Anki for iphone is not free and to me a flashcard system needs to be available on mobile devices. Thus I somewhat consider competing against Anki's iphone app since my service works anywhere as long as there's an internet connection.
Honestly? Just practice a lot and get people who have some familiarity with Software Engineering/Computer Science to interview you. It's also important that you ask those people to not take it easy on you.
The initial discomfort is necessary if you want to get better at this.
Does Notepad still randomly destroy line breaks and not let you undo more than once?
If so, those are two good reasons.
That aside, Notepad is bad because every single other text editor is probably better. Syntax highlighting, macros, plugins, ftp, language based autocomplete, etc. You can build projects directly from a lot of them with a couple of keystrokes.
What isn't wrong with using Notepad? If you use Notepad you are either a) too lazy to see what else is out there b) ignorant c) stubborn or d) don't care enough about your workflow to improve. There is literally no way you could form an argument that Notepad makes you more productive than any other popular editor.
I've read quite a bit on standing desks and I'm curious if there is any study/research that shows, experimentally, that it's actually [standing] that leads to some of the proposed benefits. I only ask because I wonder if simply exercising while sitting [1] or in general [2] lead to the same benefits or if the very sedentary nature of the circumstances surrounding sitting that lead to these poor outcomes (which then are solved by standing).
I find that since I stopped sitting, I walk around much more. There may well be few benefits to standing per se, but it's certainly an excellent catalyst for movement and exercise.
Definitely. If it's to be taken at face value, where is one dead person? "Died from sitting." Seriously?
I haven't seen a single shred of hard evidence of these FUD claims by the standing desk "cool kids" that are telling us "you're holding it wrong" and that we should do it their way "or it will kill you." C'mon. Trendiness maximus.
I've been doing some heavy investigation to how (and where) I should start my career in terms of maximizing learning. I have friends who will be working at Microsoft, and other friends who criticize said 'Microsoft' friends, saying that they won't learn much. Others say you learn the [most] at big companies, and a small minority say that start-ups are the way to go when you're early in your career.
I wonder what advice Jessica (and the HN community) would have for people like me, as I imagine there are a lot of people like me visiting HN.
> I have friends who will be working at Microsoft, and other friends who criticize said 'Microsoft' friends, saying that they won't learn much.
There are many things to criticize about the dev experience at Microsoft, but that's definitely not one of them. Unless you're in a quite dysfunctional group, there is extensive early-career training and explicit mid- to late- career mentoring there that really distinguishes it from startups and other big companies. As a manager there, I was held responsible for growing my organization's devs much more explicitly and to a much further "minimum ceiling" career stage than I've seen or heard of from any peers at other companies or other places I've worked.
Of course, things may have changed since I left that position in ~2006.
My first job as a developer was at a very small infosec non-profit (5 employees total!), I now work for a fairly large tech company (VMware) - and while I was in school I worked tech support at a startup that grew from ~30 to ~80 employees in the year and a half I was there.
So I've seen a decent range and think that you'll learn a lot wherever you are (particularly early in your career). What you learn will vary a bit and you will most likely prefer one or the other, but until you've tried both I wouldn't worry too much about which is better. I'd suggest pursuing opportunities at companies of all sizes and accept the offer that most interests you.
The advice that I got was to join mid size startup (Think of google 2004, FB 2007, or uber/ airbnb/ dropbox right now). The company has been mostly de-risked, and there is still newer parts of the organization where you get to do interesting things.
I joined a startup as the first employee shortly out of college and I've been here for almost two years. I would say I've probably learned more here than I would've elsewhere because I jump up and down so much of our stack. I've gone deep on a few technologies (Akka, ElasticSearch, CoreOS/Docker) while gaining breadth in a number of others (Neo4j, Rails, AWS).
I don't think I would've gained the responsibilities I have here as quickly as at larger companies.
This is slightly off topic, but why aren't folding bikes or scooters more popular? Their folding mechanism allows you to take them with you which would presumably prevent theft more than a lock. If a bike lock is the only thing that's keeping your bike from being stolen it doesn't seem like it'll work more than it just delays the inevitable.
Plus aren't locks really inconvenient to carry around with you? 10+ pounds is a lot when your bike is only 20lbs.
I ride a Brompton, and that is one of the big reasons; I can just take it inside, and stash it under my desk, rather than having to lock it up outside.
However, it is inconvenient in some situations. When I go to a bar, or restaurant, or movie theater, it's sometimes hard to find a place to put it that's out of the way. Since a lock is cumbersome and inconvenient, and I don't usually need it, that means I don't make a habit of carrying one, but then I'll hit a situation where it really would be more convenient to lock it up than take it in, but now I don't have that option.
That said, I do ride my Brompton as my daily commuter, and do bring it in with me, and most bars, restaurants, or the like do have enough room for me to stash it somewhere. But you do have to be willing to put up with people who think it's a little strange, or the people who joke "hey, I don't try to bring my car into the bar", and you do sometimes need to be creative to find a way to stash it securely and also out of people's way.
I say this as a proud Brompton owner, but to most people they're just weird. They're also a bit more expensive, you get less bike for a given amount. They're not that light. I often lock mine up outside because I don't want to a haul a 26 lb block up a flight of stairs.
No lock weighs 10 lb (you can read the article), and 20 lb is a pretty light bike. 3 lb lock for a 25 lb bike is more realistic (my roommate's 56 cm aluminum road bike is 26 lb).
Even 3 lb vs 25 lb is the wrong comparison. Why does the weight of the bike matters? What matters is the total weight the rider has to move - which is something like 25 lb for the bike, 20 lb for a bag, and 200 lb for the rider themself. 3 lb is peanuts on that.
There are a lot of not-very-good-bikes -- usually refered to as "bike shaped objects". These cheap bikes make the good folding bikes seem expensive. (Is this like an "overton window"?)
A good folding bike is probably a great choice for many people.
The only bike with a no-compromise fold is a Brompton. Bromptons can be stashed by your desk and are ideal for city riding, which is why they're such a common sight in London, Oxford and other UK cities.
But for other types of cycling they don't cut the mustard. I have a Bike Friday and my wife has an Airnimal, both of which are exemplary folders - the BF goes anywhere and the Airnimal goes road-bike fast. But neither of them has anything like the compact fold of a Brompton.
"From the outside, it might have looked like I was crazy to feel this way. I had graduated from Stanford, I had a CS degree, and I knew how to play the startup game. In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding."
Pardon my ignorance, but if a startup is a game, wouldn't knowing how to play be knowing how to win, i.e. an exit? I feel like getting venture capital would be the equivalent of prolonging the game, which is a +0 type of action. Is raising money really "playing?" From what I've read raising money just results in needing to raise more money.
I was going to make a similar comment. There is an undercurrent of "raising money = success" in this posting. The whole concept of throwing money at 21-year olds and hoping they find an idea still seems bizarre to me, but obviously it has paid off for the YC guys.
I would be interested to hear the opinions (or more accurately, experiences) of developers regarding "practice." I'm beginning my career as a software engineer this summer and I would like to become an "excellent" engineer. Employable, of course, but also the go-to for knowledge in a subset of computer science (let's say natural language processing, for example).
Given I have a very long life (hopefully) ahead of me, what would you say is the best way to do this? Yes, coding is good, but is it the best way? I spend a large amount of time doing side projects, but eventually I'll have a family and other obligations, so I would need higher impact, less time consuming practicing options.
An example of this I guess is how many expert violinists actually "practice" for a surprisingly small amount of time because the practice is so deliberate. What's the equivalent for us?
Nearly everything I do in martial arts is practice for the relatively few times I might spar with someone.
I don't do any skills practice for programming. I've never met anyone who did something equivalent to honing basic movement, practicing balance and similar things.
Reading about the latest programming methods is a good thing and can increase your repertoire but I don't think it's comparable to skills-practice in martial arts or music or something similar. In practices like this, there are fundamental skills that need to be in good shape to allow a person to anything creative in the discipline (I have no idea why expert violinists wouldn't spend significant periods practicing but I know little about that. I know that most music requires significant practice of basic skills to achieve mastery).
My suspicious is that programming is an activity that is strongly connected to the brain's language centers and so mastery of it on the skills-level is simple and the problems with it appear on the judgment and understanding level - which doesn't make it easy, rather gives it that extraordinarily hard quality that we programmers are familiar with.
Also, most skills-practice disciplines are performance arts rather than production processes. Machinist and auto-mechanics also have high skill levels but like programmers they are obligated to show some significant accomplishment for their entire time at work. We can contrast this with a musician or other artist, who if they give an amazingly beautiful performance once a month and have it recorded is considered remarkably successful. In contrast, a programmer gets few accolades if she can just "be a great programmer" for an hour a month - what is instead considered with programmers is their entire output, which puts an entirely different series of pressures and constraints on the programmer.
Brown belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu here. I love coding for some of the same reasons I love training and sparring. It's endlessly complex, so you never run out of new challenges.
Lately I try to master one new concept every year. In 2014 it was monads in Haskell, 2013 lisp macros, 2012 basic functional programming in lisp and F#. 2011-2008 it was web dev, TDD, OO, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C#, access forms, basic relational database design, and VB.NET.
The last two years I also take a train to work, and in that time on the ride I've started a streak on github where I post all my practice. I commit at least one commit every day either on a side project, a course I'm taking, or a book with exercises I'm working through. The urge to keep the streak going is a big motivator.
Like with everything, it depends. The way you use time is key to pretty much everything. The right hurdles to go for, for learning, are always the ones where you are outside of your comfort zone and you have to struggle for some number of hours, days, etc. to pick up the concept.
But the other half of that is to have a well-rounded life that will keep you on track. If everything feels like homework, you're stressed or unhealthy, etc., it'll be hard to summon the energy to really struggle with a hard problem. Try slicing up your year into the fractions of time you'd expect to spend working on anything. When you budget it this way instead of making a rigid schedule, you spot opportunities to break away from everything else and spend a week or so just trying to do one thing.
I'm not particularly senior so other people might be able to give you better answers. Nevertheless I would definitely recommend that you do a lot of reading. It really helps to know current technologies and more importantly understand why they exist.
You should also try your hand at developing with technologies that you don't know. It's of course useful and more scalable to read and learn about technologies out there, but actually using or implementing something with them brings your understanding to a higher level in my opinion. After all, you could know that technology X is better for something, but until you actually have gone through the suffering it was meant to solve and then used X to resolve it, you won't really understand it.
>but eventually I'll have a family and other obligations,
Get them involved. I teach my nephews programming and math. I am teaching him javascript right now. I am not good at javascript myself, but it is an opportunity for me to learn.
I once had a conversation with someone who described themselves as "rich." They claimed the poor had it easy. I asked him: "If the poor have it so easy, would you switch places?"
There was silence.
Do the poor not have to pay for things that the rich have to pay for? Yes. Is their life ultimately easier as a result? I don't think so. Coming from a poor background and now having experience with the average software engineer's salary, I'd rather have the latter, 100%.
Your question seems to me to be a false equivalence. The word "easy" is perceived as coming from this: A "rich" person sees him or herself as putting a lot into the economic system and, therefore, receiving much from it but he or she also sees a "poor" person as putting very little into the economic system yet still receiving an amount sufficient for survival and some luxuries from it (and, since social welfare is paid for through taxes, also reducing the amount that the "rich" person receive back from his or her economic input).
In other words, "those people have food, a refrigerator, a car and an iPhone, how bad can it really be?"
