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Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

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Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#151

Post by Tyr42 »

chris_j wrote: post #65
_ph_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you need both. Formal education is great for "basic skills". Most people won't invent calculus on their own. Most of us learn reading and writing in a formal way. But equally, formal education is only half of what is needed to be good in a field of work. Then there comes the experimentation, the practise. All the knowledge that can't really be taught by a book. Sometimes a good teacher or mentor can help on t…

Wise words. I'm sure most of us would never have learned all the of the basics of mathematics on our own. Though I do remember Feynman claiming in the book that he'd come up with certain trigonometric concepts on his own and then had to un-learn the names that he'd created for them and learn to call them sin, cos etc. That was pretty mind-blowing. I suppose the question for me is: how do you find the right balance be…

I think he was fed up with the notations, and made his own, rather than coming up with trig from scratch.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#152

Post by shawnz »

Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

Is this really a matter of tooling versus programming, or is it a matter of wanting to create rather than wanting to re-use the work of others?

Even purely in code, you always (EDIT: usually) have the choice of implementing a solution yourself or finding the work of someone else, packaged into a library, which solves the problem for you.

Implementing the solution yourself may be the most satisfying way to scratch that instantaneous creative itch. But does it create the end result which you can be most proud of or satisfied with?

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#154

Post by mikewarot »

marcosdumay wrote: post #134
jackdawed wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagined it has to do with how the water coming out of a faucet is affected by gravity, and gains velocity. If you imagine two cross section slices, one near the faucet, and the other near the sink, the bottom slice is going faster than the top due to gravity. Another insight is that the amount of water (flow rate) passing through these slices remain constant. To keep the flow rate the same, it has to be narrower.…

> If you let the water fall far enough, it would hit terminal velocity Does it ever hit terminal velocity? There is no air in front of it, just more fast falling water. It's well known that water gains velocity until it vaporizes. I assume it vaporizes because some small flow turbulence gets strong enough to atomize it once it reaches enough speed.

The water will break apart into raindrops which fall at terminal velocity. Depending on relative humidity, they evaporate as they go, making them cool and get smaller, which lowers the weight/surface area ratio, and they get slightly slower.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#155

Post by yowlingcat »

SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #150
swat535 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except H…

Same. I completely overbuilt a recent side project and ended up scraping the whole thing because it wastes too much time to maintain it. As much as I love building new projects, having children at home reminds me that time is my only true resource and it's better spent with the kiddos (at least at this stage of my life).

Asking because I feel this way a lot too -- is this the kind of thing that was avoidable (IE if you built it on Rails/Django + Heroku would that have cut down the maintenance), or was there intrinsic complexity to the project that made it unavoidable?

More and more, I want to build things that are in the former category if I build them at all outside of work.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#156

Post by asoneth »

schindlabua wrote: post #66
Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

Hah sounds like you described me perfectly. But I do have to say, ever since I'm programming full-time I seem not to be able to just code for fun anymore. I used to program all day long.. and I guess I still do, but now it's for work, and after 8h of work I'm just done, you know? The "stuff I want to look at" list is growing longer and longer and there's no hope of me ever catching up. (I can't imagine how it is for…

In talking with fellow parents of young children the biggest variable seems to be whether there is a stay-at-home parent, live-in relative, or nanny who can help with the recurring labor required to run a household like cleaning, cooking, shopping, bills, repairs, yard work, taxes, etc. Otherwise that work piles up until after the kids go to sleep and on weekends.

You can sacrifice sleep, but that's not sustainable for everyone.

My partner and I block out a couple hours each week for the other to wrangle the kids so we can work on our various hobbies/projects. I've found that when I work on my computer-based hobbies I usually end up frittering away half the time reading online news whereas outdoor construction, yard, and bike projects don't seem to suffer from that so they end up making more progress.

Hopefully in ~5 yrs I can actually do some of these things with the kids and it'll get a little easier.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#158

Post by NBJack »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #69
Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

Hm, it’s different for me. Since at work I don’t really do the Continuous Integration/Delivery stuff (or anything with “real infrastructure”), I find it very enjoyable to fiddle with it at home. There’s no pressure to accomplish anything and I can just leave it alone for months or even years before coming back to it. There’s a nice side-effect, too: The CI definition documents how to compile the project. I recently d…

I would caution against trusting your build process definition to hold up to time. It's definitely better than nothing.

Even within the last few years of my job, we've had numerous disruptions to our automated builds due to everything from repo changes to version bumps in our fundamental deploy tools. I've got a self-assigned action to take just tomorrow due to how a change in how secrets management has now disrupted our performance testing process available to devs. Anecdotally, it seems more and more that as newer build tools move forward, they rarely seem to prioritize compatibility with existing methods (I'm looking at you, k8s, and your API versioning; "where feasible" turned out to be a loose definition).

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#159

Post by Oras »

swat535 wrote: post #137
Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except H…

Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand that its never about the tools and more about the delivery. The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node, go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux, amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution to a problem they have.

However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion among developers.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#160

Post by moldavi »

pomian wrote: post #147
schindlabua wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah sounds like you described me perfectly. But I do have to say, ever since I'm programming full-time I seem not to be able to just code for fun anymore. I used to program all day long.. and I guess I still do, but now it's for work, and after 8h of work I'm just done, you know? The "stuff I want to look at" list is growing longer and longer and there's no hope of me ever catching up. (I can't imagine how it is for…

An aside for future or present dad's (and all Parents.) There is so much joy and learning that happens with raising kids, that I think the secret is not fight it, but enjoy it. Almost sounds cliché, but embrace the experience. From the very beginning to when they are adults, to experience a window into your own life, a window into the world. These windows allow you to explore your surroundings and relationships with…

How do you let go of the things you want to do? I like to think that my side project is something only I could do, that the world needs but doesnt know it yet... so the thought of giving it up sends chills through me.

You seem to have a really nice outlook on things so I'd really appreciate any hints on how to reconcile this and get to where you are! (I dont have any kids yet)

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