Smelling ingredients & food is a good way to develop intuition about how things will taste when combined
Salt early is generally much better than salt late
Data Science:
Interactive environments like Jupyter notebooks are a huge productivity win, even with their disadvantages
Automatic code reloading makes Jupyter much more productive (e.g. autoreload for Python, or Revise for Julia)
Bootstrapping gives you fast, accurate statistics in a lot of areas without needing to be too precise about theory
Programming:
Do everything in a virtual environment or the equivalent for your language. Even if you use literally one environment on your machine, the tooling around these tends to be much better
Have some form of reasonably accurate, reasonably fast feedback loop(s). Types, tests, whatever – the best choice depends a lot on the problem domain. But the worst default is no feedback loop
Ping-pong:
People adapt to your style very rapidly, even within a single game. Learn 2-3 complementary styles and switch them up when somebody gets used to one
Friendship:
Set up easy, default ways to interact with your friends, such as getting weekly coffees, making it easy for them to visit, hosting board game nights etc.
Take notes on what your friends like
When your friends have persistent problems, take notes on what they’ve tried. When you hear something they haven’t tried, recommend it. This is both practical and the fact that you’ve customized it is generally appreciated
Conversations:
Realize that small amounts of awkwardness, silence etc. are generally not a problem. I was implicitly following a strategy that tried to absolutely minimize awkwardness for a long time, which was a bad idea
Cooking:
Smelling ingredients & food is a good way to develop intuition about how things will taste when combined
Salt early is generally much better than salt late
Data Science:
Interactive environments like Jupyter notebooks are a huge productivity win, even with their disadvantages
Automatic code reloading makes Jupyter much more productive (e.g. autoreload for Python, or Revise for Julia)
Bootstrapping gives you fast, accurate statistics in a lot of areas without needing to be too precise about theory
Programming:
Do everything in a virtual environment or the equivalent for your language. Even if you use literally one environment on your machine, the tooling around these tends to be much better
Have some form of reasonably accurate, reasonably fast feedback loop(s). Types, tests, whatever – the best choice depends a lot on the problem domain. But the worst default is no feedback loop
Ping-pong:
People adapt to your style very rapidly, even within a single game. Learn 2-3 complementary styles and switch them up when somebody gets used to one
Friendship:
Set up easy, default ways to interact with your friends, such as getting weekly coffees, making it easy for them to visit, hosting board game nights etc.
Take notes on what your friends like
When your friends have persistent problems, take notes on what they’ve tried. When you hear something they haven’t tried, recommend it. This is both practical and the fact that you’ve customized it is generally appreciated
Conversations:
Realize that small amounts of awkwardness, silence etc. are generally not a problem. I was implicitly following a strategy that tried to absolutely minimize awkwardness for a long time, which was a bad idea
These are nice, for the friends recommendation one just be cautious of offering unsolicited advice and other-optimizing