Only 1 mention of pBase in this thread so far, I really liked this idea of having a database of people, I'm wondering if someone has solved this problem already?
Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
301–310 of 415 posts
Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not (just) about social outlet, it's about growing and learning professionally. Unless your job is to blindly implement features someone else adds to a spec sheet it's always worthwhile to get professional input from people from different fields. Often they'll have unique ideas and insights that comes from having a different background and different experiences.
To add to this, in no circumstance have I ever seen developers spending 100% or even close to 90% of their time actively writing code or thinking about code and working. Heck, for most of the ones I’ve worked with, it’s probably closer to 60% productive time during office hours, with the most productive being somewhere between 80-100% busy. Just because you (the person before you, actually) are a reclusive jerk, does…
Yeah but the difference is when you work remote, you can use that other 40% of your time to:
- run errands
- do the laundry
- hit the gym for a while
- cook a tasty lunch or even dinner for later.
Whereas in the office, you just use that time for chitchat, HN/reddit, wondering around etc.
And I'm not a reclusive jerk, I like my coworkers and I do enjoy it when we meet up in person, but I don't need to see them every day. We have a short voice call most days, and we catch up irl possibly 6-12 times a year which is already more than I see some of my friends who live further away.
Honestly there's just so much more time in the day for my personal hobbies and activities that I don't think I could ever go back to on site, or even full-time/more than 4 days/week for that matter.
Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
#303I’ve always admired Wolfram. As he said in the article he could have made his company much bigger but he has a great thing going and gets to do what he loves most every day. Do really cool stuff, mostly stay out of the rat race and make a few bucks.
Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
#304I applaud his work ethic, but can you imagine how many people it takes to support this work style? Programmers building custom interfaces, around the clock monitoring people for his streaming whims (mentioned in the article), system admin's keeping his home cloud running, his personal dev cloud at the office, and the syncing between them. It seems pretty personnel intense
Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
#305Some pretty cool things: - He's a CEO who dogfoods his own software! Not only that, he seems to be one of its most prolific users. That's amazing. Having worked for over a decade at Google, I sometimes wonder if the founders still use the products. Larry Page used to always harp on latency (rightly), and now Google products are slower than ever. - He's a remote CEO, and supports remote working! It sounds like the com…
My son and I met Stephen and his son at the NY Maker Faire a few years ago. As you might imagine, his son (I think he was around 11 then) takes after his father and was heavily into programming already. Imagine having him as your father! Lucky bugger.
I saw a cool presentation by wolfram’s son last year. He seemed early twenties.
It was a neat demo of using population data and quickly running it through Mathematica for nice chloropleth maps, charts, etc.
He was pretty cool and answered questions afterwards.
He was showing how the tool is useful for social science, but it’s so expensive.
I hope that if Wolfram ever retires, he will open source it because it’s so useful beyond the current customer base who values it enough to pay.
Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
#306Funny, I do this with my digital trash can: When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away…
I do something similar and thought it was a cool reference to find another does it as well.
I don’t throw the second pail away and just put it in a storage bin, forever (so far). About once a year, I fish out a document. To me, it seems cheaper than the time I spent trying to think about how to sort or keep stuff.
Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
#307Only 1 mention of pBase in this thread so far, I really liked this idea of having a database of people, I'm wondering if someone has solved this problem already?
Also: https://sivers.org/dbt
Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
#308How cow, this guy is the world's most organized person. I operate in the exact opposite way. The more disorganized, temporary, inconvenient, and cluttered my workspace is, the more I can ignore the outside world and focus on the abstract problem at hand.
Completely unqualified thought, but I think it has to do with how you organize information in your brain. Are you spatially oriented or do you think in lists?
I'm a chemist, and I definitely think spatially. Creating images of physical objects in my head and reorienting them is a major part of my job, and the "memory palace" has been the most valuable memory tool I've found.
I can't think if there's an extra set of papers on my desk. I tend to organize my tasks using the physical space on my desk, so the most urgent item is about 3 inches from my keyboard at any time. I start to get anxious if too many things pile onto my desk without intentionally organizing them into priorities.
Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. It will always be easy to look at something from the outside and point out all the ways it should or can’t work or could work better. The systems and people involved are usually much more complicated. The world also owes itself more compassion. “Thousand foot” criticism lacks compassion.
You're describing a policy of not making frank assessment of the efficacy of business practices.
More like a policy of avoiding drive-by commentary on businesses with which one has little knowledge or investment.
Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like some people get a lot out of it, and others not so much. As in, if someone has the type of personality where they work best with lots of "heads-down" time on projects (and frankly many of the best engineers I know are like this), give them that space to do their best work without being interrupted by That One Person Who Always Comes Over to Chat. Most offices and even most orgs / teams have THAT DUDE. If…
For what it's worth, I seem to recall reading that the most effective engineers are not necessarily the ones that (heads down) create the best solutions for some specific challenges, but those that know who is the best person to ask about (or task with) a specific problem. So, the Dude might be contributing quite a bit.
There's also the person who seems to not be contributing but who gently steers others towards a solution. Without this person, the team wouldn't work well, but looking in from the outside (or even from the inside sometimes), the person looks like they're doing very little.