daryllxd

I'm commenting on Hacker News, and I believe that getting access to a community of engineers, programmers, whatever, successful people, has been a net positive for me. So many good ideas get shared here.

Hobbies that you want to discover more in, but no one in your immediate friend group knows. You want to go deep in programming, basketball, golf, whatever. There's multiple Youtube videos, subreddits, etc. for it.

Video calling? Chatting with a person from literally thousands of miles away? My grandpa used to literally write a letter on paper to his brother who was in the States. Now I can just call my parents with video calls.

I'm almost always on perplexity now, it has supplanted Google search.

Curious what you're using chat GPT on and not perplexity? I feel that its free tier offers more than ChatGPT. It is particularly helpful for the "tell me how ..." kind of queries and to confirm understanding with concepts I'm learning

> And then run an Ansible script which installs a series of Brew items (ansible has a brew module) along with other stuff not on brew.

Yes, this is what I have right now. I have it set up to install some non-Brew stuff as well (Chrome, Firefox, Whatsapp, etc.). I intend on using this even for my non-tech family's machines, ideally should just be 1 script to install `homebrew`, `pip` (or `uv` like the other fellow said) + Ansible, and then 1 script to install everything else via the brew module.

Awesome, I think this is kind of what I am going for re: the goodies. I am a tmux guy as well but will try them out.

I'm leaning towards Ansible as I wanted to learn it this year for VMs too. So there is some overlap with the local machines + am still on MacOS.

Curious why you went with fish over zsh? (Zsh is more common in my circles)

Hey, thanks - I don't think it's a good idea to time machine my personal laptop to my new work laptop. And definitely I would try to follow the guides if the company has them.

> I wonder why complicate your life?

I wouldn't say it's complicating life? I'm quite having fun tinkering around with it. I intend to use the playbook (or maybe Brewfile as one of my friends recommend that as well) for setting up future machines for my family and I.

Great comment and blog post man. I think you crystallised what I've been wondering, why do some business or self-improvement books feel they could have been a tweet like you said.

Just to add. I suggest journaling and keeping track of things. Like even 10 to 15 minutes per say of how the day went, what you felt. This is a cure but also a prevention thing. Meaning what were the days and trends of what you were doing before the big bad monster came. For me its usually when I havent exercised, ate junk food or didnt eat my veggies, sometimes when I havent gone out of the house (remote work). I dont think this will work for clinical depression but I'm not a doctor. Just a tip. Gather data and figure out how to reverse engineer the suck. Good luck!

Yes, I agree, and it really is a feature (flaw?) of human psychology. As much as I want to say that I want to make sure that I research something before doing or buying it, more often than not I just choose something based on emotion. Even for something like programming, I wonder if I use libraries based on their utility or on the star power of the guy who built it. It takes a lot of mental power to weigh pros and cons versus just choosing and hoping for the best.

Just a constraint so I force myself to do this, I'm barely pushing through day 6 hehe. Then I can go back next month and redo all the articles, hehe.

This sounds cool. Was it really helpful? What do they teach in comedy class?

I just spoke at a dev conference for the first time last weekend. Here's what I found, in addition to randomly checking out Youtube videos:

- https://speaking.io/ - https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/hanselman-speaking -> Mr. Scott is really good, I like his talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS1mnISoG7U.

I think you have to just keep on practicing actually speaking, like even in front of a mirror, I didn't do this enough (I practiced, but in front of my machine). Also just look at a few people in the audience, think of it like you're chatting with 1 person 100 times/5 people 20 times as opposed to chatting 100 people.

Thank you! Those are all helpful tips. Yup, I have sort of a script written. Instead of "you know", I'll just try pausing. I might actually reference this thread in the presentation just to show my human side. :)

Nice. I've read a bunch of books and I'm also looking to make something like this. Just a question: I'm not an American, how does copyright work for things like this? Can I write something like a "10 things I learned from <BOOK>" with a few (like < 20) lines copied (or should I paraphrase it?) from the book?

Hello, thank you for replying! That's so great to hear. Yes, I have other interests (hiking, cycling, travelling, recently writing/journaling). They don't pay the bills though, hehe.

She's one of my favorite speakers! I actually took down notes of 2 of her conference talks. https://github.com/daryllxd/every_ruby_talk_ever/blob/master.... I watched that specific talk before too!

Christ, that's right. "Without publishing, it is impossible to write blog posts." I should just keep on publishing because (this is just my thought process right now, not so sure about this):

- People can figure out points, because I've gotten things from blog posts with so-so sentence composition but brilliant points. As long as the points make sense, an article that's badly written from the technical perspective still has some value. - Everything can be edited or deleted anyway.

Thanks!

I completely agree with this. Whatever's most familiar for you, but hopefully, it should be familiar for other people too. Try to write it in a way that you can switch out parts if you really needed to. For example, I'm still a Rails programmer but I've been structuring my apps differently from traditional Rails (oftentimes just doing the API backend).

However, that's only because I still have the luxury of time. If I had a gun to my head and a finite number of hours to code an app, then I'd go with vanilla Rails. If I was given a few weeks to study a new framework, I'd go with Elixir/Phoenix, but only because I spent a few days trying it around and while I'm not particularly fluent with it yet, I like its design and speed a lot more than Rails.

I think this is why we perfect our craft. We have to be able to code fast or code pretty, depending on the circumstances.

Oh I forgot about that! I actually have some notes: https://github.com/daryllxd/lifelong-learning/blob/master/pr...

Can this work in learning a new programming language? I'm seeing parallels in that you'll need to recognize/encode patterns/syntax in both.

This is mine: https://www.cycleops.com/product/supermagneto.

I hook it up to a bike computer (Garmin Edge 520) and an app called TrainerRoad (https://www.trainerroad.com/platforms). It's a bit of an investment, but I find that having numbers/instrumentation makes things exciting especially when tracking your progress.

My bike and my bike trainer are in my top ten best purchases ever in terms of the value they've given (increased energy, increased fitness).

What a wonderful answer. I love hearing "programming" as "craft", I can't articulate it yet but it's a combination of science/art/other trades.

Thank you for answering. At first I was surprised at "someone who's a productive expert in their field in some group, will not understand, and not be capable of working in some other group", but I guess at some level I as a Ruby/JS (and learning Elixir) programmer am drifting apart from the other languages. Like right now I can't visualize myself coding iOS/Android apps just because the tooling is different. I probably could if I really wanted to, but it'd be really hard.

My goal for the next few years is to just keep on mastering the craft as to make it easier to make things or make decisions on things, I hope to continue programming to at least make tools for myself and for other people.

I completely agre re: "its the people you do things with that matter", but I'd like to add "the people you do things for", too. I think everyone (bakers and soldiers included) likes working with nice people and working on something that will be used by other people.

If you're the type to not want to go to the gym (anxiety, or it's too far), I've had immense benefits from cycling, both indoors and outdoors. I can think more clearly about programming when I'm chilling on the bike, so many ideas and bug fixes have come while just pedalling along.

That's actually super smart. I usually try to log my habits/daily things to do (write in journal, exercise, spend at least an hour reading a book etc.) but doing it for virtues sounds like a good idea. What did you get from doing it? Why'd you stop?

I've been to Korea too. Are you a developer there? How's it like?

How'd it go? :)

Hey man, a lot of suggestions in the thread, but I think you can also do some journaling. Just open your text editor and write whatever you're feeling. For me I thought this was stupid and a waste of time but it's nice to see your thoughts and see the progression of how you're thinking/feeling. I sometimes have crappy days where I write "I just played the Sims all day" or "I am really not in the mood" and I find that for some reason I can't keep on writing that same thing for several days in a row.

It's like when I write "I did crappy things" down, I get irritated with myself for not being productive and I want to do better things tomorrow. Not necessarily programming at first but something productive (like cook a meal, exercise, etc.).

Not sure if this will help but for me it did so hopefully it works? Also eat right and try to exercise. If you don't like exercise just take walks. I find walking to be therapeutic too

Also agree here. I think you gradually get to know these technologies with the more practice/experience you get. I might not know Puppet or Chef, but I've used Ansible in the past and they're a bit different but they're also the same. So if I was applying to this company I'd say that I haven't used some of the specific technologies per se but I can learn them when I get there.

I think this job description just says, "we want to see if you can contribute in the front-end, back-end, database design, have some literacy in the Amazon services, use development tools like Jira, etc." This sounds daunting when you read it, but over a span of a few months with a company or with a project, you'll get to experience most of these anyway

- Mindset by Carol Dweck. Taught me a lot about just grinding/practicing.

- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson. It's helping me focus only on the things I really want.

- Deep Work by Cal Newport. I have almost no social media now, and I value uninterrupted time greatly.

- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Quite sobering honestly. I realize I'm spoiled AF.

- Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. I'm more conscientious of my (and my close friends') plans and I try to help them as much as possible. No excuses. Also the military discipline/mindset is really inspiring.

- Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss. I haven't finished it but this is what I read before sleeping, I can just flip the page anywhere and I read something cool

Hi I've also recently (re)discovered reading books. What books do you recommend?