“Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding“
Embrace the Grind
301–310 of 320 posts
Re: Embrace the Grind
#302>People said I did the impossible, but that’s wrong: I merely did something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do it.
Actually, what he did doesn't sound boring to me at all! I love cleaning and organizing, and it's one of my favorite things to do as a programmer. But it's the type of work that we tend to feel like we don't have permission to do.
Re: Embrace the Grind
#303This article is very on point and every team benefits tremendously from people who do just spend the time and sleigh the monsters. In a bigger team, a big second reason why these kinds of very uncomfortable tasks aren't done is that they also often don't produce immediate business value. You then have double resistance: the PO wants features from you and grinding is boring. The people who first get to a position wher…
This.
I'm glad my employer has hack weeks twice a year when I can play, or grind out useful-but-low pricey tasks.
Re: Embrace the Grind
#304I experienced this when I first started learning the piano. When I played the first song I had learned for my sister, she was amazed. "Wow, I could never play like that", she said, "my fingers don't work that way". But when I broke down for her exactly how I'd learned it -- by breaking the song down into manageable chunks of just a few notes each, practicing each chunk with each hand separately many times until profi…
This is basically exactly how "The elements of piano practice" [1] lays it out.
Re: Embrace the Grind
#305This reminds me of a blog post by Steve Klabnik (on the community team of Rust currently) about how he went through the Ruby on Rails backlog once similarly. It's a good read: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-to-be-an-open-source-ga...
Thanks! I’m glad you like it; at the time I didn’t think it was a big deal but it’s probably one of the most widely-read things I’ve written... (Tiny nit: I am not on the community team. I am on the core team though.)
Ah dang I knew I should have looked up your role!
Re: Embrace the Grind
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
The movie thing is a good example. I remind my kids that some of these movies cost $1,000,000/minute to make. That might be what they make in their lifetime, so it is about that many hours of work per minute (a life’s work).
When you put it that way, that's obscenely expensive. Maybe we should be steering kids toward entertainment that we can create as well as consume because it's not absurdly expensive.
But stuff like Netflix or Disney+ is quite cheap compared to other forms of entertainment because it is spread over so many viewers.
I remember Madonna getting a lot of grief over a statement about climate change because her crew was shifting so much kit around by air. But the reality is someone paying $100 for a concert ticket isn't going to cause much in the way of carbon emissions, certainly nothing like buying a car or a trans-Atlantic flight.
Re: Embrace the Grind
#307That's my tactic to blend-in in a engineering team and gain some respect / credibility. I try to find the most boring, utterly broken part, that nobody wants to touch... and I sink time into it. Once I made it somewhat usable, I document it.
Same here. I like doing things nobody wants to do, especially when I'm new in the team. The problem I've identified is that you're then the go-to person for the task you did in the beginning. Example: You need to figure out how to deploy X. This is poorly documented and nobody knows how to do it. Action: You read the code, understand what needs to be done, deploy it. Then, you document it. Finally, you create fairly…
I used to be quite happy to do all the dirty jobs that needed doing until I had an epiphany and realised I wasn't getting any credit for this. In fact it seemed to be doing my career some harm.
I stopped and refused any work that wasn't directly linked to bringing money in. Within a couple of years my salary doubled.
Re: Embrace the Grind
#308Every time I hear about the "Three virtues", I always think "Well, there's 'laziness' and there's laziness ". I know when I or someone else is being 'lazy' or lazy . Same thing for the other virtues. This is why we appreciate those who embrace the grind.
I'm not even sure what laziness is anymore, other than being a symptom of something else.
Re: Embrace the Grind
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think GCP is worse than AWS? I've used GCP and found it quite easy to start with and the managed instances was a breeze to set up and deploy stuff. I've done it for only small businesses and they were happy with the results too and the easy to use console made things easier to navigate. Maybe the trouble with GCP comes with scale?
I'm strictly against all "cloud" lock-in, but if you're going down that path despite all caveats, then using the #1 cloud provider makes more sense than a third-place competitor from a company that's best known for not having customer service.
Kubernetes is as anti-lock-in as you can get when it comes to cloud platforms. Which makes sense when you think it's the #3 competitor who mostly sponsors it - on the whole, lock-in benefits the market leader, so commoditization works to upstarts advantage.
Re: Embrace the Grind
#310I experienced this when I first started learning the piano. When I played the first song I had learned for my sister, she was amazed. "Wow, I could never play like that", she said, "my fingers don't work that way". But when I broke down for her exactly how I'd learned it -- by breaking the song down into manageable chunks of just a few notes each, practicing each chunk with each hand separately many times until profi…
This is basically exactly how "The elements of piano practice" [1] lays it out. [1] http://www.pianopractice.org/book.pdf
That's actually exactly the method I used! I had trouble finding the book again, so thank you for linking me to it.
I personally think everyone should learn at least one song on the piano using this method. It's such a great introduction to how the brain learns. I was amazed the first time I noticed I could actually get better at a song not by practicing longer or harder, but by taking a break and returning only once I felt the urge again (or even better, after a full night's sleep). It's a strange feeling to suddenly glide through a section that you previously found difficult without any additional practice in between.