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Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
111–120 of 785 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
#112Listening to other people more. I'm the youngest of six children, and it's hard for me to get a word in edgewise when I'm at home.
Then one day I realised that women thought I was sexist and men thought I was an asshole because I dominated the conversation. I'm a grown man and don't need to take advantage of every opportunity to speak.
Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
#113Using a daily planner (on paper, not a app). I figured this out about 2 months ago.
Being able to write down the tasks and scan back through my backlog has helped me be more productive. For me, using a calendar service or task manager app just does not work as well... BTW, I am a millennial.
edit: I am 10 years younger then everyone else at my company and get questioned all the time about "why I use a day runner" when everyone else is on a smartphone.
Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an excellent point. Can you give any more detail on what you are doing instead of selling your time? I don't want specifics per say, just general ideas about what you have switched to and how it has been lucrative. I find the idea quite interesting.
I bought a really small business in the translation industry late last year. Since purchase our monthly revenue has grown ~ 190% and we have solid plans to continue the growth. We have 4 people on our internal team, but everyone works remote and part time (approx. 20 hours/week) including me. Our main workforce is made up of freelance translators (about 45 of them at the moment). I handle development, marketing, stra…
So an LSP?
Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
#115Hmmm, hate to admit this: Use a Mac for work rather than Linux. The unixness combined with availability of the likes of MS Office, together with the genuinely beautiful interface has really increased my throughput. Secondly: Doing 1.5 hrs exercise daily.
I've used Linux full-time for 11 years; booted into Windows about once or twice a year to try out a game, and had a Windows VM for photo editing (DxO doesn't work in WINE, and afaik, there are no good replacements for it). Just a couple of months ago I switched to Windows as the host OS and Linux in a VM running in the background 24x7 (off the raw disks, so I am virtualizing the same system that I ran as my host OS, which meant I didn't have to spend time re-installing and re-configuring everything).
As a long-time Linux die-hard who passed so many applications by because they didn't work well in WINE and/or virtualized Windows, it pained me to switch, but Linux is much more cooperative as a VM than Windows is (and it also pains me to "reward" Windows's bad behavior with the position of host OS). With appropriate tweaking (Dexpot) and a good terminal (ConEmu+Cygwin for SSH to my VM), Windows is basically just like a DE that can play new games (Overwatch, woot!) and run my photo editing software 5x faster than it ran in VM.
Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
#116Commuting by bicycle. Fresh air and exercise, all packed into the same amount of time it would have taken me to drive and park, even enjoyed the thrill and mental challenge of forcing myself out in the rain and snow. Took some shortcuts and explored areas I've never been to before.
The great thing about biking is that it opens up your route options. Almost any street is as good as any other - you'll make just about the same time on a residential street as a main street, so you have an almost infinite variety of options without much sacrifice in team.
Contrast with a car, where taking side streets will slow you down significantly.
Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
#117After 12 years of coding professionally, move from development into product management/ownership. It's like playing an instrument versus playing the orchestra. It ain't for everyone, and I won't claim I'm particularly good at it, but it's a fascinating new kind of creativity.
Who's doing the coding now? How does it feel to you if you have to "outsource" it and pay for every small bugfix? I'm asking because on the one hand, I enjoy coding. On the other hand, it might make sense to work ON the business, not IN the business in the future.
I'm a Product Manager inside a software company, which means I work with an internal development group to actually execute my ideas (certainly some POs/PMs work with outsourced staff, but that's not the case here, with the exception of one product where the outsourced staff are largely treated as direct team members, so the dynamic is largely the same as with our internal staff).
That means my job turns into talking to customers, collecting requirements and authoring user stories, prioritizing the backlog, and generally giving the developers all the information and guidance they need to build (what I hope is) the best product we can, with the right feature set, executed with the right timing.
Of course, I still enjoy coding, but what I enjoy about coding isn't the hammering of the nails, but rather building a finished product from which users gain benefit. In that respect, what I'm doing now is leveraging an entire staff of people to achieve a vision I couldn't possible deliver by myself, which is pretty damn cool!
The role itself is multi-disciplinary. I have to understand the technology in order to adequately gauge cost and complexity, technical tradeoffs, and so forth. But I also have to understand the business impact of those decisions, and the way those decisions affect the customer.
In my particular case, we're in a B2B environment where we do deep technical integrations as part of product deployment. So my customers are individual business owners and technical operations staff that I interact with directly on a very regular basis (as opposed to, say, a consumer product where you're dealing in aggregate customer behaviour).
Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
#118Exercise, though others have said that. Personally, I'd say that the thing that changed my life for the best has been Not Giving Tech Support. When I was a teenager I was kinda miserable because some people abused me for tech support. You know, it's nice to give favors, but at some point you're fed up of reinstalling every computer in your block every 6 months. People stop you on the streets and the first thing they…
As for me, I stopped giving tech support by saying "I don't use Windows anymore, probably I forgot how to do it; if you want to install Linux, I'm happy to help".
Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
#119Saving for FI (Financial Independence) If I save at my current rate I will achieve FI in 2022. If I had started saving aggressively sooner I would already be FI (I'm in my mid forties). I hate answering to other people and would rather work on my own stuff. FI will get me there. Read the book The Simple Path to Wealth to understand the process. Or this blog post is a good start: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02…
what does FI mean in your case -- retirement? i would think that means something different to everyone
Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
#1201) using git (or source control, more generally). One day, I figured all the devs (most better than me) around me were using source control. I asked a few why, and why I should use it. Now I realize I was treading a dangerous path before using git. 2) using the command line freely (ie : not being an expert, but being able to use it a bit and automate some tasks). At some point, I maintained several apps at once, and…
For #1+#2-- I'm also a convert, which is sadly still not as prevalent in my field (computational science) as it should be.
I always tell people: its a good 10% extra overhead you add to a project during design to be careful with regression testing and source control, and that is paid back many times the first time you avoid a dangerous bug or bad tarball that goes undetected for 3 months.