Wow, not the kind of engineering room I'd want to be in. You have to be able to make claims that the other party does not have a complete picture of the situation, and an external critic is indeed going to be vulnerable to the same criticism.
Maybe you would have a point if it were a Linus-style "only a fucking idiot would" rant. But responding to a sincere attempt to defend a design decision as if it were an insult is some prima donna behavior.
I mean, sure, that’s a possibility. But some people are just really good at whiteboarding problems and explaining solutions. Sometimes these people end up being technical interviewers. If you’ve been a technical interviewer for a while, you don’t find the experience stressful. After a while of doing technical problems they start to seem easier and easier, even when presented with evidence to the contrary (when candidates find them difficult).
Speaking as someone who is (1) a technical interviewer (2) good at whiteboarding problems and (3) has near zero fear of public speaking, I think the big exercise in humility is to figure out ways to get evidence for the interviewee’s skill set even when it’s dissimilar to my own.
I'm moving towards an approach of batch processing more things. What this means in practice is that more of my tasks use limited interactivity - e.g. "draft and redraft" vs "draft and edit". This has the effect of the "yes and" in improv, where I make errors but have to keep going regardless. Working within that mode also means that I can activate on a reflexive, pre-flow state level where I flex the project-management muscles,
not the problem-solving muscles. Flow means I am challenging myself, and with so many years of experience, challenging myself means that I am overcomplicating it.
As well, I'm more likely to treat looking up docs as a research project where I copy relevant snippets of the text into one place for easier reference.
I'm still unhappy with a lot of aspects of how I code, but most of it isn't on the end of the day-to-day editing, but rather things like, "oh, I switched languages again - time to relearn the string library".
That id an interesting take on flow meaning you are overcomplicating things. That explains what was happening to me pretty well I think. I was too bored to reach a state of flow but if it were more challenging I would have been re-inventing something. I have switched domain since I burnt out which is perhaps why I can now find new challenges and be able to reach flow.
As someone who works in healthcare and has to juggle quite a bit of technical info on quite a few different active individual patients and who has also read other poster's responses above, I'm kinda taken aback that there is such a lack of higher level organization going on. Is it just something that isn't taught or that is but people just don't want or like to do?
I can only speak for software, but as an industry it doesn't have any clear framework of process at an individuals level. It's all very much left to the individual on how they organise themselves, and a lot of people (including me) never got the memo that it's something you should think about or else there can be consequences (like burn out, inefficiency). Just generally speaking the software industry is a melting pot of loose ideals when it comes to actually working. There are no regulations, no unions, no standard tooling, hell sometimes we make our own tools, set our own hours, move our own goalposts.
I think that's why software companies are often approached with quite a bit of caution by other businesses. It's not like hiring an engineering firm, where you can be pretty certain you'll get an industry standardized result.
The more I think about the "boredom is good" concept, the more I suspect it's flawed. Bored kids get into trouble, especially as they get older. By 18, a very bored kid left to chance will have found an unhealthy outlet like drinking or property theft.
We have a lot of screens now. But it's what one sees and does with the screen that matters. There is an element of media as pollution in this, but it's contrasted against our notion of "the classics". We always end up with a youth that is a mixture of the misspent and the classics.
Bored kids who are always bored and have no outlets to stem that boredom often get into trouble. I think that's pretty well known and correlated. It's a picture that's been seen in countless deprived areas. Some will make their own outlets that might include drink or crime. Others will make their own constructive outlets.
I doubt that degree of chance is what anyone is advocating. Instead a little dead time, or space to be bored every day or two is often the spark for something creative. Make a Lego model, draw a picture, go out on bikes for an hour, kick a football round the back garden, etc etc.
You’re trying to analyze raising children scientifically, and I think that’s impossible.
You can never measure bored teens against non-bored teens in any meaningful way. No parent will want to, or be able to participate in a scientific study to tests the effects of boredom on their teens. What would that even look like? Randomize parents in two groups, and have them change their parenting in prescribed ways? No parent would agree to that.
Even if you did that study, and parents didn’t fail to follow the instructions, the results wouldn’t be applicable. Humans are different. What works for one teen may be counterproductive for another. You could get an average impact of 0, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t impact on a per-teen basis.
And of course, you don’t even know what outcome you want to optimize for. Is it grades? Number of friends? Salary at age 35?
Raising kids is (for better or worse) completely unscientific. Discussions are based in anecdotes and personal experience, not statistics.
The point is that they are individuals and one size fits all is doomed to failure. Any findings will be coarse and easy to confuse cause and effect. Just because children active in sports and music programs may be healthier and happier doesn't mean forcing the kid into both will improve things - by all means expose the kids to it, encourage them and let them pursue it but forcing a square peg into a round hole is good for no one.
There were worries that powerlines were harming children because children with homes near power lines had worse performance in schools. Analysis found that the mechanism for the "harm" was lowered property values - parents who lived near powerlines considered unsightly had fewer resources and it reflected in their children's academic performance.
A pure statistical approach on an individual level is like trying to have a full term baby in one month. Trying to actually raise children involves small N numbers with divergent starting states and control is impossible. You won't raise your second child in the same environment as the first - the year is different, you are different and there is the addition of an older sibling.
You can figure out great harms and benefits but anything else is shrouded in enough noise that attempting it at that level is practically superstition.
I am not advocating for a pure statistical approach.
The parent of my first comment was making broad claims about the effects of boredom without justification. I dont think the assertion has any value without some good evidence. I was therefore providing the parent comment an opportunity to Contribute something more substantive than armchair speculation.
It also isn't new at all - the puritans had similar ideas that took them from ruling England after ousting the king to what may be snarkily summarized "We prefer nobility over these self-rightious fundamentalists wankers."
It is a toxic "your misery is good for you because it flatters my ego" attitude mixed in with nostalgia for a past that never was.
Being able to deal with boredom productively is useful but that doesn't make boredom a virtue or a good way to promote it any more than being able to stay sane in maximum security with only a library makes isolation a virtue and solitary confinement a good way to promote sanity and literacy.
I've been converted to the "add peripherals" side, personally. The standards are developed enough and the selection is broad enough to dial in whatever balance of price, portability, ergonomics and device features is desired - at the extreme end, a USB OTG hub connecting your full size mechanical keyboard, MMO mouse, graphics tablet, game controllers, and flash drives, and at the other, pocket folding Bluetooth keyboards and mini mice. It turns a phone or tablet into "just a screen" - a viable entry level workstation only held back by software and processing capacity.
"high-performance" is a qualifier worthy of question, though.
If the goal were to write one algorithm to be the fastest implementation, performance would usually equate to having low level control.
If the goal were to do automatic optimization of a wide variety of similar algorithms, then we're in the "actually writing a compiler" territory and then there is little to be gained from defaulting to low-level control.
And there are some options. You could achieve barebones VM protections with Pawn(the language enforces very little otherwise, though). You could use something ref-counted like a TCL implementation, which would allow you to design around linear allocation times. The vast majority are using some kind of tracing collector of course, but I wouldn't say this is a total loss for achieving a combination of real time and memory protection.
My main minus to this is not that it's JS(I'm building a JS fantasy computer too) but that it's a node/react piece, which inspires zero confidence that it will have anything resembling foundational stability in the future.
>Everything compiles to JS these days, so it is an easy lowest common denominator.
That's not even remotely true. JS is only a common denominator for running code in a browser, but the lowest common denominator is still C/C++ and Java, even with native applications vs. Electron.
Maybe you would have a point if it were a Linus-style "only a fucking idiot would" rant. But responding to a sincere attempt to defend a design decision as if it were an insult is some prima donna behavior.