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The Programmer's Brain

manning.com

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Re: The Programmer's Brain

#51

Post by arthur_sav »

mbfg wrote: post #18

The most important skills i wish someone had taught me when i was a young developer was how to interact with people in all areas of the organization, and how to deal with the politics. I was (as a young person), strongly against really wanting to know about these aspects, and instead wanted to be purely technical, but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.

Not sure i agree with this one.

Plenty of places where purely technical people are appreciated, you just have to be willing to move around companies until you find a good fit.

That is not to say that you won't interact with other people within the org but politics will be less relevant.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#52

Post by chenmike »

superasn wrote: post #48
mbfg wrote: post #18

The most important skills i wish someone had taught me when i was a young developer was how to interact with people in all areas of the organization, and how to deal with the politics. I was (as a young person), strongly against really wanting to know about these aspects, and instead wanted to be purely technical, but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.

As a product creator I can say the same about sales. How I wish someone had told me that when it comes to SaaS the 80-20 is 80% focus on sale (traffic, customer feedback, seo, conversions, etc) and 20 percent is actually technical. And it's not just about money, even OSS projects need a lot of push and support when the "fun" part is done.

It sounds like you’re at least partway into the journey of learning sales. Would love to know what resources you’ve consumed that were helpful to you

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#54

Post by abainbridge »

woleium wrote: post #2

are Manning books any better these days? They always used to rush the most awful poorly edited and planned content to market to be the first ones with a book on $NewTechnology

I read the first few pages. It was riddled with problems.

1. Section 1.1 shows an APL program "1 2 2 2 2 2 ⊤ n" and says, "The confusion here lies in the fact that you might not know what ⊤ means.". Nope. The confusion is that I don't know what any of the symbols do or how an APL program is structured. I expect this is the case for most readers.

2. There are 3 examples here. The discussions of the examples are not next to the examples. It is all jumbled up and hard to read.

3. The Java example spells main as mian.

4. Section 2 says, "programmers write a lot more code than they read". That is incorrect. For example, normally I read several of the solutions on Stackoverflow before I decide which one to copy and paste :-)

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#55

Post by jbluepolarbear »

mtrycz2 wrote: post #53
jbluepolarbear wrote: post #46

I need the version for programmers with extremely bad ADHD.

Did you already read this one?

I started to but none of it described how my mind works and I lost interest. I got to the speed reading part before I stopped. I do speed read (because of dyslexia), but none of the preceding described me to any iota and I felt that it was most definitely target and written for neurotypical individuals.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#56

Post by lelanthran »

msolujic wrote: post #31
mbfg wrote: post #18

The most important skills i wish someone had taught me when i was a young developer was how to interact with people in all areas of the organization, and how to deal with the politics. I was (as a young person), strongly against really wanting to know about these aspects, and instead wanted to be purely technical, but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.

This. I also wished we learned more about this in my CS degree college classes. Luckily, there is pretty good podcast series that helped me structure team leadership, management and other non technical skills. It is called: Manager tools. Here is the list of all topics on politics [1] with intro to 101 series saying this: "Your organization is MUCH more political than most of us realize. For those who know it's polit…

> I highly recommend this series at least. > > [1] https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/politics#

From reading the topic overview, that looks great, genuinely good. However, there are about 30 x 25m podcasts, or about 12.5 hours of listening to do. In written form I expect that to be about 2 hours of reading (probably less).

Do you have any recommendations in written form?

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#57

Post by 2wrist »

msolujic wrote: post #31
mbfg wrote: post #18

The most important skills i wish someone had taught me when i was a young developer was how to interact with people in all areas of the organization, and how to deal with the politics. I was (as a young person), strongly against really wanting to know about these aspects, and instead wanted to be purely technical, but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.

This. I also wished we learned more about this in my CS degree college classes. Luckily, there is pretty good podcast series that helped me structure team leadership, management and other non technical skills. It is called: Manager tools. Here is the list of all topics on politics [1] with intro to 101 series saying this: "Your organization is MUCH more political than most of us realize. For those who know it's polit…

Thanks for the link!

Most folk think that Computing is all technical but it is still a people business. It also helps me to think of it as people engineering.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#58

Post by superasn »

chenmike wrote: post #52
superasn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a product creator I can say the same about sales. How I wish someone had told me that when it comes to SaaS the 80-20 is 80% focus on sale (traffic, customer feedback, seo, conversions, etc) and 20 percent is actually technical. And it's not just about money, even OSS projects need a lot of push and support when the "fun" part is done.

It sounds like you’re at least partway into the journey of learning sales. Would love to know what resources you’ve consumed that were helpful to you

There was a thread recently about it here. I think it contains some very solid advice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27653357

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#59

Post by MrDresden »

agbell wrote: post #10

Felienne is also a host on Software Engineering Radio. If you are curious about the content I think a teaser of it is covered in this interview: https://www.se-radio.net/2021/06/episode-462-felienne-on-the...

I appreciate that there are other people taking the time to create something like SE-radio, getting interesting individuals on to talk about interesting topics and then giving it away for free (I do not consider it payment to listen to an occasional ad for 10 seconds).

But I have tried so many times to start listening to SE-radio and always given up do to the audio quality. It is so grating when the interviewer and interviewee have drastically different volumes and quality.

This may have been fixed by now, as it has been around two years since I last tried.

Re: The Programmer's Brain

#60

Post by agbell »

MrDresden wrote: post #59
agbell wrote: post #10

Felienne is also a host on Software Engineering Radio. If you are curious about the content I think a teaser of it is covered in this interview: https://www.se-radio.net/2021/06/episode-462-felienne-on-the...

I appreciate that there are other people taking the time to create something like SE-radio, getting interesting individuals on to talk about interesting topics and then giving it away for free (I do not consider it payment to listen to an occasional ad for 10 seconds). But I have tried so many times to start listening to SE-radio and always given up do to the audio quality. It is so grating when the interviewer and i…

Volume levels are relatively easy address so hopefully they have that under control. Quality is hard because you take your guests as they are and people often don't realize the how echoey their room is or how poor the microphone they have is.

I use Izotope de-reverb on my own podcast to improve the quality somewhat, but there is only so much you can do.

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