Not all passions, pursuits and energy return Nobel Prizes. Something to be mindful of when reading too far into this. Still, I learn things that are interesting to me and sometimes I get lucky and people want to pay me and other times a new technology comes out and I wasted a few good years. Since I’m making my decisions on what to learn, it doesn’t seem like wasted time, but rather a shit ton of fun.
Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
231–240 of 285 posts
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this way of looking at the problem, I wouldn't have thought of this! I think this relies implicitly, too, on incompressibility of the fluid, no? As well as surface tension? Otherwise, we might imagine the fluid having less density at the bottom, while occupying a circular cross-section of the same area.
It does rely on incompressibility, but, to this order, does not include surface tension. The water faucet puzzle that interested me as a student was after the water had reached the sink and begun to spread out radially from the stream. Have you noticed that there is a circular boundary where the layer of water suddenly changes depth?
You mean the hydraulic termination shock?
Something like this: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ryzFfMYaEV4/TZist3z0dxI/AAAAAAAAAE...
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not popular because it's not realistic in most environments. In many cases it's advantageous to use those things you listed because that's what the market can provide talent-wise. I'd rather deal with learning new tech that's well documented than some custom lib that "just works" but no one understands because the architect left years ago. My whole career has been about consistent education, so that doesn't inti…
I believe you have agreed with me in your points especially regarding talent and turnover. The shiny tech today will be a legacy 6 months later or a year if you’re lucky. Then the talent pool will change and you can’t attract the devs who religiously follow new trends. You’ll end up hiring people to deal with your {legacy} system or as you pointed out .. substantial changing it.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#234Goal-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 why if you don't enjoy leet puzzles, you don't learn anything, or can't even do them.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#235Earlier 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…
I still use Heroku for almost all my personal projects. I stopped for a while, but they now allow you to dockerize your projects and push them to their registry. They also allow you to have multiple apps with access to shared resources. Those two changes have made it much more flexible than it was back in the early days. You never realize how much configuration of AWS is like pulling teeth until you stop.
I'm going through literally what you mentioned last. I had a very simply API built on lambdas for a side project, that worked perfectly fine till last month. But now, every minor change I make to that code results in some error or the other that I can't figure out for the life of me. It has been so bad that I had to quit the project altogether.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
You can still do side projects when you’ve got kids. You just have to treat your priorities seriously, which usually means having to give up most of the netflix/social-media time. You also have to realize that in a two parent household, you don’t usually need both parents looking after the kids, and it’s better for both of you if you take turns (for your sanity AND for your free time).
That sounds pretty promising. Does taking turns work well in practice?
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yet if I go back to my non-management dev friends and talk about this, they are all like "eeeew, what about X and Y" and I'm just like, but neither the citizens or my IT operations staff gives two shits about any of that. That's exactly what I meant. I remember arguing with a colleague who over-engineered a simple ORM table by having 3 classes. One was just an empty class, the other was an empty interface, and the…
For some reason the first time I do something I always over engineer it... it took me a lot of self growth to take feedback like yours seriously and not get defensive of my “what-if” thought patterns.
I’ve gotten into the habit of just pumping out a naïve solution without worrying about anything and then throwing it away and re-building more thoughtfully because now I have full sense of the scope and some immediate edge-cases. As long as the thing is small enough to do that.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#238Some past threads:
Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 - Nov 2015 (22 comments)
Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 - April 2012 (66 comments)
Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291773 - March 2011 (22 comments)
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not popular because it's not realistic in most environments. In many cases it's advantageous to use those things you listed because that's what the market can provide talent-wise. I'd rather deal with learning new tech that's well documented than some custom lib that "just works" but no one understands because the architect left years ago. My whole career has been about consistent education, so that doesn't inti…
it's advantageous to use those things you listed because that's what the market can provide talent-wise More silliness. Pay developers enough so that they'll stick around. If they stick around, then you don't need to hire for talent in a particular framework or language. You can hire for intelligence, creativity, passion, drive, whatever... and invest in training people when they get there. Jumping from framework to…
> Pay developers enough so that they'll stick around
It's amazing FANG companies have any turnover based on that logic. Turnover happens for a variety of reasons... like global pandemics... you can't make a blanket statement like that and expect to be taken seriously.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not popular because it's not realistic in most environments. In many cases it's advantageous to use those things you listed because that's what the market can provide talent-wise. I'd rather deal with learning new tech that's well documented than some custom lib that "just works" but no one understands because the architect left years ago. My whole career has been about consistent education, so that doesn't inti…
I believe you have agreed with me in your points especially regarding talent and turnover. The shiny tech today will be a legacy 6 months later or a year if you’re lucky. Then the talent pool will change and you can’t attract the devs who religiously follow new trends. You’ll end up hiring people to deal with your {legacy} system or as you pointed out .. substantial changing it.
React/Redux/Angular all have staying power so I don't understand your point. I don't know what you mean by "shiny" tech. Other than specific libs that go unmaintained, most popular tech has some staying power.