171–180 of 295 posts
A few in there are marked as "dangerous" - books that I've seen totally destroy productivity, but I included them since it's impossible to refute what you don't understand.
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I love the Mythical Man-Month, but it’s one of those books that only software engineers seem to read, and they already know what’s in it.
Ah, but bad management likes to -claim- to have read it. Sometimes just having the reference can be leverage, i.e., "Well, as per the Mythical Man Month, not all tasks can be parallelized. We can't take three women and complete a pregnancy in 3 months, 3x as fast, after all. This is one of those cases - we won't speed things up by adding people, but we might make things worse"
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Found out that I have ADHD. Never managed to read any books about programming, after a few pages my brain starts making up excuses to do other things and I start rereading the same paragraph over and over again. No issues doing the actual programming, could sit for hours on end without any issues. One nifty thing about my ADHD is that something that was super interesting can become dull as hell. For no apparent reaso…
A little trick for technical articles that I've found is to use screen readers.
Is it just me or do other people struggle to read these kinds of very technical books? It's not that I don't comprehend, it's that my brain finds it boring and hard to focus. I think I have trained my brain so much on rapid skimming of websites for useful info, while throwing away most of the content, that I tend to do the same with books, which really doesn't work well. Has anyone found alternative ways to consume t…
Found out that I have ADHD. Never managed to read any books about programming, after a few pages my brain starts making up excuses to do other things and I start rereading the same paragraph over and over again. No issues doing the actual programming, could sit for hours on end without any issues. One nifty thing about my ADHD is that something that was super interesting can become dull as hell. For no apparent reaso…
Clean code... To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long.. Or when I see commented code blocks in one function.. Other have mentioned The Mythical Man Month, and I'd say it's a great book. Sadly, more often than not, it's something I wish I could staple to managements foreheads. "read this now before our next planning session" The Rspec book was a great book, that helped me fully embrace TDD…
> .. The Mythical Man Month, and I'd say it's a great book. Sadly, more often than not, it's something I wish I could staple to managements foreheads. "read this now before our next planning session" Did you read the book? It's not about the (ab)use of mandays/months in planning sessions, it's about the huge differences in capacities between individual programmers and the importance of having some "10x programmers" i…
I thought the whole thing was about having a plan, and many well structured, organised teams; having a 10x programmer makes no difference at all without the rest of the things; no matter how great you are, you can’t do everything, and if you try, you’ll become a bottleneck.
I sympathise very much with wanting to staple “do you actually have a plan for how that’s going to work?” to someone in a planning meeting.
> Very good professional programmers are ten times as productive as poor ones, at same training and two-year experience level. (Sackman, Grant, and Erickson)
> Sackman, Grant, and Erickson's data showed no correlation whatsoever between experience and performance. I doubt the universality of that result.
> A small sharp team is too slow for really big systems.
^ literally a quotes from the book.
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Found out that I have ADHD. Never managed to read any books about programming, after a few pages my brain starts making up excuses to do other things and I start rereading the same paragraph over and over again. No issues doing the actual programming, could sit for hours on end without any issues. One nifty thing about my ADHD is that something that was super interesting can become dull as hell. For no apparent reaso…
Those concentration drugs that you hear about, do they work? I've heard that a lot of students use them, but I'm a little bit wary of using something like that.
I use one of them, and it has been a great help for me for studying and for work. I don't take them during "off-time", i.e., weekends and holidays, and I don't feel like I need them for my hobbies, where part of what makes it fun for me is that I can take my time, shift my focus constantly, and define "progress" by my own internal metrics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Found out that I have ADHD. Never managed to read any books about programming, after a few pages my brain starts making up excuses to do other things and I start rereading the same paragraph over and over again. No issues doing the actual programming, could sit for hours on end without any issues. One nifty thing about my ADHD is that something that was super interesting can become dull as hell. For no apparent reaso…
Those concentration drugs that you hear about, do they work? I've heard that a lot of students use them, but I'm a little bit wary of using something like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A little trick for technical articles that I've found is to use screen readers.
Screen readers work great, for me it's my phone. On my desktop I'd be getting distracted and bored in about two paragraphs. Even if I try to come back to the article, there's invariable 3 other things that I'm switching between. On my phone I've read 250k word books cover to cover, same books I could never read on a PC. Attention is weird like that. Another trick is getting your dopamine* externally. There's an assoc…
If they would otherwise not feel normal and there are no negative side effects, is that a problem?
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Screen readers work great, for me it's my phone. On my desktop I'd be getting distracted and bored in about two paragraphs. Even if I try to come back to the article, there's invariable 3 other things that I'm switching between. On my phone I've read 250k word books cover to cover, same books I could never read on a PC. Attention is weird like that. Another trick is getting your dopamine* externally. There's an assoc…
> Unfortunately, when people start needing a substance just to feel normal, that is the definition of an addiction. If they would otherwise not feel normal and there are no negative side effects, is that a problem?
Negative side effects of note with usual ADHD medication (amphetamine salts) include increased cardiovascular load, development of a tolerance (you need higher doses to achieve the same effect). Sometimes amphetamines induce small changes in personality, rarely full blown psychosis (this has happened at therapeutic doses!).
In general you should apply the same sort of risk-benefit analysis we use for every other drug. If you don't experience any side effects so strong you want to stop, and you believe you're aware of the risks, great.
If you're taking them without a script, I'd advise you to find a steady-state dose that works for you and stick to it. Don't let yourself increase the frequency or the dose without a conscious decision. That's how many people have spiraled.
Finally, I think it's important to have a lot of respect for psychoactive chemicals. Nature doesn't care very much for human overconfidence. If you start being careless, chemistry will do what chemistry does.
i.e. “You are a bad programmer/engineer/scientist/person, because you did not read this book, or know this technique.” Thing.
I see this frequently. As a [mostly] self-taught software developer, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of this behavior.
In my case, I have a real “Oh yeah? I’ll show you!” streak. I became expert at stuff, simply because some e-bully told me I was bad at it (because they were the only ones fit to judge others).
Not everyone has that kind of stubbornness. I suspect that a hell of a lot of truly gifted folks never realized their passions, and that our industry has been robbed of significant talent, as a result.
Maybe I’m looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, or I was fortunate to run into the people I did, but I don’t recall encountering a lot of this behavior, when I was getting started. I needed a lot of help and nurturing, when I was younger, until I reached the confidence level required to have an “Oh yeah?” response. I’m grateful that I got it.
"A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow." -Charles Browder