111–120 of 213 posts
Sorry but nope. Just because you've worked on something that is popular doesn't mean that it is of good quality or well developed or secury or that the particular devs are competant or good.
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What's wrong with being comfortable though? Why should one be dissatisfied with being satisfied? Is satisfaction ever OK? And if so, when? When can you know for sure that you've actualized your full potential? Is it even something that's knowable? This seems overly omniscient to me. I see this fearful, regret-filled ethos driving a lot of my peers and the western culture at large and I worry about the mindset it inst…
There's something in human nature that finds meaning in turbulence, friction, conflict, movement. A sense of being challenged, pushing past limits, propelling into excitement and change. When you reach a state where you have all your needs met and don't need to go any further, there still remains a sense that there's more left undone. Comfort can be equated with stagnation. It's a Nietzschean notion. A will-to-danger…
Or are you saying that there is no way to be productive without the stress that is more and more present in our daily lives, in this environment of competition and constant yearning for more, for example?
Edit: deleted a phrase.
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I read this based on some HN comments, I found it to be pretty motivational but not much else. Was there anything else you gained from it that I may have skipped?
The whole thing is concrete examples of thinking deeper about a problem. I guess it can be motivating if you’re ever in position to corner an enemy army. I’d say it’s examples of game theory, that worked, without any sort of sense of game theory existing. It’s kind of the root of a weird synthesized way of thinking about the world.
There are two kind of life - swim in the sea and walk the mountain. Swim in the sea you enjoy but nothing left behind. We call the people good at this guys with wisdom. Walk the mountain you left a path. If the steps repeated made a path to ease late comer. But if not continue walk the path will be covered and gone. When you walk you follow path not known who made it in many cases. Or create your own. We call them pe…
No offense, but you claim you have been "officially coding for 25 years now". You state you are 36. Were you really, officially doing anything at 11 years of age. What does that mean? I was a solder tech at 13 years old. I NEVER throw that out there in any blog or write up, even though I was _literally_ getting a paycheck from a company. Does that make me an official solder tech? Hell no. When people ask how much exp…
I made my first BASIC game on an Apple IIe in the 4th grade at 8 years old. I didn't start professionally coding until 23 when getting paid to code/create. Though I still use that initial game as motivation to keep creating, building and shipping products.
My main goal with coding is creative and shipping products, I still had that goal even way back on the Apple IIe. The idea of making games to make a living was amazing, luckily I get to do that and I think it has lots to do with that 4th grade honors/GATE program group where a couple kids and myself made BASIC games.
Another big impact was my Pascal/programming teacher in high school Mr. Iles. He let us mess around with all sorts of fun during class and at lunch in computer lab. We setup the first internet and TV cards I had ever seen in '92-'94. We played games like Scorched Earth and created games, one of my friends Adam worked for Intel and was making Sierra looking games at the time.
I have had computers at home since middle school and always created projects on them including programming/art projects. I taught myself web development, interactive development (Flash and others in late 90s), and game development with C++ before having professional work by completing projects, much of it pre-internet or early internet just by books and BBSing/IRC. I studied the Quake II engine in early 2000. I learned Unreal starting with 2003 mods and Unity in 2008 on my own, and now make games on those platforms. When mobile finally hit with the iPhone in 2007/8, I realized it was the next handheld gaming market with the SDK and OpenGL support and jumped on that.
All of those moments have major impact on future programmers, it did to me. So people really can be seen as "officially coding" well back into elementary/middle/high school, but learning and shipping/creating is a consistent thing in my life since then.
It would have been better for OP to say "professionally coding" for less time since they were actually paid to program, but even an artist or writer or actor would say they started way back then but they later got paid/professional work to solidify their field or career professionally. I professionally started working as a coder/web/interactive developer in 1996 and have worked at tech companies, agencies and game studios since doing web, app, game development for entertainment, promotional and marketing systems.
My advice to programmers, creators, product developers is to always be creating products for yourself, to ship to the world on a consistent basis, perfect or not, everything is iterative.
Work projects are important as well, but to feel fulfilled, side projects or eventually going fulltime on your own projects/products where you get to decide and create is much more fulfilling. It can make contract/work projects less intense and can make you a better team member when you can relinquish control on those projects to a team while you get to work on your projects in freedom or with small teams of people that work great to ship content to the world. Programmers that aren't doing their own thing, might have difficulty with ego and making sure everyone uses what they like in terms of tech/process/product/creative properties of a project.
> "25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning"
Good, it is always better to have a beginners mind even if you have decades of experience. The more you can create on your own the better. If your friend that you helped quickly learned and created a website, you should thank them that they motivated you to publish and start building for yourself.
Programming is a tool, to create, to build products, but shipping and making them public is what it is all about, no matter when you start.
What every salary-person has to show for it: a life lived; bills paid; food on the table; health; a roof over your head; a body not ravaged and damaged by hard labor; the ability to relax and have some entertainment in the evening; a place to sleep; comfort; relative stability; the ability to make a living using mostly just your brain. Yes, perspective is important, and I’m not saying one should not strive to make mo…
Maybe some of us tend to mix up "a life lived" with overachieving. In other words, we only feel it worth if we produce something truly outstanding.
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Hannah Arendt draws a useful distinction between "labor" and "work." Labor is effort required to sustain life: catching food, finding water, plowing crops. Because living creatures need these things continually, labor never ends. Food is eaten or decays and new food must be grown. Work, on the other hand, has a defined start and endpoint. Ideally, it produces something enduring and unique. In ancient times, labor was…
Completely different angle: We're primates who by nature are very hierarchy oriented. We judge our lives by how high in the hierarchy we are. And no matter how rich society gets, how good our homes, health, food supply and culture are, we still end up on average in the middle of the pack. And maybe that's what feels like you have "nothing to show for it".
The tendency of evolutionary psychology to assert that life is governed by primal instincts established in harsher times isn't politically neutral.
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Unless the car is a very rare make / model, you will nearly always lose money on it. You won’t suddenly discover a rare carbuerator buried in there that, with some elbow grease, add $50k of value to the car. I realize this is missing the point, but this is why one should pick metaphors carefully.
Can't speak for other places but in my city many have made a business out of doing this. They buy and soup up old cars. There's a trust factor because they've been in the business for more than a decade. Also, they have a reputation for selling at comparatively higher prices -- and they don't seem to be running out of business. https://m.indiamart.com/yash-car-bazar/
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You forgot to mention millions of dollars of value created for other people.
A lumber jack cuts down a tree and sells the wood for $500 to a high end furniture maker. This furniture maker then produces an armoire that he sells to a rich person for $7000. Was that lumber jack exploited because he only made $500 from the wood?