331–340 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.
I was lucky enough to get paid for this but I'll say it anyway: learning to speak is the only thing of lasting value I have gotten out of startup accelerators. I would have gladly drop a few grand to acquire that skill. In fact, I'm considering hiring a speaking coach to improve. I've historically been a strong written communicator, but it turns out that speaking is very different from writing. In fact, I had thought…
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Back in the 90s tech futurists were talking about having "the library of congress on the size of your finger nail". Now we actually could do something in that realm (LoC is about ~10tb and there's 1tb microsd cards; we're probably talking "within 5-7 years" without any exaggeration) but there's so many courts and laws stopping it from happening, the great cambrian explosion of knowledge has been held back.
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…
I agree and like the discussion you guy's started from my seemingly innocent comment.
I add one argument why I think scientific papers and nonfiction books (Library Genisis) should be free (and legal) ...
You often hear the complaint that so many people are uneducated and believe in conspiracy theories (or other stupid things). This is (imho) problematic for a democracy.
Giving free access to books and papers could really help.
Also a lot of research is founded by tax money and papers are by far the most expensive literature....
As a Python developer it has to be PyCharm Professional Edition. I am a more effective developer because of it.
> What would you do if you had a million dollars? > I'll tell you what I'd do, man, two monitors at the same time. Maybe I have less mental swap space than the average person, but nothing has increased my productivity like monitor space. Plunking down for an ultawidescreen was the best development decision I've made. Being able to have specs/docs + IDE + search + chat/email open at the same time, accessible with a ph…
As many others have said, books are the best things I've spent money on, but let me say more: Do books sometimes say things that are obvious? Yes. For example, when I first read Martin Fowler's book Refactoring, I had been renaming variables and moving methods from one class to another for years. But he gave a new framework for thinking about something that obvious. I've found the idea of separating out my coding flo…
> A typical industry book is $40-$50, and a typical text book is $100-$150. If this is out of some people's budgets, check eBay. Also some thrift store chains have certain locations that are book focused. You can get older edition textbooks for practically free. It's not like Claude Shannon's equations have changed. The old editions are effectively just as good. I've picked up plenty of classic books, HBR, Drucker, C…
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OP said they have a professional development budget, so it's presumably from an employer. Cute non-answer notwithstanding, I don't think their employer is going to allocate professional development resources for therapy.
What about their response makes you think it was a non answer? I specifically opened this thread to share the exact same experience, as therapy has helped my professional life much more than any book or tool I ever bought.