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Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)

training.kalzumeus.com

231–240 of 278 posts

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

#231

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…

I'm not at odds with their opinion but rather with their tone and delivery. I'm not a fan of podcasts at all, and I get where they are coming from, but someone's sharing an idea they're clearly very passionate about, and I'm all for giving constructive feedback (that's probably why they picked this particular forum to share their idea, after all), even if such feedback hurts, but I also expect a modicum of positivity to go along with that, and their comment doesn't clear that bar for me.

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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you give it a try for audio editing make sure you record different podcast guests on separate audio tracks, makes the whole thing significantly better. I wrote a few thoughts on my blog about how I went about starting with the podcast including tools used, might be useful? https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/starting-a-podcast

Yes, a 100% this. Even better if you can get the interviewee to record audio on their computer too, this way you can get proper audio without compression issues for editing. Doesn't work for "video podcasts" because sound sync is a bitch, but for audio only it can enhance the quality immensely.

This is brilliant!

Especially for those times when you have internet issues on one end or another.

At the very least you don't lose your content.

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every format is for everyone. I personally listen to podcasts or audio books every day when driving and in my lunch break.

People are different, and I like to learn about other people's methods and the potential benefits thereof. So let me ask ... when you're listening to podcasts, do you ever take anything away from them that is actionable? Do you take notes? Do you summarise? How do you ensure that the lessons in the podcast don't get lost? Do you "Listen with attention" or are they mostly just background? I find that podcasts are ther…

Kinda depends upon if it is educational, informational or entertainment. I never use podcasts to just fill out the background, I generally use heavy metal music for that.

I tend to either remember how/where to find the information again or the actual thing. So with podcasts I will either remind myself that I can't easily reference it and therefore remember the lesson, or sometimes I will write it down later in the day.

What do you use for your Zettelkasten? I still haven't found a notebook software that I actually like, so my notes are kinda spread between a few different solutions.

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

#234
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not at all harsh! And super super valuable. So genuinely, thank you for this.

SEO and discoverability are critical.

It is abundantly clear to me that I've got to workshop the name.

The categories are

- "say-able" can a listener hear the name and find the right one without a spelling mistake?

- is it unique enough to have a top slot search result?

- does it explain what it's about in the title?

- Would someone in the target audience instantly know what it was about if they saw it in a list of 800,000 podcasts? (The number of different pods out there according to a research report I read before deciding I still wanted to do it)

"Ship it" is a reference to the thing they (sometimes) say on GitHub when your pull request is accepted.

The icon has the "ship-it squirrel"

I thought that was cut and referencial so people in the know would recognize it instantly.

It also has a special place in my own heart because I first learned about it when a pull request I sent to one of the Microsoft as-net docker repos. In the version of the story I remember Scott Hanselman himself commented on the PR and said "lgtm :shipit:"

Which on GitHub translates into a picture of a squirrel dressed up as a gangster.

Based on the rules above I rename to "LGTM: the podcast about delivering code for professional programmers"

Maybe just "LGTM - the programmer podcast"

Thanks again. I'm going to work on it.

Edit: or maybe I rename to "LGTM shipit"?

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

#235
post #171

I mean, what the hell is with all this 60-90 hours per week stuff going on? Am I an incredibly defective human being or something - I cannot even fathom working anything even CLOSE to that (in software/tech, maybe if you're in med school or work an an ER I can see it). There is no way in hell I could ever even be close to productive for that period of time for more than, say, one week a year or something (and even th…

I used to occasionally worked 80+ hours at a time in my younger days, during a period where I was working for an oil services company, building tooling for migrating different business systems to SAP. The company has several locations across the globe, and each was using something different to be migrated to SAP. One time I flew to Brazil to build SAP integration tooling for the local division of the company - 3 flig…

> it was a false economy - if we'd just worked normal hours ... we could have achieved the same result, without all the mess along the way.

Nearly 100% of the time I was on teams that grinded down to the bone, things turned out poorly.

Nearly 100% of the time I was on teams that have tons of slack time, we absolutely crush it. If you're "busy" all the time you can't reflect, put things in perspective, consider alternatives, etc. It is, exactly as you say, a false economy (probably a better term than work theater, which implies slacking off, which is not what I meant)

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

#236
post #144
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your original example is very specific, but your follow up clarifies that the reality is that it is vague guesswork. I think you could claim contribution, but very hard to define that line x of code written last Friday resulted directly in y% of profits. To me it signals you're probably exaggerating. You better be able to back up your reasoning behind your claim. Bold claims require bold explanations.

It’s not vague guesswork at all. If you can’t measure the success of your project, why are you doing it? It’s okay, even expected, if the answer is probabilistic. What’s not okay is doing stuff for no reason. Bonus points if you’re able to tell a story like: We did X to achieve Y, but it didn’t work because Z. So we tried ...

The success of the project as a whole is measured, of course.

But it's 20 people working on it, from design to sales to ops to customers relations to devs. How could you possibly pin 20% of the profit (not even the turnover, but the profit) on one guy?

Even if he improved the SQL queries and that immediately led to more sales, making the choice to work on that over other things was probably not his.

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

#238
post #171

I mean, what the hell is with all this 60-90 hours per week stuff going on? Am I an incredibly defective human being or something - I cannot even fathom working anything even CLOSE to that (in software/tech, maybe if you're in med school or work an an ER I can see it). There is no way in hell I could ever even be close to productive for that period of time for more than, say, one week a year or something (and even th…

Workaholism is an addiction and a mental health problem. I have worked for 50+ hours a week for 4 years and last year I became a manager and have worked 60-80 for the last year. On bad weeks, I joke to my wife that I am headed to my 9-5... because I sometimes work 9am to 5am and get up the next day for another 9am meeting. I am absolutely doing real work, if anything, it's my non-work life that is "theater." I won't…

It sounds like you may need help, and I hope you find it.

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

#239
post #100
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your blog is very high quality and i've enjoyed it in the past (Metropolis-Hastings post especially). however there's a problem if everybody is going to do this, if it becomes standard that you want to have a blog in order to promote yourself during a job hunt. i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on ba…

> "i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on basic ML topics, and so on." This is such a sad way to view blogging and Github contributions... There's nothing wrong with people writing bad articles. In fact everyone writes badly to begin with. The same goes for Github contributions, everyone starts off wit…

> There's nothing wrong with people writing bad articles. In fact everyone writes badly to begin with.

It's ok to write badly in the beginning. It's less ok (to say the least) to publish the bad writing in the Internet and decrease it's mean quality level in result. Of course, by now the cat's way out of the bad and Internet is mostly low-effort, low-value crap. Arguably, it's been this way since the very beginning. In terms of quality and curation it's basically the digital equivalent of a wall in a public restroom. But still, I find scribbling on such walls to be in poor taste...

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

#240
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…

I think his point is that working on deep internals (rather than client facing products) is difficult to show off.

I think this is true, because you would have to do extra work beyond what your being paid to do, to make it show-off-able.

However, look at Brendan Gregg for example. He works on deep internals that would be very hard to show off without putting extra effort into sharing his knowledge. But since he does make that effort, he’s seen as an industry leader for his skill set.

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