31–40 of 91 posts
I'm currently trying out vimwiki. Let's see how that goes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The corporate world doesn't work like this. Everybody is paid a salary exchange for 45 hours of your life each week and your assignments are generally governed by an agile sprint cycle, so there is absolutely no motivation to be productive. I’ve consulted in a lot of large enterprises, and this is really untrue. If you’re happy just stagnating and some level that you’ve decided is good enough, you can get away with…
You're describing the opposite extreme. Most people are aware that they need to strike a balance: be aware of your own marketability versus just doing enough but not burning themselves up. Being more or less productive is defined by - in no particular order - your salary, workplace culture (a due sense of agency and feeling respected,...), your own intrinsic motivation to choose a particular career path and personal…
No, I’m simply debunking the parent commenter’s assertion that “there is absolutely no motivation to be productive”.
> a large part of your toolbox and knowledge is perceived as "obsolete" within a short time (1 or 2 years)
This is a major exaggeration. I do a fair number of node projects. I did my first one ~8 years ago. I don’t think I’m close to doing my last one, and it hasn’t been hard to keep up with the changes in that time.
> Banks, airlines, public institutions,... don't operate on short timescales (5 or 10 years), they operate on long timescales (20 to 50 years out). They aren't interested in shiny tech
I feel like you haven’t worked in a bank or airline before. Most of them have ancient tech in their core infrastructure, but a) they’re not happy about that, they just don’t know how to change it and b) a vast majority of their technical workforce will have no contact with that at all. Your average sized bank will typically employ 0 DB2 DBAs (they’ll all just be contracted from IBM), and a very small team of Cobol devs. You could work writing code in a bank for 10 years and never meet one. Banks and airlines are constantly trying to modernize (especially since they’ve realized how much money they can save by employing SREs/DevOps engineers). They love shiny new tech. A large portion of my consulting work comes from such organisations that are highly motivated to implement it.
> there's still demand for COBOL and Perl programmers. You can perfectly build a career in as an expert in those areas.
No you can’t. Today’s COBOL engineers are the ones that survived getting laid off when banks decided they didn’t want to invest in COBOL anymore. There’s essentially no entry level COBOL jobs on the market today.
> you do not know half of this person's life and their decisions
I know he got laid off, and that he’s been looking for work since then. I also know his skill set is no longer in particularly high demand. I see this happen all the time. A significant portion of my work comes from large organisations seeking to modernize their technical capabilities. They tend to be filled with people like him when I start, and a non-trivial portion of them tend to be gone a year later (all of the ones who couldn’t adapt to the new technology).
> might be because he can't simply move to another area with more swing projects
There is really no such place. There are still companies that use technology like that, but the number of them is shrinking every year, and people aren’t using it for new projects.
The bottom line is that even in large inefficient organisations, there is still a strong incentive to be productive and to invest in developing your own skills. Most people expect their careers to last 45+ years. Even if it takes 10 years for your skills to become obsolete in a slow moving organisation, you’d still have to spend the first 35 of those years developing your skills.
I am stuck in the same loop of trying to find the best way to organise my thoughts. My best attempt was using Dropbox Paper. They have a great editing/writing experience, but eventually it got to a stage where the page load times took too long. I'm currently trying out vimwiki. Let's see how that goes.
Very true. I followed the same path, and a side project was always the way to learn something new. Sometimes those side projects become full on ventures as well. Added bonus. I also very well remember my joy after I "invented" the AMQ, only to later find out about ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ etc. (which didn't diminish that "proud" feeling)
Good work!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are unfinished projects worth anything to an prospective employer? I have plenty of projects I attempted before getting busy with real life. Should I show those when asked for a Github?
> unfinished projects Just redefine the scope, or the success criteria! If the project's purpose was to learn or experiment with X, it doesn't matter that it's not a polished product, it still served its purpose and as such can be considered done.
What is finished anyway? Are projects ever "finished"?
As someone, whose side project[1] graduated into a full-time company, I agree with a lot of stuff in this post - > Lesson 0: Programming in a void is worthless 100% true. If you are trying to learn a language without a goal, you'll probably never graduate from tutorials. Imposing your own requirements/boundaries, just makes the learning part more engrossing and you'll make connections which you won't otherwise. Itera…
Liste looks great! I've been looking around for a better tool to aid in note-taking after all the posts around this space over the last few weeks. Will keep an eye on it and good luck with the launch. How did you decide to start a company around the idea before launch?
It was mostly a personal itch. I had been using Pocket for sometime but it honestly wasn't cutting it anymore. I built a smaller app over the Pocket api but as time progressed, the app diverged more and more. Once the Pocket api just became a glorified database, I decided to go all in. I waited for other solutions to come around but none were satisfying enough. After 5 years I had enough, talked to some people who expressed similar desire and that's when I jumped in full time.
As someone, whose side project[1] graduated into a full-time company, I agree with a lot of stuff in this post - > Lesson 0: Programming in a void is worthless 100% true. If you are trying to learn a language without a goal, you'll probably never graduate from tutorials. Imposing your own requirements/boundaries, just makes the learning part more engrossing and you'll make connections which you won't otherwise. Itera…
There is typo on your site: saved serches -> saved searches
I am stuck in the same loop of trying to find the best way to organise my thoughts. My best attempt was using Dropbox Paper. They have a great editing/writing experience, but eventually it got to a stage where the page load times took too long. I'm currently trying out vimwiki. Let's see how that goes.
Over the years I've tried so many tools, languages, workflows, and the only ones that stuck were the ones that were boring but timeless. I've not just been gravitating toward OrgMode for all my note keeping, but I've also gotten more and more into bash for much of my stuff.
There are downsides to that, of course. It's frustrating that I'm mostly limited to text-only things, for example. But it feels like any investment into bash/emacs+orgmode/emacs+tramp/emacs+? offers so much more than becoming reliant on app number that quite possibly disappears or stagnates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are unfinished projects worth anything to an prospective employer? I have plenty of projects I attempted before getting busy with real life. Should I show those when asked for a Github?
YMMV, but when I interview as an employer is ask a candidate to talk me through a project they really enjoyed. It can be work-based or a side-project, doesn't matter as long as it's something they really enjoyed. We then use that to explore what it was that excited them, the technology decisions they made, etc.[1] If your answer was an unfinished project, I'd want to know why they were unfinished. Did you give up on…
I am stuck in the same loop of trying to find the best way to organise my thoughts. My best attempt was using Dropbox Paper. They have a great editing/writing experience, but eventually it got to a stage where the page load times took too long. I'm currently trying out vimwiki. Let's see how that goes.