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You must read at least one book to ride

ludic.mataroa.blog

131–140 of 155 posts

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#131
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of EU countries havr some kind of consultancy embedded deep into the their core financial and governments and other critical institutions. The EU commission is full of barely competent consultants developing some sort of applications. Probably getting EY or Accenture to solve the problems is one of the key steps in becoming accepted as a 1st world country.

Honestly, being a freelance consultant is also the only way to have a high wage… that fact alone explains a lot.

I get it, I live in Belgium and being a freelancer is truly the only way to make a more than decent wage(more or less silicon valley salary with 36 hours week). Problem is that is not really fair

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reading a book is like a mechanic learning how to work on cars without ever touching a car. What a weird analogy. Programming without reading anything (a book, a manual, a guide) just makes you a monkey with a typewriter.

You can become functionally capable in any mainstream programming language with some working examples, newbie hello world tutorials, maybe a debugger, and/or stack overflow. You are unlikely to get past an intermediate level of skill, and you won’t understand the deeper patterns that motivated the language designers, but you can add features and write useful applications. Is that really a monkey with a typewriter?

Absolutely. I deal with people like that on a day to day basis.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#133

I am most productive, from day to day, when I’m also reading. It somehow strokes my mind and encourages my creativity.

We've been floating the idea of giving everyone on the team Wednesdays off, fully paid, to read non-technical material while they're benched. We haven't done it yet because I pay rent and am worried that maybe we aren't good enough at sales to generate that much surplus... but deep down, I think it'll make a smarter team and that'll pay for itself. And the only reason that it's non-technical material is that it's jus…

Speaking of, I found interesting (and thinking about it some more, I am not even sure why I find that interesting...) that you seem to be exclusively talking about technical books in this posts, yet "tech book" is only directly mentioned once, towards the end.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#134

>Then there are engineers (and people in every profession) who never try for the entirety of their careers, and this is the majority of every profession. I find this pretty ridiculous. It's just that the standards are pretty low in IT. And being a good programmer just isn't a job requirement in the industry. I don't know a single case where a someone got fired for writing bad code.

Through the blog I get to meet a lot of people from all walks of life, and this has broadly been the consensus, with some exceptions. "Never try" is maybe unique to I.T, "remain fundamentally incompetent or try incorrectly" is very common. I was horrified to hear surgeons say that they view their field this way. Lawyers seem to be a bit more optimistic on average, but I still hear horror stories now and then. But yes…

One of the most important changes in the recent decades is that the bar to become a journalist (as in, someone that wields the 4th power of broadcasting) has been lowered tremendously (from print / radio / tv to bloggers / wiki editors / podcasts / home video makers / streamers...).

P.S.: Congrats, you are a decently powerful journalist too now.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#135

The section about reading "the right books" is important. I tried reading some self-help books in high school, but after reading a few, you'll realize they are mostly "fanfic" as the author says. I noticed some other patterns in these books. 1. Constant self-questioning while reading - "Is this obvious? did I already know this?" 2. Lots of examples or stories 3. Try to turn a simple metaphor/slogan into a complete ph…

You might enjoy the If Books Could Kill podcast. They mostly cover self-help and pop-business or pop-science books. They talk a lot about the recurring patterns and sometimes surprising shared topics among the books.

Thanks for this recommendation. I've started with their Atomic Habits episode which is excellent. Critical thinking skills are an essential foundation before picking up this type of book. I'd be pleased to hear of any good books on critical thinking for teens.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been floating the idea of giving everyone on the team Wednesdays off, fully paid, to read non-technical material while they're benched. We haven't done it yet because I pay rent and am worried that maybe we aren't good enough at sales to generate that much surplus... but deep down, I think it'll make a smarter team and that'll pay for itself. And the only reason that it's non-technical material is that it's jus…

Speaking of, I found interesting (and thinking about it some more, I am not even sure why I find that interesting...) that you seem to be exclusively talking about technical books in this posts, yet "tech book" is only directly mentioned once, towards the end.

Probably because my audience is probably 90% software engineers, and many of them have more experience and technical skill than me. I only really dare to advise people in the first 1-3 years of their tech journey on actual tech topics.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the kind words on the writing! And the implicit skills are important, it's just that reading a book is, broadly speaking, a very strong indicator of ability and a great starting point. The best engineer at my consultancy doesn't really read books due to S-tier ADHD, but has a massive amount of lived experience and has read enough documentation/high-tier blog posts that there's probably some equivalency.…

> how do you know what books to read? I'm teaching myself linear algebra after failing the official class. I bought Strang's book and to me it was like reading the rantings of a madman (edit: ofc I mean "to me", as he is an accomplished mathematician), nothing made sense and it seemed all over the place. Which is strange because he seems always so highly recommended in that field. Its a visual subject for gods sake m…

Thank you for this - I had the same experience with Strang’s book/style when I tried to learn linear algebra, maybe I’ll pick up Lay & McDonald!

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#138
post #56
post #8

Starting to read again has significantly increased my attention span and ability to focus. It has also made me crave doom scrolling less.

Underrated habit - Even for people without diagnosed ADHD, there's a skill aspect to deep focus that is developed through experience and discipline. Habit is a shortcut to discipline. What a lot of people see in themselves as ADHD is at least compounded by underdeveloped and (willfully) neglected skill in being able to focus. Not saying all, so chill everyone. But if you have self or professionally diagnosed ADHD, do…

This doesn't always get a lot of traction, but I have medically diagnosed ADHD. The meds cause terrible and dangerous side effects for me, so I cannot take them.

I decided to actively train my focus in my early twenties. Over time I got better and better at it. I require a few prerequisites: well rested, recently exercised, not too hungry, have no meetings coming up, and keep my phone away. I'm able to engage my hyperfocus at will. Most days it lasts for 4-6 hours straight. I am able to engage it at least once a day.

This took many years to build up. It's fragile - easily prevented by distractions. But with the right set and setting, once it engages it's an incredible tool. I've accomplished things in 4-6 hours that would normally take me weeks.

I wish I could get the benefit with meds, but here we are. Maybe what I've built is the generic crappy equivalent, but it's all I've got and I'm proud I've gotten it this far.

For how I trained it, I started programming on the train ride home. I worked through low stakes programming puzzles from SICP. I found it worked best if I sprinted to the train station and ate something an hour before departure. I would open my laptop and just try to engage the hyperfocus. Many days I couldn't: people talking, train noises, being hungry, etc. Over time though I got better and better at it. Eventually I would be engaging as the laptop screen was opening. To this day ten years later opening a laptop screen engages the hyperfocus if all the rest of the requirements are met. Over a year I finished SICP, doing about one exercise a day. I then picked up another book of homework problems, then another, and another. Over a few years the skill strengthened, I found I could hold it for the drive home from the train station and keep going after.

It's harder at a desk, often I'll burn an hour or two before I can make it click. But once it does I can hold it even when getting up to go get food or going for a walk. I've gone to a cafeteria with coworkers or driven home while still in a "work trance" that picks right back up when I log in again. It's very strange being in hyperfocus on a programming puzzle while talking to someone over food. I can release it, but then I might not be able to engage it again that day so I often leave it running. Rude to my coworkers at lunch, perhaps, but I gotta make money somehow and this is how I do it.

I credit a large amount of my success to this tool. It's fantastic for just getting epic amounts of work done. I can spend hours tracing down a detailed bug, or building out a whole new module. In this trance state reading code feels as natural as reading English. Big transformations make perfect sense in ways I cannot describe outside the effect.

I've used it to write two books, build my own business, and make a living.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#139

> I can't help but feel that something has gone dreadfully wrong in society in that we've decided to start incentivizing people with no talent or interest to participate in the technology space. Many of them are extremely wide awake in other areas, be it sports, art, mathematics, whatever. Unfortunately for complex reasons related to some sectors having more money than they know what to do with, large organizations b…

I teach Software Engineering at the university level. I can definitely tell the students in my intro classes that are in it for the money and have no talent or real interest in software development. Provided they make it through the program it's anyone's guess how they'll do in their career assuming they even get a software development job.
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