Ulimate design?
2,010 karma · joined November 8, 2010
There may be an interesting angle for married couples in doing so. I'm interested in the sleep-tech and prospects of "feeling better," but the thing that would be really intriguing to me is the idea of something that can wake me up without an alarm blaring, which my wife hates.
They should definitely partner with RPI. Go Engineers!
There are better and cheaper ways to keep track of good ideas than a GoDaddy account!
On the other hand I worry that these kinds of lists promote an impractical approach to mastering a field that is at odds with being a "Hacker".
Think of it as being like Waterfall Subject Mastery versus Lean Subject Mastery. In Waterfall Subject Mastery you try to anticipate what you need to know up front, learn a bunch of stuff, then try to apply it to a problem. There are two problems with this model: First, you really don't know what you need to know. Second, you won't really understand it as well in the abstract.
With Lean Subject Mastery OTOH, you pick a problem and crank on it until you run into a wall. Then do some learning until you can overcome the wall. At first the walls will be many and frequent. But over time your baseline of competency is increased and you actually become productive in the new technology.
What's great about the lean approach is that when it comes time to learn about a specific topic, you have a much better context for understanding it, and thus the effort to learn it is greatly reduced. And because you have an active project, you can put your learning into practice more quickly and thus retention is increased.
The secret, though, to making LSM really work well is to commit to learning a bit more than just what you need to get over the wall. This is the difference between truly learning and being an eternal cargo culter. Don't just start banging against the OAuth library; try to understand how OAuth works. Just do it in the context of a real-world problem.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against education and learning for learning's sake, I'm just more for efficiency and getting stuff done.
Its recency affords it nice coverage of Facebook and Twitter as practical examples.
This is too true. As a Python/Django newcomer that has been difficult.
Any perspectives on buildout and where it fits into the toolbox of the future?
I started using it after watching Jacob Kaplan-Moss' Django Deployment Workshop ([1] -- highly recommended) and I like it, but I read about virtualenv and pip much more often.
[1] http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/1689/pycon-2010-django...
One thing I don't really get about Python deployment tools in general is the idea of building eggs for everything, especially the parts of my own applications that I will never redistribute. This seems to be emphasized with all the tools.
There are some other neat wallboards in the contest, but I found this one particularly cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM
The speaker argues that that freedom and choice are held as unassailable virtues by Western cultures, but in fact research shows that too much choice leads to unhappiness.
If you think of mind wandering as perhaps a product of too much choice for the mind, the two ideas are complementary.
One thing's for sure, there's no way they're getting that into the App Store... Apple doesn't like it when you repurpose the buttons!