251–260 of 553 posts
Improv lessons. Seriously. Being confident speaking in front of others and the life lessons it provides ("yes, and") are absolutely indispensable. It brought me out of my shell and advanced me in my career significantly, all while having fun and making friends.
Spend $9,000 US dollars to get a MS in CS, Data Science or Cyber Security from Georgia Tech. It's a solid top 10 CS program. It will take a few years, but it is definitely a great investment. If you don't already have an undergrad degree and/or want a quicker program, look at some of the reputable code/security academies that partner with major state universities. They cost a bit more 15K to 20K but are shorter (typi…
I thought that price had to be a typo... but wow you are not kidding. I wonder why it is so cheap? Seriously considering it.
One downside to this model is that for some courses, like those with rapidly changing content, the lecture videos can go out of date after a year or two. GT needs to address this somehow. (Their ML and computer vision courses especially suffer from this.)
But their degrees are still a great value and worth every penny.
I once did a two-day workshop on negotiation techniques, which covered not only methods but also helped me to become more comfortable dealing with the psychological stress that's induced in many negotiation situations. So far I'd say the course (which was free as I won it as a prize in a business plan competition) is directly responsible for at least 50-100.000 € of additional revenue that I made in the last years, s…
It was a really great thing and I highly recommend it to everyone.
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Every local library could store the full digitised book contents of the LoC[1] for about $5,000. That this isn't happening is a crime. ________________________________ Notes: 1. I get about 200 TB based on 40 million books, OCRd at 5 MB per book. A 2 TB SATA 5200 RPM drive runs about $100, and the full collection would fit on 50 such drives. Full optical scans are ~10x larger. The LoC's collection includes another 13…
Interesting. I web searched and Google told me 10TB so I went with that. I think we're still within the information revolution and to put it into perspective let's look at the textile revolution. Clothes used to be expensive. Someone maybe owned 1 or 2 sets, often passed down from their parents. You could easily illustrate your wealth by wearing many layers of fine material. Simply owning many clothes was sufficient…
Fads-as-signalling shows up in many places if you look for it: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...
Information is ... somewhat trickier. Clothing is manifest and overt. Information ... mostly isn't. (Memes, logos, jingles, musical hooks, and slogans being prime exceptions.) Possession of specific information becomes a credible (expensive to obtain, hard to falsify) indicator of strong group identity --- whether you're talking about membership within a religious sect, programming subspecialty, profession, banking cabal, political party, or neihbourhood gang. Various fandoms seem to be a reasonably benign (for now) expression of this.
Denis Didrot despaired at the overwhelming abundance of information facing him and his fellow Encyclopédists, in 1775. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2877
The total number of titles in Europe at the time was about one million. Today, one millon titles are published per year. (http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker-Data.html) On average, that's one book per 330 Americans. Who read fewer than one book per year, on average.
What does it mean to publish if what's recorded is never read? The old WORN drive joke (write once, read never) has fangs.
Or if different cultures (religious, geographic, professional, political,...) share no common literary or informational references?
The therapist is a good one already suggested. Also instead of other PD I would suggest to save (invest) as much as possible as early as possible. A career in tech is very seldom healthy as a forever job so having an escape path is important. I used this technique to get enough invested by 45 that I could comfortably live on the dividends/capital gains/passive income it generates without ever touching the investment…
> My career has been much more rewarding since.
That sounds like an interesting story. Any more details?
I've enjoyed having an O'Reilly Safari subscription for random access to books. In particular, the Pragmatic Programmer and Designing Data-Intensive Applications. I've also had good experiences with SCPD courses from Stanford, if your budget would cover those (they are at the other end of the price spectrum).
I frequently muse about whether Safari, which is valuable, is worth the $399/y Pro: I like being able to sample the same topic from many prospectives (one chapter from each of 3-5 books) Cons: I wouldn't spend /that/ much on books in a year, the quality of the videos is widely variable, the search (including quality filtering) is _terrible_, and the inability to bookmark specific talks within a conference is infuriat…
That said, it is fun to be able to randomly access books on a topic without having to decide whether or not to buy them.
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I've also struggled with finding the right coach. It's a tricky evaluation problem: The first meeting shouldn't feel perfectly comfortable, the whole point is that they're going to bring in viewpoints that stress you out. But incorrect viewpoints also stress me out. I'd love to demand scientific evidence behind all of their assertions, but have (kicking and screaming) come to realize that many important things in lif…
> I'd love to demand scientific evidence behind all of their assertions, but have (kicking and screaming) come to realize that many important things in life simply don't/can't have studies at my preferred level of rigor. Hm. I still haven't accepted this, perhaps it's why I think a lot of management "techniques" are bullshit or bullshit combined with obvious truisms.
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> expensive workstation and cheap laptops as a front end This has worked really well for me too. Desktop is xeon with 64gb ram and I can take advantage of that power from anywhere.
Same here, AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with 64gb. I just realized I don't need that when I am seating in front of tv or while traveling, and as long as I can connect two external monitors to my laptop is enough. Something "similar" to this in MacBook world is 4k, and you end up with a portable device with worst battery performance and always suffering that you are about to loose your life. VS Code was definitely something that…
Same here, those two plus a 2 TB NVMe SSD.
If your budget is a few hundred, an IntelliJ Ultimate license. For me it's a force multiplier. Built-in highlights of things that can be improved (e.g. linting) is a bonus. In the end, things like VS Code are just text editors. I mean, you can't get a warning that the `[]` syntax isn't available in your old codebase's flavor of PHP (5.2) in VS Code. I think. Alternatively: Take time off. If you have enough money to l…
Improv lessons. Seriously. Being confident speaking in front of others and the life lessons it provides ("yes, and") are absolutely indispensable. It brought me out of my shell and advanced me in my career significantly, all while having fun and making friends.
Good idea. What do you mean exactly by improv lessons?