, etc., and you actually live in a city/town where you're not likely to be murdered by a terrorist just for riding your bike, then that might be something you should look at.

audiobooks, b/c doomscrolling is poison.

i think chilling for 3/6/12 months is cool. i've actually been straight burned out before -- not depressed, not ennui, burned out. and all it took was 6-12 months of doing jack shit, then i was fine. but if it was 5.99 months? would not have been enough. most of the stuff i read on burnout didn't really capture it. i know one of the nordic countries started an official 'burnout office' within the government.

i suggest a bunch of googling on ennui to start.

then watch some good Mubis.

then go vote.

and then read/watch some Chomsky.

going up against Trump while he controls the the executive and judiciary branches is not smart.

  Location: Phoenix, AZ
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes? No covid, please.
  Technologies: Generalist, non-dev
  Résumé/CV: Upon request
  Email: psmithsf@gmail.com

Going to finish a contract early as a SRE supporting corporate ELT software.

Seeking 4-day week. Prefer startups, but open. Open to contract. BS Computer Engineering. Java and AWS Arch Assoc certified.

Project Mgr. Product Mgr. Support Mgr.

Interested in hybrid roles. Prefer startups.

i'd guess you're like most programmers.

we start doing it, get better, and then stop getting better. and that's it.

if i had to do it again and actually get better?

man, tough.

i would guess by 'better' we actually mean 'faster'. we could talk about quality/bugs/big-O/etc. but that's boring.

i know some of these will be off the table for various reasons, and not saying i would do them myself, but i would consider:

* ask better devs how to get better/faster. -- including shadowing them for an hour or two once a week -- this also includes learning how to use a debugger properly/etc. or anything else that you don't _have_ to know to be a dev * take a formal comp sci class. to me, the main goal of doing any kind of certification/class is to boost your self-confidence. of course you'll learn, but having confidence is important so you can dwell in a hopeful/contented present -- i.e. your coding won't be distracted. * learn LISP * _really_ learn the languages/tech you're working with. instead of being 'just' a hacker, take some amount of time each week to go deeper. * switch to a non-coding position :)