101–110 of 322 posts
Accept all negative criticism advice as well as you possibly can. If it's just someone being an asshole it's very easy to know that and just ignore, but if it's real it's the most valuable feedback you can get.
This is not going to go well in the US or the British culture...
The people you spend the most time with affect how you think and what you do.
Unfortunately, sometimes I find myself surrounded by people who have vastly differing life philosophies than my own (relatives, friends, spouse). In that case, the disagreement in a way pushes me harder to achieve what I want to out of sheer stubbornness than if I actually was surrounded by people who thought the same way as me.
Always make backups. The little bit of time it takes will be a life saver if anything transpires unexpected. Oh and don't deploy on Fridays.
On this same note, test your backups occasionally. Untested backups are worse than no backups.
Make things pretty. No amount of hard work and usefulness can amount to a beautiful product. I have strong feelings about Lean Startup who told me to create a MVP, which made me look like an amateur. So, listen to the marketing people and wait to release a beautiful finished product.
As a user I beg of you not to sacrifice usefulness and features for Pretty. Seen way too may times where stuff was rewritten to look better but usability suffered. Case in point: Walmart recently redid their self checkouts. The new system looks a lot better and I like it if it did not take 3 times as long to pay. It even took forever compared to the old one to register cash being inserted. And there were several comp…
Life, by default, is suffering. The surprise is not the fact that there is suffering around the world, but how we managed to achieve the level of prolonged peaceful co-existence that we have today. We should act in such a way that suffering or chaos is reduced---however small such reduction may be. Suppose you had a choice between watching T.V. and washing the dishes. Watching T.V. means, perhaps, that your spouse wi…
The people you spend the most time with affect how you think and what you do.
I originally posted this separately, but then saw your post and am adding it here. What you said and the below were some of the most profound realizations for me, even though it seems so obvious, but the extremely high degree to which this is true isn't that obvious. --- People are incredibly hard to change. Spent half a year teaching someone programming. They told me they wanted to learn, etc. Ended up doing most of…
In one interpretation, that's a scary thought encouraging selfishness. In my view, it's a pragmatic description of reality, encouraging judiciousness. I still find great joy in helping others, sometimes at some expense to myself, but I now feel a lot less bad about making value judgements before deciding if such a thing is worthwhile, rather than feeling obligated to help everyone that might want it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha, I’ve learned the hard way that: By the time you invoke a contract, the relationship is already in trouble.
This is usually true. There's two saving graces, though: 1) Just having the contract sometimes gives people pause about what boundaries they're willing to cross. 2) A contract can help you salvage things that are not the relationship once the relationship has gone south if you choose too.
Sadly, after more than 20 years building software, _NEVER_ trust a business person. My faith in humanity had to have me bitten by this the hard way more than once.
When I see business people smile at each other and shaking hands, I cannot make sense of this in my mind. What's the point of smiling when both people couldn't care less if the other person dropped dead on the spot.
Documentation is like sex. If it is good, it is good. If it is bad it is good