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Side projects

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Re: Side projects

#161

Post by joshdotsmith »

el_benhameen wrote: post #98
xhrpost wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it happen to help with the attitude or process of cooking? It's probably the bachelor mentality in me but I honestly just hate cooking. The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous. However, I do feel like I could eat a little more natural and better if I did cook more.

It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available. Going to the grocery store is then less about "shit, they're out of $ingredient" and more about "wow, the salmon looks really fresh this week". The actual act of cooking is the same--instead of focusing on following and mucking up someone else's recipe, I get to feel creative as I build something based on w…

Alton Brown is our guiding light for CookAcademy. (Our chef ironically also happened to be on Cutthroat Kitchen!)

Mark Bittman writes about the stages of learning how to cook and you are pretty advanced relative to others. Many of us haven't gotten to the point where we can realistically come up with ideas based on tastes because we don't know how they interact. Generalizing these ideas requires understanding how and why things work, which is exactly why Alton Brown is so useful to so many people. He breaks down the reasoning behind something so that you can generalize it the next time, or in a different dish, or apply a principle to something new altogether.

Re: Side projects

#162

Post by joshdotsmith »

gshrikant wrote: post #118
el_benhameen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available. Going to the grocery store is then less about "shit, they're out of $ingredient" and more about "wow, the salmon looks really fresh this week". The actual act of cooking is the same--instead of focusing on following and mucking up someone else's recipe, I get to feel creative as I build something based on w…

>> It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available. I've been trying to learn how to cook ever since I moved roughly 3 months ago. My early attempts at replicating others' recipes had paid off decently so I attempted the hack-stuff-together approach on a couple of occasions. It did _not_ go well. :-/ I ended up with a ton of wasted ingredients not to ment…

You can see the link to my site elsewhere, but I'd be happy to help more thoroughly if you're interested. The ability to do this is not a reflection of your ability to think creatively but rather that you need to understand why you're using certain things and what effect they will have on your dish.

Re: Side projects

#163

Post by zem »

jorendorffmoz wrote: post #63
seiji wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can give back in many ways The standard way society compensates persons for useful goods and services is by exchanging currency, not by bartering favors or by saying "look! we made a billion dollars using your software, here, have these free 40 lines of code as a bug fix. thx." Unrelated note: every time I see these (needlessly?) optimized string compare statements, I fall out of my chair laughing and/or crying: http…

I guess what I'm saying is, I don't see how your (or anyone's) interests would be served by the cost of Redis being a lot higher.

ideally, what you want to say is "here's my software; if you need a good, free solution you're welcome to use it. however, if you're making millions off a stack that my work is essential to, i would like a share".

cory doctorow has made a similar argument about copyright and the absurdity of one-size-fits-all:

> We're trying to retrofit the rules that governed multi-stage rocket ships (huge publishing conglomerates) to cover the activity of pedestrians (people who post quotes from books on their personal blogs). And the pedestrians aren't buying it: they hear that they need a law degree to safely quote from their favourite TV show and they assume that the system is irredeemably broken and not worth attending to at all.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/26/copyright-...

Re: Side projects

#164

Post by joshdotsmith »

r00fus wrote: post #154
TeMPOraL wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous. This. That's the primary reason I keep eating unhealthy. Since I started working, I naturally gravitated toward few dishes that basically make themselves - e.g. french fries, boiled/fried sausage, etc. - basically anything I can drop on the stove and leave unatte…

I would strongly recommend slow cookers. You can leave it in the morning and get it in the evening. The recipes are straightforward and require little actual cooking knowledge. Even better you can easily cook large quantities so you're not even cooking every day. My healthy favorite is slow-cooked stew combined with rice-cooker brown rice/quinoa - both are set on timers so they finish just before we get home - so no…

I second this advice. A slow cooker is really ideal for your use case and can have some dramatically amazing results.

Still, you can't slow cook something like a pan-sautéed chicken breast. But many people, particularly single people, simply don't want to expend the effort for the reward. I have no problem with that; been there, done that.

Re: Side projects

#165

Post by thebouv »

bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

I'm with you on this and will hungrily lap up any advice on the subject.

I write code that can't be open sourced for work, but want to contribute to OSS projects. But dammit, at the end of the day or week of coding all the time for my full time job, it is hard as well to sit down in front of the screen again without going mad.

Life, kids, wife, non-coding hobbies, coding hobbies -- whirlwind of competition for my time. Ugh.

Re: Side projects

#166

Post by joshdotsmith »

Kronopath wrote: post #108
joshdotsmith wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of side projects and learning to cook, I'm working on a side project that helps people learn to cook. Happy to share if interested.

Do share! I'm interested.

I replied to myself above with the link.

Re: Side projects

#167

Post by humbertomn »

darkFunction wrote: post #85
humbertomn wrote: post #17

I'm another believer that focussing in 1 thing is overestimated. "There’s a myth when it comes to what we’ve been taught about focus. Doing only 1 thing isn’t focusing. It’s essentially just doing 1 thing. Following a course of action until completion is FOCUS" - Hodan Ibrahim Interesting related read: http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/psychological-marketing-my...

I struggle to focus on more than one thing, in programming and in life, one thing is intensely the single focus of all my passion and energy until one day it is not.

Maybe it's hard to measure what exactly is the 1 thing. In my typical day in my early stage project, I still have to code a few hours per day in addition to managing design work, doing initial marketing strategy and testing some campaigns, talking to customers, investors and mentors and making lots of decisions.

I still spend around 40mins in stuff from my previous startup which I'm not officially in operations anymore, but still have to help with some things.

On top of all that, I created a side project and built a team to run it and will be doing only mentoring, and this can be a great help to my oficial project.

So, I'm not saying this is the ideal setup... Of course a lot will change once the company starts to grow and we are able to hire more people, but I can say at the end of the day I'm pretty happy with my production and already thinking about the next day of work.

Re: Side projects

#168

Post by maxerickson »

gshrikant wrote: post #118
el_benhameen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available. Going to the grocery store is then less about "shit, they're out of $ingredient" and more about "wow, the salmon looks really fresh this week". The actual act of cooking is the same--instead of focusing on following and mucking up someone else's recipe, I get to feel creative as I build something based on w…

>> It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available. I've been trying to learn how to cook ever since I moved roughly 3 months ago. My early attempts at replicating others' recipes had paid off decently so I attempted the hack-stuff-together approach on a couple of occasions. It did _not_ go well. :-/ I ended up with a ton of wasted ingredients not to ment…

3 months isn't a long time.

I think one way to build up intuition is to cook a recipe with a very short list of ingredients multiple times, with small variations (like the size of cutting things up or cooking time or whatever).

One thing Good Eats consistently does is talk about whether an ingredient has a functional purpose in a recipe, and what that purpose is. Other cooking resources do that too, but usually not as well.

Re: Side projects

#169

Post by bglazer »

Arjuna wrote: post #156
bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

I can completely empathize. I have a family, and so it takes even more effort to create the time and find the space to make things happen. I just launched a game into the App Store. The journey was incredible, and filled with joy, sweat, and tears. I've written about what I've gone through. It might be helpful for you. A small caution... these are relatively long posts, but hopefully they are enjoyable, insightful, a…

Thank you Arjuna! Congratulations on publishing your game.

From your linked post:

> Even the people around you won't understand the mental suffering that you are silently muscling through; you, torn between two worlds as the aforementioned autonomic function pushes and strains you to your personal limits. You measure the day's progress in centimeters rather than meters. You will either summit, or freeze to death on the mountain in your boots; the summit in sight, but just out of reach. Which-ever event happens, you feel alone, either way, because no one is carrying the sheer weight of The Vision than you. It is all you. It has only ever been you. There is no one to save you.

I snapped and yelled at my girlfriend the other day because I felt like she didn't understand the work I was putting into the project and the stress it caused me. That was definitely a low point for me.

Re: Side projects

#170

Post by compwron »

bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

What I do is to sometimes take a 'sanity day' to sit at home or in a library and get some serious work done. 9-5 (or whatever) just like work. You even get to sleep in instead of commuting. I realize that this is partially because I've been lucky to have jobs where taking one day won't be a vacation/sick-day disaster-overreach.
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