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Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#451

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

Sukotto wrote: post #349

Every day is a struggle. For several years I've struggled to learn enough Japanese for daily living. (Spouse is Japanese and we moved to Japan a few years ago with our 3 school-aged kids). Very little success on this. しょうがないね My wife is out of town anywhere between 3 days to 2 weeks each month for her job. While she is gone, we rely heavily on her parents (with whom I cannot communicate directly). They take care of l…

I'm in a similar position. Maybe we should get in touch and figure out a way to hold each other accountable to learning the language.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#452

Post by n0tme »

I am 35 and I am lonely and it's not getting any better + my job is getting boring (DBA), since I am pretty familiar with everything, and there's no chance for me to switch to programming, even though I know JS and many other languages, but my resume says: 10+ years DBA.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#453

Post by Tade0 »

exikyut wrote: post #381
Tade0 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less than two days ago lerna left-padded out of being FLOSS and since Babel uses lerna we're having this conversation now: https://github.com/babel/babel/issues/8579#issuecomment-4169... I pine for the times when we could just place a few tags here and there and call it a day.

Whoa, this is awesome. (I mean that half-sarcastically in a "you must go and see, you won't believe it" kind of way.) I'll cherry-pick these comments, which I think have the best signal/flame ratio: > ... > this doesn't seem safe anymore. this stack has too many individuals with no oversight in charge > i really wish the javascript community would start seeing unnecessary tooling as a vulnerability > this happens so…

Whoa, this is awesome. (I mean that half-sarcastically in a "you must go and see, you won't believe it" kind of way.)

It definitely inspires awe.

I mean, what am I supposed to make of this? https://github.com/palantir/tslint/issues/4141#issuecomment-...

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#454

Post by amorphous »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #240

I have a very wide area of interests, and doing things takes time. But while I'm doing thing 'A', I think about the fact that I'm making no progress on 'B', 'C', ... 'n' and it distracts me both from thinking as deeply as I need to on thing 'A' and the enjoyment I get from getting something done. So I struggle with letting go of the desire to get everything done that I can imagine would be fun and interesting to do.

Yes yes yes

We live in an age where the ability to say "no" has become more important than saying "yes". It used to be the other way around. I grew up in the 80s and all I had was my VC-20 learning basic and later assembler. That's it. Then there was the library or bookshop, where I would find once in a while something really interesting. Nowadays, the possibilities are endless.

On top of that, I have realized that my brain has changed over the years. Feeding it constantly with new stuff is not healthy. The good news is that this process is reversible. Things like practising meditation can help a lot.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#455

Post by amorphous »

legohead wrote: post #219

I don't like the new way of doing things. Kubernetes, node, react, terraform... Everything is more complicated and also more fragile. I feel like the software world is collectively mad and I'm sitting on the outside asking "wtf is going on?" Or maybe I'm the crazy one.

Certainly not crazy.

I started programming on a VC-20 doing basic and later assembler. Just this for years. Glorious times.

What helps a little is to go deep into the history of computer programming and see the big picture. The fundamental problems defined in the 30s ~ 50s are still very much relevant. Kubernates, node, react etc are just ripples.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#456

Post by phyalow »

_sword wrote: post #159
phyalow wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in a very similar spot last year. I pivoted back to school and have 0 regrets, good luck.

Would you mind giving some more context around your age or relative career maturity when you went back to school? I’m recently 27 and aiming for grad school next year, accelerating my plans after a really bad summer grind in my role.

Im exactly the same age. Emails in my bio.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#457

Post by exikyut »

n0tme wrote: post #452

I am 35 and I am lonely and it's not getting any better + my job is getting boring (DBA), since I am pretty familiar with everything, and there's no chance for me to switch to programming, even though I know JS and many other languages, but my resume says: 10+ years DBA.

Does improving query optimizers or other internal stages sound interesting? If you've been a DBA for 10 years then you're going to know a few things about the way databases work internally, even if you specifically only have experience with say SQL Server or Oracle.

You could very probably pivot around into database development/maintenance and the transition (including the job-hunt bit) may be less bumpy than you expect.

The process of figuring out if this is a worthwhile idea might also be able to squash the loneliness bit: go tinker on open-source database systems for a while, in your spare time.

I've heard Redis is very clean C code and very easy to hack on, so that might be an interesting starting point. On the other hand Redis isn't quite SQL, it's a key/value store, so perhaps it wouldn't be a good fit.

MySQL and PostgreSQL are so part of the furniture one's initial thought on poking those might be "why would I even dive in", which is totally valid if nothing's on fire and there are no critical money-eating bugs or whatever. But the chances are a decade's DBA experience might come in handy.

I've no idea what languages you know, how much experience you have with what, and (most importantly) what random technical things will leap out at you as especially interesting when you see them.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#458

Post by exikyut »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #431
wetpaste wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just some MVP java app with an nginx proxy, elastic-search, and mysql? Why is this running in k8s on aws via Kops in conjunction with a cloudformation template for aurora inside of a VPC? With containers separately built via packer +ansible kicked off via jenkins after each pull request merge? The CI pipeline also kicks off a canary deployment in our UAT environment with a prometheus exporter for monitoring o…

Soooooo for those who read through this but didn't understand it, this is actually 100% accurate and a possibly commendable way to run an application in production. I do lament that tools have become so complicated, but just about every piece mentioned (except for maybe kubernetes?) actually does a thing that is likely useful to you in production. A run down: Java - yikes but OK, the JVM is an excellent piece of soft…

"Ah, so that's what Kops, cloudformation, aurora, packer, UAT, ELK, Jaeger, service meshes, istio and calico are."

"Yeah, no. I have no plans to try and actually make anything with that tangle. Hah."

"Although... I do know what nginx, java, containers, k8s, VPCs, ansible, jenkins, and CI are... so... maybe it's really all the same at the end of the day, I'll see everything in this list similarly 5 years from now, and I should see if I can tolerate it?"

"Hm. There is the small fact that I don't really know what k8s, VPCs, ansible and jenkins actually do, let alone the entire first list, and of all of these I've probably only really used Java, and that only a few times. I think I've had a few minutes' look at GitLab's Grafana dashboard once or twice?"

"I'll bet installing all of these, including all dependencies, would take probably multiple tens of gigabytes of diskspace, and probably consume more RAM that I have installed." (I'm running short on both, I have a few hundred MB of diskspace free right now, and never any free RAM :D)

"I wonder how effectively I can learn these on the job?"

"...I wonder if there are any jobs that don't require $tool_existence+1 years of experience with any of these before they even consider candidates ._."

Goes back to writing PHP script in text editor

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#459

Post by openfuture »

Discipline, time management, fear of commitment, money to some extent and then occasionally my self-image.

Reading the responses here makes me feel blessed for my problems. Also I am making progress on them (these are long term things that I will be dealing with in some form my whole life, hopefully the money one will be gone by the time I add health to the list).

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#460

Post by exikyut »

80386 wrote: post #30

I make I try to get at least one Git commit every day, but my job is pretty draining, so that doesn't happen. And sometimes all my projects get blocked on hard stuff that I don't have the energy to solve. For all I know, I might look alright on paper. I've co-authored a paper in a respectable journal, written a few Rails apps, a few desktop apps, and a crappy interpreter for an old language - which doesn't really use…

All the other comments are very nice-looking hiring offers, which is awesome.

But so far nobody's expressed interest in the interpreter for the old language. What language was it? I'm very curious!

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