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A Project of One’s Own

paulgraham.com

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Re: A Project of One’s Own

#281

Post by jimbokun »

grahamburger wrote: post #199
idiotsecant wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your disagreement! Anyone who has built a personal project and a real-world professionally engineered project knows that the actual tasks involved are wildly different. What you think the correct solution is becomes a tertiary consideration. You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others. Designing a treehouse for fun and designing a professional sol…

I mean, that's also true of hacking game mods as a kid vs. actual programming for money as an adult. But many professional programmers got their start by just playing around with computers as a kid.

Right, the business and politics parts are orthogonal to the engineering or programming parts. They are general facts of life you can't escape regardless of your vocation.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#282

Post by jimbokun »

convolvatron wrote: post #269
EarthLaunch wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, why push through on a fun personal project into causing burnout? Asking for...a friend.

I guess I have a different theory of burnout. to me it happens when I can't connect the dots anymore. its not because I worked too hard. company found a vertical and how I spend all my time trying to fix 'bugs' that are really because the product is being mis-applied. most of the senior team left and its clear that we aren't going to be taking on any other work than cleaning up. sales are flagging and its clear that…

Amen.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#283

Post by TeMPOraL »

idiotsecant wrote: post #192
TeMPOraL wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I'd say there is a pretty direct route. The kid is trying to construct a building. They face great many object-level challenges: what materials to use, where to get them, how to connect them, how to make the structure stable, how to reduce work, etc. Behind each challenge is a field of study for the kid to dabble in, in order to overcome the problem. "Real" architecture and civil engineering, as done by a…

I disagree with your disagreement! Anyone who has built a personal project and a real-world professionally engineered project knows that the actual tasks involved are wildly different. What you think the correct solution is becomes a tertiary consideration. You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others. Designing a treehouse for fun and designing a professional sol…

> You need to consider the desires of stakeholders, money people, regulators, and quite a few others.

You mean, like, parents? :).

I don't see the difference. The considerations you listed can sometimes dominate the object-level work, but they're also mostly generic skills for all creative white collar jobs. The core that distinguishes an architect from an aviation engineer or a graphic designer - this is the treehouse stuff.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#284

Post by enos_feedler »

brhsagain wrote: post #131

Good essay overall, but this footnote in particular stood out to me: > [2] Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the last war. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success was to acquire credentials while ascending some predefined ladder. But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on grades. How awful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects, and thereby gave the…

Very similar to my story. I grew up in a shitty industrial town of oil refineries. Schools and teachers were not that great, so I went to the local community college bookstore and stole programming books by stuffing them in my jacket and walking out. I got AOL, then internet and eventually IRC. I learned disassemblers, debuggers and x86 instruction set. Joined world-famous cracking groups and wrote key generators and cd checks. At the time I thought this was all normal, but looking back it was pretty wild. Eventually moved to silicon valley, worked for big tech, etc. But it was all no thanks to grades, exams, etc.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#285

Post by trilinearnz »

A delightful read. Certainly my most elative moments have come from personal projects, mostly games. Something I struggle with is gaining traction on subsequent projects when my burnout is at it's worst, as it's obviously a mentally-intensive endeavor despite the possibility of net gains.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#286

Post by borroka »

humanlion87 wrote: post #135
germinalphrase wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a teacher, this resonates. For many, the knowledge and skills development in school is too abstract. An aside: Is ‘take your child to work day’ even a thing anymore?

I have been in a couple of companies where they have had the "bring your child to work day" concept. Though it happens very rarely (maybe 1-2 times per year) I doubt that it has any impact.

It is for the parents and for the company, not for the kids. And, as it happened to a colleague of mine, it can be a sad day for those who cannot bring their kids to work on that day (e.g., disabilities, death). I would get rid of those days, stat.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#287

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #151
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #10

> It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams. The current educational system seems to turn off high school kids (anecdotal evidence being my own) from pursuing…

I have a 9-year-old, and he's pretty much into his "iPad time" where he gets 30 minutes per day. He's got a soccer team which demands a certain amount of time per week, but like most kids he has a lot of free time... We did two main things: 1) From the age of about 7, we started him on something called "Beast Academy", which is basically a maths course for kids, using examples in a cartoon-like style. He did simultan…

This is all good stuff. My kids are older and in high school so there is a change in attitude from their 9-12 year old versions to now that comes with being nearly an adult, legally speaking. There is only so much "spend X time on Y" you can do because the goal, at least ours, is to prepare them for life on their own. They need to do their schoolwork on their own without nagging. If we micro-manage their work, how will they succeed later on in college? They need to think about career options to at least narrow down schools that have potential majors. I'm not talking about deciding on a career, just give it some thought.

As an example of how their thinking changes (at least my kids and others), when they know the grading rubric the teacher uses and they have a B, they can do the math to figure out if an A is even possible. If its not, why bother with extra effort there? (that is their thinking)

In software terms this is like solving 80% of a performance problem by fixing a minor thing that was causing it. You are wasting effort to try and bring performance back much further.

Anyways I think what might work is just to get them to do something creative over the summer as a "project" but they choose it and work on it.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#288

Post by austincheney »

UncleMeat wrote: post #30
austincheney wrote: post #13

If I had to choose between my kids getting good grades and working on ambitious projects of their own, I'd pick the projects. And not because I'm an indulgent parent, but because I've been on the other end and I know which has more predictive value. When I was picking startups for Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those. Tha…

> mention explicit use of events or the DOM and the common sentiment reminds me of reading history about lynchings in Jim Crow era and sun down towns Mass murder with no judicial punishment resembles people being mean to you at work? Black people were disemboweled and burned alive by gangs of people who did it for fun . This is the most ridiculous comparison I think I have ever seen on this forum.

Jim Crow is a collection of various discriminatory laws and regulations with the intention of institutionalizing racial segregation and discrimination.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

It seems you are confusing Jim Crow for the various riots and racial violence that occurred during that time period. It serves no benefit to falsely intertwine similar but separate historical concepts solely to write some vague hyperbole.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#289

Post by feoren »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #170
TeMPOraL wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being competitive in school-like activities provides them To an extent. I keep wondering, wouldn't it be better if schools/universities were structured as PvE challenges, not PvP ones? Trying to elicit a culture of collaboration, instead of pitting students against each other? I may be strongly biased, because I hate competition outside of games[0], and competitive incentives generally make me stop caring. -- [0] -…

If I was a Professor teaching the same class to two different sections, it would be really neat to give the entire winning section extra credit based on the difference between the average values of the two sections. This would encourage group study and would ultimately lead to students helping their other classmates out. And since teaching is the best way to learn, everyone would do better. Maybe you don't even need…

That's still a "student vs. student" mindset, just one that incorporates a form of collective punishment, which is against the Geneva convention. It's an absolutely atrocious idea.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#290

Post by elihu »

It's not important, but I wondered if the title was an allusion to one of the patterns in Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" titled "A room of one's own", about the necessity in designing houses to give everyone some bit of space that's distinctly theirs. The theme seems kind of similar, and PG makes a lot of architectural references in the essay.

In googling for "A room of one's own", though, I discovered that it's also the title of an essay by Virginia Wolfe written in 1929. It's possible that might possibly have inspired the name of the pattern in Christopher Alexander's book.

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