61–70 of 128 posts
There is a quote from Louis Nizer that applies here: "He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist." Its that last part that is hard to bridge for a lot of engineers. The thing that did it for me was sitting through a LOT of formal usability studies. Seeing folks actually use an application you ma…
I feel like my experience is the opposite of this. I've never understood something until it stood between me and building what I needed to build. This approach has been great professionally, but lately I'm becoming more interested in theory intensive fields and struggling to find resources that teach from the perspective of someone who wants to build something that requires the knowledge involved, rather than someone…
FWIW all this math stuff a) makes way more sense with some FP knowledge, and b) is not all that hard to understand in the context of a project.
Finally, for extra immersion, start reading Data Tau (the data science version of HN). Just pick out stuff that's related to what you're working on, and then try to understand a whole article or something. That's what I did with HN and I grew exponentially as a programmer because of it.
Here's a priority list that you should typically follow for making anything. 1. Make it work. 2. Make it not break. 3. Make it fast. That's it really. Until the performance of something is blocking what you need to do somewhere else leave it the hell alone.
Per (as far as I can tell) the original: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast 1. Make it work. 2. Make it right. 3. Make it fast.
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coming up with side projects is difficult.
Yeah, this is my problem as well. I have a really hard time coming up with ideas for a good side project, and then when I do, half the time I find out someone already implemented something like that and it feels like I'm just pointlessly reinventing the wheel. I think I need to do a better job of reminding myself that it's not pointless as long as I learn something.
There is a quote from Louis Nizer that applies here: "He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist." Its that last part that is hard to bridge for a lot of engineers. The thing that did it for me was sitting through a LOT of formal usability studies. Seeing folks actually use an application you ma…
You can't always fix it. If it were that simple, everyone would be using Python 3 already.
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Why not integrate new things to learn with a fun side project?
coming up with side projects is difficult.
For example, I'm working on plotting parking tickets in Chicago. Tons of FOIA, lots of data analysis, sanitizing, python, GIS, government induced hair pullings, gnu cli tools, civic meetups, web scraping, etc. Finished this[0] last night using 730k parking tickets after a LOT of cleanup with python. There's no way in hell I would've been able to do this a year ago without stepping into something so deep.
[0] https://plot.ly/~red-bin/6.embed (just
"He who rests while other people work with their heads, hands, and hearts is a capitalist".
and it doesnt end there, after you build the stuff, you need to make sure that the stuff solves a problem, which to me is a much more harder problem.