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Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

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Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#191

Post by blinkymach12 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #148
20thCB wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- I'm not young There's your answer.

Yeah, I know. I just don't feel that it's constructive to complain about it. I don't deny it; I just won't let it stop me. Despite all that, I have it real good. I am able to do work that I love (and not get paid a dime for it), and live a life that includes friends, health, wonder and joy. I may not be a TED-talkin', man-bunned, skinny-jeans-wearin' jargonaut, but the folks that end up working with me are very, very…

Thanks for sharing, Chris. Honestly it sounds to me like you're living the dream-- you're secure enough in your abilities that you can pursue the projects you're excited by rather than having to play career games as an employee for someone else. I hope it keeps working out for you :-)

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#192

Post by Swizec »

alisonkisk wrote: post #157
Swizec wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I said profits not revenue. Specifically to capture that 1 & 2 might be the same work :) Just talking in terms of business impact puts you miles ahead of other candidates in many eng jobs. Especially for levels above junior. Very important to have engineers who (want to) understand why they do what they do.

Meanwhile the most wildly successful companies in history did the opposite of that and hired techies to make amazing stuff that printed money.

> hired techies to make amazing stuff that printed money.

you are agreeing with me

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#193

Post by garmaine »

AlexC04 wrote: post #141
theshrike79 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't start another podcast. Or if you absolutely must, please provide a text version of the content. Podcasts aren't searchable, they aren't skimmable and their content isn't indexed in search engines. Text is.

Sorry you're getting downvoted on this post. I found your data point useful. Even though I disagree that there are enough podcasts serving the senior developer / corporate programmer niche, being made aware of the existence of "podcast exhaustion" is valuable, and the discussion convinced me that a transcription service is worth it. I'd hate for negative attention to result in a chilling effect on your decision to vo…

Let me add another data point: I never listen to podcasts. Ever. I've tried it, and I hate the format. Even when I am forwarded something highly relevant to my interests, I still check for a transcript, and if there is none I move along.

You can't search audio. You can't skim audio. You can't easily hyperlink to audio, copy-and-paste audio, or auto-summarize audio. Audio is not indexed or cached by the big search engines. It's a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE and inefficient medium to convey information.

Beyond all those very pragmatic reasons, there are also people like me whose personality type (introversion) makes us find listening to audio an emotionally draining task as it simulates interacting with people. I don't get energized by it--it is work. And why should I give you my working energy when I could just as easily have skim-read a transcript or blog post with the same information and gotten energized by the self-study approach?

THAT SAID, you said that you want to do interviews... and that is something that really calls out for an audio medium. Sure you can transcribe it, and people like me appreciate the transcription, but I recognize that the audio is the original source material and transcription is an additional expense. I'd rather have the full interview available than some highly edited transcript... but I would hope that there is at least a short summary of the content in the description of each segment.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#194

Post by wyclif »

kirubakaran wrote: post #30
darawk wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patrick runs his own software business afaik, so I think he definitely qualifies as a capitalist in terms of his economic role in society. However, I assume by 'capitalist' he meant more the suite of economic beliefs he subscribes to than his own personal role in the economy.

> Patrick runs his own software business afaik He used to. Now he works at Stripe.

A bit of a shame that the Miniconf talk he linked to was taken down on this old post.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#195

Post by Consultant32452 »

zikzak wrote: post #41
_huayra_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one thing I messed up during my grad school studies. Now that I have a "real job", getting the ball rolling on blogging about what I'm looking into / learning about is harder (although that is still a convenient excuse). Thank goodness I have been meticulously keeping track of what I've learned in Org mode for years. I've just gotta dredge that old database for some blog posts (starting with why folks who are…

I work on a well established, closed source, trade secrets style e-commerce site. I can never seem to think about anything I could write up that would not involve me reworking everything to be more general. I also think it would largely boil down to a Stack Overflow link. I am doing more management now, so that might make this problem a little easier to solve for me.

I had one of these blogs years ago and I found the questions I had to look up were great subjects for blog posts. Many of them wound up being pretty basic: thread safe singleton in java, sort a list, etc. This isn't a PhD thesis, it doesn't have to be profound, you're just trying to demonstrate you can write some code and communicate.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#196

Post by philipswood »

garmaine wrote: post #193
AlexC04 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry you're getting downvoted on this post. I found your data point useful. Even though I disagree that there are enough podcasts serving the senior developer / corporate programmer niche, being made aware of the existence of "podcast exhaustion" is valuable, and the discussion convinced me that a transcription service is worth it. I'd hate for negative attention to result in a chilling effect on your decision to vo…

Let me add another data point: I never listen to podcasts. Ever. I've tried it, and I hate the format. Even when I am forwarded something highly relevant to my interests, I still check for a transcript, and if there is none I move along. You can't search audio. You can't skim audio. You can't easily hyperlink to audio, copy-and-paste audio, or auto-summarize audio. Audio is not indexed or cached by the big search eng…

One more data point: Personally I only listen to podcasts on long commutes. This only occasionally happens when regularly needing to actually go to a physical office location in a nearby city. Even then podcasts are competing with audiobooks or long phonecalls to people I don't often get enough free time to talk to.

It's not that I don't enjoy the format, I do, but I find it harder to fit into my life.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#197

Post by XargonEnder »

Swizec wrote: post #20
davnicwil wrote: post #12

As is typical of patio11 this is all great stuff. One subtlety I'd venture to emphasise for people just getting started with building things and putting stuff out there, though, is that you should expect the impact of and return on any one of these things to be far from linear. That is, the 'stacking bricks' metaphor may not apply so much. Yes, you should produce stuff on a regular cadence, and everything you produce…

> Don't get put off by the fact that nobody cares about the first few (several, dozen, hundred...) things you put out there Your first few things will suck. Keep going. Practice takes time. Ira Glass, advice to beginners: http://www.zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-begi...

Great comic and great link

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#198

Post by danielscrubs »

judge2020 wrote: post #190
ddulaney wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, podcasts can be listened to in the background, while text must be actively read. There are pros and cons to each format as a consumer, not to mention differences in production workflow.

To add, I think we should leave it to the machines to start indexing podcasts automatically. They're some of the easiest mediums for speech recognition and Google has been indexing YouTube transcripts for a few years now.

They have been doing it badly for a few years know yes, it’s not solved by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#199

Post by XargonEnder »

magnetowasright wrote: post #130
beforeolives wrote: post #72

I was hoping that we were moving in the opposite direction where people aren't expected to show off side projects, ship something every week or work for a famous company in order to be successful. If this article is good advice, that makes me a bit sad about the state and direction of the industry.

Totally agree. To me it feels like it’s talking around the problems in the industry. The solution to good work being ‘unmarketable’ isn’t to stop doing good work. We can’t all be fighting to do the kind of work that ‘looks’ good, and we shouldn’t have to. Search Engine Optimisation has destroyed the usefulness of search engines. If you search for a recipe or you’re looking for blog posts about a particular technology…

I hate being subservient to an algorithm, but I'm trying to build a business, what choice do I have?

Re: Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

#200

Post by chillfox »

AlexC04 wrote: post #88
piokoch wrote: post #60

"Don't try to make a career out of optimizing the SQL queries to display a preference page on a line of business app at a company that no one has ever heard of. That is not the straightforward path to having other people learn you are capable of doing meaningful work." This is so sad. Optimizing that SQL might require being really clever and can bring enormous value for the company that maybe nobody heard about but m…

What's a funny coincidence is that I've been thinking about almost exactly this for a little while. Just in the last two weeks I decided to create a podcast where I interview the exact types of developers who optimize SQL inside business apps. In fact, literally just last night I recorded and uploaded (to YouTube and the various podcast platforms) episode zero. Not an actual interview yet, but a statement of purpose…

Have you actually tried searching "Ship It" on a podcast platform?

There is absolutely zero chance that I can find the correct one without knowing what the thumbnail looks like.

Search results in order:

  - I Ship It
  - Ship It Show
  - We Ship It Podcast
  - The Ship-it Show
  - Print It and Ship It
  - Ship It or Skip It
  - I Can Ship It!
  - ...
edit: I realized the above might sound a bit harsh. Sorry. Please do some branding to make the podcast easier to find. I was trying to find it in Overcast as I am actually interested in listening to it.
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