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Antisuji
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I’ve sometimes been in the habit of talking into my phone, which conveniently removes the social stigma as long as no one is close enough to hear what you’re saying. Taking walks helps. You can either record yourself or not—I find that talking into an inert phone feels awkward while recording myself makes me feel a little self-conscious. I never did find a method I was completely comfortable with, which might be why I don’t do it anymore.
Anyway, I’m generally a fan of self-talk / private speech. I think it’s a good way to put your thoughts through a BS detector, or at least so goes my theory: since you’re hearing the words aloud you interpret the message as if someone else were saying it and so you hold it to a higher standard.
The hows and whys of refactoring and DRY. How and why to achieve proper separation of concerns (I still have lots to learn there).
Social protocols, especially around initiating and maintaining friendships and other levels of relationships. Being empathetic.
While it’s probably justified to correct for the sampling bias in prevalence statistics, it’s worth pointing out that sexual partners are not sampled uniformly: the prevalence of a given STD will potentially be higher in the population of likely partners than in the general population.
Looking back at this, I’m realizing that a lot of these suggestions are more plain old advice rather than force multipliers. The true force multipliers are proficiency with tools, continually investing in improving your workflow, and probably certain people skills like delegation and team-building.
As pushcx said it’s not about speed as much as not having to pay attention to what your fingers are doing (and crucially, being able to look elsewhere while you type). The bottleneck isn’t bandwidth but the size of your L1 cache.
This sort of optimization is a pretty foundational concept for software engineers. These are things that have helped my career as a software engineer and made me more effective in my job (not exactly the same thing, but related!):
Basics
Touch typing. This should go without saying, but I’ve worked with people who hunt and peck and it’s painful to watch. But you don’t have to type really fast to get most of the benefit, since other bottlenecks will start to dominate. In my experience a pokey 50 WPM is more than sufficient.
More Advanced Mechanics
Gain fluency in a powerful shell, a good text editor, and an expressive “scripting” language
Learn a modern version control system such as git
Set up an environment that works for you and keep improving it – this is very much along the lines of Nick5a1′s systems mindset. Keep your dotfiles in version control.
Don’t repeat yourself. Learn to refactor code to remove unnecessary duplication.
Keep configuration decisions out of code
Understand dependencies among different pieces of code and know a few strategies for simplifying them (the pub/sub or event bus pattern, dependency injection, etc.)
Know how to deal with asynchronous operations using both callbacks and promises – NodeSchool has a great tutorial for server-side JavaScript.
Soft Skills
Keep a todo list (I keep my own, or you can get really good with your issue tracker)
Keep a log of things you’ve done (bonus if you can generate the log automatically from your todo list)
Keep notes on how you solved tricky problems
Understand your role (you’re not a designer or product manager, but you need to know what they care about to work with them effectively)
prioritize the product, then others’ goals, then your own (this is usually the most effective way of furthering your goals)
insist on regular one-on-one meetings with your manager
before answering a question find out why the question was asked
As you get older, you gain more ability to buy utility at good prices: for instance, kids become increasingly expensive as they age.
Perhaps because my economic intuition isn’t that sharp, I’m having trouble connecting the dots on this statement. I’m not seeing how the example implies the assertion, and I’m having trouble coming up with another example. Can you expand on this?
This is interesting, thanks for the link. The model seems to be partly based on one’s assessment of self-worth as compared to their partner. Based on this I’d expect to see a person exhibit different styles depending on who they’re dating, though this effect could be diminished by acclimation. This might account for some portion of the 20-30% of people who change styles. Is this explored in the literature? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding and the self- and other-assessments are purely positive or negative and not at all comparative.
Also I tried searching for frequencies of the four styles in the population and wasn’t able to find anything. Do you know if that’s available anywhere? Or even better, how the styles are distributed (are there strong clusters or are most people borderline as with MBTI?).
You’re right, I made some assumptions that probably don’t apply to SaidAchmiz, and I realize my comment comes off poorly. I apologize. I was trying to refer to the situation from the OP, but found it difficult to write about without using a hypothetical “you” and I’m not entirely satisfied with the result.
What I was trying to get across is that this kind of situation can be complex and that the girlfriend in the scenario can have legitimate emotional justification for behaving this way. I agree that wishing you’d lied is a bad situation to be in. I agree that the OP’s story is not a very good mode of interaction even if handled the way Sam Harris would. I agree that people should be able to have explicit conversations about emphasizing positives rather than veiled ones (which I was trying to get at when I said the conversation was “actually” about that).
I don’t mean to imply that SaidAchmiz wants to feel completely free to say anything regardless of consequences. I’m trying to say that I have felt that tendency myself and have unintentionally taken advantage of a “we should be able to say anything to each other” policy as an excuse not to think about the effects of my speech.
Hopefully this is clearer. I’m only trying to relay what I’ve learned from my experiences, but maybe I’ve failed at that.
I understand the sentiment, but I’d caution that the desire to be able to express yourself freely can be seen as cover for having license to say whatever you want without regard to how it effects the other person. This is bad even if you don’t intend to use it that way: you should be spending some cycles thinking about how the other person will feel about what you say. I speak from experience: saying what’s on my mind has at times been hurtful to people I care about and I should have censored it or redirected the impulse.
Perhaps part of what you’re objecting to is not that the person prefers you to lie, but that they prefer a world that can’t exist to exist. If this were really what’s going on, that would be a severe lapse of rationality. But that world can exist: our opinions are mutable and it’s quite possible to decide to like the play. The conversation is actually about something completely different: whether you’re willing and able to emphasize the positive over the negative aspects of something for her sake, which is an essential skill in any relationship.
The conversation is also about asking for acknowledgement and approval for something she’s worked hard on and probably partially identifies with.
Please note that I’m not saying this is easy or obvious. Empathy is a difficult skill and requires training (or socialization), followed by practice and attention even for those to whom it comes easily.
Or, of course, some combination thereof.
This is a great idea for a regular thread! Thanks for posting.
I’m taking Computing for Data Analysis on Coursera, which is more or less an R primer. There’s only one more week left in my session, so there’s not much time left to study together, but regardless I’m open to studying with other LWers taking the course. So far it’s pretty good, so I can recommend the course if you’re thinking of taking it.
I probably won’t have much time for MOOCing in the near future since next week I’m starting a new job that I expect to be intellectually demanding and I’ll want to do other kinds of things in my free time. But you never know.
Edit to add: I’m also on Lesson 5 of Differential Equations on Udacity, but since it’s not timed I’ve put it on the back burner. I’m planning to finish it up once the R course is done.
It’s always about direction of attention
This is one of my favorite things about a certain brand of writing: it’s meta, or somehow self-aware or self-similar, without rubbing the fact in your face. Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium are also like this (and are the only lit-crit-like thing I’ve ever enjoyed reading).
The toast is Josey Baker Bread (yes, that’s actually his name; short documentary here) and it really is that good. By which I mean, as another exploitative Bay Area techie, I’ve paid that price at The Mill more than once and I felt it was worth it.
I more or less agree, but note that extra effort does not necessarily mean extra hours. Though, depending on who you work for the latter might be a good proxy for the former.
This is closely related to a failure mode of communication discussed here recently. The error made by the “fascists” and “rakes” in the linked post is a special case of the OP’s error of assumed variables: in this case the hidden variable is whose morality applies.
My guess is that these miscommunications often arise from inadequate empathy or theory of mind. It’s very common for assertions to have hidden or assumed variables that are reflexive, that is, they refer to the speaker. Some people have the ability to automatically transfer the hidden referent when changing such an assertion’s subject, and others must to reminded to do so. (And indeed, in some cases some will argue that it’s not appropriate to transfer the referent!)
It appears to be this.
Non-paywall article here.
I used to feel that way about interruptions, but at this point I’m not convinced that taking breaks is particularly harmful to my productivity as a programmer. I’m usually in one of two situations. I’m either stuck on something, in which case taking a break can be helpful, or in the zone, in which case I know exactly what I’m doing and it takes less than a minute to get back into things. The intuition that interruptions are bad for productivity might stem from the fact that being interrupted feels unpleasant.
Of course my experience may not apply to everyone, etc, etc.