411–420 of 438 posts
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I’m not sure I follow the analogy here, are you implying technical leadership is committing heinous crimes against humanity?
It’s a joke on the original anecdote’s timeless formula of double-filtered appeal to patriarchal authority (the father relaying the wisdom of the boss to the son).
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Really? IMO there's an awful lot, they just ask for mid 200,000s.
I've met plenty of engineering leaders being paid double that who are not "good at their job." It's a hard job to do well; it requires you care about technical details but also deal almost exclusively with people. It's a rare person who naturally fits into the "extrovert engineer" role and corporations are shitty about training those who don't fit yet to practice the right behaviors. Plus, if engineering is "design w…
$400,000k for dev + fun at parties, sign me up
In 2 days time I'll mark my 27th year as a professional programmer (and just over 40 years since I started programming). I've worked in small companies, big companies, and mega-corporations. I've been a programmer, manager, team lead and CTO. And in doing so I discovered that I don't like managing people, I don't like meetings, and I don't like paperwork. I like long periods of focus. So I'm a software dev/architect…
I want to earn enough money from my business ideas to spend the rest of my time on hacking on niche languages, distributed/anonymous networks, etc. and as I grow older, to use computer and programming just to maintain a modern off-the-grid life (so working on my smart grid, automating my cabin-in-the-woods life)
Computers and the Internet have gone from being a lifestyle, to just a tool.
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On flow: back when I started my blog (2004) I soon realized that nothing had ever turned on the "flow switch" as predictably as preparing and publishing posts: for 4-6 hours/day, 5-6 days/week, I was in heaven. Reading the comments on vjk800's comment led me to focus on my state of mind today (I'll be 75 on June 8) as I work on my blog in its nineteenth year. Though I spend perhaps 2-3 hours/day 3-5 days/week on it n…
Love this. After 19 years I imagine your blog gets some traffic. Would you mind sharing how it's worked out? I think its pretty rare outside of newspapers to see someone publishing content for this long.
I'd get 10 or 20 comments/post, often.
Then a slow decline until January 2015 when I became clinically depressed and barely functional such that it took everything I had to post one sentence/day just to show proof of life.
I recovered completely in October 2016 and resumed multiple posts daily as is the case today.
Traffic when I started back in in late 2016 on a regular multiple posts/day basis was around 100 pageviews/day.
Current traffic is about 600 pageviews/day, with 5-10 comments/week.
Still, a couple times a year some popular blog/website picks up something I've posted and links to my post which results in a sudden spike to 3,000-8,000 pageviews that day, with a regression to the norm over the next week or two.
One thing I find interesting is that things I post today I would've posted back in 2004, and vice versa.
It's amusing to discover a couple times/year that something I'm about to feature or just featured appeared 10-15 years ago.
Occasionally a reader from back in the day will point this out, to my delight.
As best I can tell, the only popular one-person blogs that still update regularly and go back as far as I do are https://www.swiss-miss.com/ [March 2005] and https://kottke.org/ [1998].
I take pride in publishing daily including weekends and holidays, unlike pretty much every other blog/website.
Always something new at boj if you can just make it through the night till the next morning....
As to making money from the site: when I started I thought perhaps I could do that, so the guy who set up my blog (I have 0 technical skills or knowledge of coding etc.) made it so I had Google AdSense on my homepage along with an Amazon Associate banner/link.
At the blog's peak I was generating about $300/month from each of those two sources, with a couple anomalous checks from Amazon in late 2014 for $2,000-$3,000.
Just when that happened is when I got depressed, and income collapsed to the point that I removed all ads from my homepage and left AdSense up on individual posts.
Currently Google deposits around $120 into my bank account every 6-12 months, though I may have failed to update my AdSense agreement such that my Google payments are kaput.
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Love this. After 19 years I imagine your blog gets some traffic. Would you mind sharing how it's worked out? I think its pretty rare outside of newspapers to see someone publishing content for this long.
Love this too! Super interested in this story, I'm seeking inspiration for this kind of activity and you seem to be hitting the "sweet spot".
I really like to write about things that catch my interest
Being an enthusiast
Being extremely interested in people/things that are surprising/clever/beautiful/original/funny (not all at once necessarily)
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On flow: back when I started my blog (2004) I soon realized that nothing had ever turned on the "flow switch" as predictably as preparing and publishing posts: for 4-6 hours/day, 5-6 days/week, I was in heaven. Reading the comments on vjk800's comment led me to focus on my state of mind today (I'll be 75 on June 8) as I work on my blog in its nineteenth year. Though I spend perhaps 2-3 hours/day 3-5 days/week on it n…
I checked out the blog and noticed the book "Quantations". > How does the theoretical world of quantum physics create our everyday life? "Quantations" explains this with wit and clarity, making the imaginary real. I also took a peek into the book. I'm sorry to sound negative, but this is just full of fluff that has nothing to do with actual quantum physics. It's all pseudo-philosophical fluff and that stuff is the re…
You don't sound negative to me but, rather, accurate and factual.
I am no physicist but rather a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years until 2015).
The only physics I know I learned in 1966-1967 Physics 1a/2a/3a at UCLA, which was the easier physics sequence for non-physics majors who planned to go on to medical school or graduate study in other scientific disciplines.
I made up the word "Quantations" for my book to describe a compendium of quotations I'd been gathering since I was in college in the 1960s (indeed, I actually used yellowed cuttings from newspapers and magazines I'd gotten in the habit of keeping in file folders back then) that in large part centered around quantum physics.
I included many of my own thoughts, "pseudo-philosophical fluff" being a perfect description and one I'm going to use in the future, BTW.
Since my teenage years the mystery of quantum physics and its related tangents and intersections with so-called "reality" has been of much interest to me.
The philosophical explorations and musings of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr, and their peers and successors continue to offer glimpses of other possible ways of viewing the universe and being.
"BS" is a fair way to describe non-mathematical, non-quantitative attempts to render quantum mechanics into everyday language.
As Richard Feynman remarked in 1964 in The Messenger Lectures at MIT, "... I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
I actually crossed paths with Richard Feynman in 1980 when I was an anesthesiology resident at UCLA Medical Center: he was about to undergo surgery for removal of a cancerous abdominal mass and I happened to be standing in a corridor as he was wheeled into the operating room.
He died in 1989 at age 69 of sequelae of that cancer.
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I’ve been programming professionally for over 25 years. I have not written a line of code for “fun” since I graduated from college.
This makes me sad. Do you mean you coded for fun before graduating and not since, or ever? Like you never coded a little game or a shell function to make your commandline usage easier or anything like that just for your own use, for fun? Honestly it’s a double edged sword to like coding because then you get opinions about languages. I could never be a mercenary in anything though. If I didn’t like coding I’d be a des…
I spent from 1996 (when I graduated) -2012 as a part time fitness instructor, active runner and a weightlifter.
I spent from 1996-2002 and 2006-2012 hanging out with friends and dating (I was married from 2002-2006.
From 2012-2022 I spent my time with family (got remarried in 2012).
By the end of 2022, my wife and I had gotten rid of everything that wouldn’t fit into three suitcases and decided to be “hybrid digital nomads” where we stay in our “vacation home” from October - early February and we fly around to different cities in the US for the other 7 months.
I’ve also taken back up running.
There is so much more to life than pecking on a computer during my free time.
Software development is a means to an end - nothing more.
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Guilty. I'm pretty good at my job, but I never learned CS fundamentals and don't work in a context where this matters (I currently work in front-end JS/TS). I don't think it's worthless knowledge to me, but I think you're a bit blinded by your own context. I have seen many comments on HN bemoaning "Developers who don't even know X", and X is always something different. I don't think there's a smoking gun for bad deve…
Here's one take: good developers learn fast, bad developers learn slow. Software is one of the fastest moving fields, so it takes a quick mind to keep up. Clearly, everyone needs some basic knowledge to program, and equally clearly, there will be gaps in every developer's knowledge. When needed, we fill the gaps as quickly as possible. If someone can learn 10x as fast, maybe they only need 1/10th the knowledge base.
But at 50, I'm feeling burned out about doing anything for 40+ hours per week anymore. I'm embarking on an adventure with cancer right now, and if I survive it then I'll do my best to find a way to wind down so that I work half-time or zero.
I'd rather be somewhere warm and bleak, nailing houses together for Habitat for Humanity.