groundCode

I’m waiting for a comment about why the author chose to Write the fictional project in JavaScript to take the top comment spot and the language wars to begin....

Everyone starts from somewhere. No matter how “developed” a field is. I think we should encourage the learning no matter what level people are instead of being scornful of how “advanced” a field of study or the people within it are. There are many reasons people might not be familiar with these commands. One super simple one is if they come from a windows background where often guis take precedence over the command line.

I once saw a company that interviewed like this. The also paid the candidate for the afternoon. The thinking was if you are working on our codebase you should be compensated.

We don’t know that the author didn’t google and try a few things. And it’s perfectly possible to be a computer scientist and not know how to tune a web server. There are lots of specialisms and paths. Personally I admire someone who, despite being an expert, isn’t afraid to ask questions and admit when they don’t know something.

Inconsolata https://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

To be fair, government gateway isn’t actually developed or maintained by GDS (the organisation responsible for GOV.UK)

Exactly what I thought when I read that. I wonder how much stopping slack meant they all just jumped on twitter

Realising that maintenance is the job and when you get to looking at legacy code, that it's not crap, but just represents a person/team's point in time understanding of a domain. Your understanding is different or maybe the domain has changed (no business stands still) and so you would code it differently here and now. But you might not have back then with the understanding and knowledge the team had when they wrote it.

Realising that in x days/months/years your own code will be the legacy and viewed by other developers and yourself. Your code will represent your understanding at the point in time you write it. It's natural if it looks horrid or incomplete or bad or that you missed something obvious. Don't beat yourself up over it.

Look on any code with the understanding and compassion with which you would have the next developer look on your code.

That and making sure to get up, stretch regularly and look out the window and get out the building. Smell the roses. That sort of thing.

David malan’s CS50 course has some nice material on this. Some of the clearest well presented and enthusiastic lectures I’ve seen.

I always thought it neatly mimicked the way we think of age. When you are born you start at 0. You only turn 1 after you have lived a year.

Nitpick s/he said s/he couldn’t run the repo. If someone posted that in our slack someone would jump in and ask what errors s/he was getting. Once we found a solution we would get the docs updated, usually by the person who found the problem since they have the most context.

People ask for help in different ways based on personality, skill set and experience. It’s more important to meet them where they are than sit back and smugly suggest they lack individual ownership.

On the subject of motel living, Willy Vlautin’s book This Motel Life is an excellent read.

I'm old fashioned. Pen and paper. Take notes, recall from memory and review with decreasing regularity until it becomes base knowledge. If my brain feels like it's hurting that's good :)

This is good advice. If you want the internship/job at a company, you have to get your foot in the door. That means going through the recruitment team. Cutting off your nose to spite your face doesn't often result in job offers. Get through the recruitment and make it better from the inside.

Somewhat brilliant in that by forcing me offline I was distraction free in reading the piece. Basically it fostered an environment in which I was more likely to read to the end of the article

I'm always happy to read Troy's writing and heed his advice. I'm not sure about the whole "Perhaps Neil Patel is hoping that people will be too distracted looking at him in his pyjamas to notice" thing though. I do feel one can offer counter arguments without resorting to that kind of insult and teasing. Especially when you are right.

I think dysfunction like you describe comes from organisations that don't value developer opinion. I don't particularly blame some contractors for taking advantage of that and making a living from it, but it reflects the organisation, not the contractors per se.

My last company was like that and contractors played the role of "yes"-person all the time. Where I am now, though is very different. Everyone discusses ideas and decisions are not taken without considering options. Contractors get stuck in with everyone else and don't just shovel bad solutions to problems.

Somehow very swiftly ended up with an atomic bomb......

My main gripe is that in general, I don't think it puts the user first. It's flashy for the sake of it and I find it a terrible user experience. This is certainly subjective, but it's not helping my impression of the product which I now associate with an ideal that is trying to show how clever the designers are but not really put an excellent sublime user experience in my hands (which is what I think they were shooting for. This is all completely subjective, but they are my impressions none the less.

The site "works" on my laptop, but not really on my phone - I'm not a fan of the overly flashy animation intro, again subjective.

I work on a small screen (12.5 inch) - here's my narrative as I load the site - the entire screen is taken up with a menu bar and a picture of the top of a device. I'm not sure what is on offer at first glance. Scrolling down there's a lovely story to draw me in by the founder, but still no mention of what the "thing" he is trying to sell is.

The first mention on the page of any product is "accessories" - so they sell accessories for phones I guess.....I scroll back up - aaaaah one of the menu items is "phone" - maybe they are selling a phone.

That was my user experience on my laptop. On my phone I was greeted with a black screen for quite a few seconds and then a website that was slow and dithering. I tried clicking through to a few sub pages but they froze and then broke my back button completely. Granted it's an old, slow barely internet enabled mobile with a not very well supported OS. Still, it's very seldom I don't get a reasonable experience on well coded websites.

Hope the product is better than the website....

I type on dvorak and use vim. I've not changed the vim keybindings at all. So when I want to switch to insert mode I hit the "i" key where it is on the dvorak layout. In qwerty terms, I hit the key where "g" would be.

I came across CS unplugged a while ago. Looks like it might be useful http://csunplugged.org/

Personally, I'm basing my startup on the brexit fallout depressing the value of the pound, making outsourcing development to the uk cheaper than ever :) to wit I have set up http://brexitlabs.com

In all seriousness, I don't have a company to move, but I am seriously considering moving. I have a family here so it isn't as simple as pack up and go, but I've emigrated before so....In the meantime, parody seems my best bet. :)

> Otherwise, raising a child requires a great deal of self-sacrifice with absolutely no guarantee that you'll even get the satisfaction of a job well done. It's a total crap shoot and even the emotional return on your investment is likely to be poor.

Interesting. Although there is self-sacrifice, for myself, I see it more as a privileged to bring up another human being. As much sacrifice as I've given, I've gotten back. Being a parent has made me really consider my own actions - do I act in accordance with my moral code? do I actually present the example I want to set or am I hypocritical? How can I create safe boundaries for the child so they can explore and become themselves? There are so many things being a parent can teach you. The questions that children come up with out of curiosity.....sometimes just floor me completely. Then there's the cuddles and hugs which just melt your heart :)

I don't know about self-interest - I think here it really is down to what you think self-interest is. Which I think starts to touch on what each person believes their life is for. Anyway, just some random thoughts.

Interesting. Does that mean they have relaxed their t&c on how old you have to be to get a google account? I seem to remember a few years back google deleted an email account that some parents had set up for their child to email their grandparents.

Some food for thought there.

This I quite liked - probably because I've seen it happen a few times:

> We should not ask customers for more precision than they can give us (a symptom of this is to badger customers or managers for detailed “requirements,” then complain endlessly about “changing requirements”).

I think the idea of context is vital really. If you are a hired gun building something you aren't personally going to use, then you do need to be able to put yourself in the customer/user's shoes. Ideally, you should get to know the subject area well enough to be your own customer so you can bridge the gap between what the customer says they want and what they actually need but just haven't expressed yet.

Inconsolata http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

Interesting post - I love this idea that everything is a table and with INSERT, "you’re not really inserting individual rows. You’re really inserting entire tables".

This was a good read - I'm a dev over 40 and much of this rang true. I think there's a lot of great advice in there. One standout for me was "Be prepared to change your mind at any time through learning. " - something that I think we should all aspire to.

A Stupid Ideas in London sounds great - happy to help out!