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jugjugon Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

I've been thinking about this, but I don't really know. The podcast is a lot of Clojure, which by itself might be an interesting language to learn. Some people report that learning Clojure was different than other languages, eg Uncle Bob, Gene Kim (see "Love Letter to Clojure") or I think even Paul Graham.

Maybe the Effectively Isolated Serie might be interesting (ep 021-027). Oh, and Cooking Up Composition, about composing functions (ep 093-098).

jugjugon Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

Lately, I have been struck by pragmatism of approaches discussed in https://clojuredesign.club/

For example, one can start separating pure functions from side-effects, aiming for aggressively minimal side-effecting functions. Applying this approach to calling REST APIs, one would first create a full request (including the http method, body, headers, etc) in a pure function, and only then send that request to the wire. With such a split, one can easily unit-test the request construction (it's a pure fn), and also explore the request.

It was mind-bending to me when I first heard it. The podcast is full of such approaches and it seems that Chris and Nate, the hosts, have quite some battle scars to source from.

jugjugon Volkswagen Will Bring Back Physical Buttons in New Cars

Reminds on Rich Hickey ranting about touch screens in cars [1] in Design in Practice:

> We do not have feature X" is never a valid problem statement. If you need proof of this you only need to look at a modern car which has a touch screen where no one said, "I need to slide my finger on some random piece of glass to a precise point to set my blower in my car while I am driving." No one has ever said that, right? But somebody did say, "We need touch screens because young people will never buy our cars." This is what happens when you are not talking about the problem.

[1]: https://youtu.be/c5QF2HjHLSE?si=M6apr6fG_YaIDOpj&t=1826

jugjugon Ask HN: How do you get side gigs?

not mentioned here yet: small bet approach, popularized by Daniel Vassalo https://twitter.com/dvassallo

jugjugon Ask HN: Working in tech for climate?

I worked shortly for an airline, breathing carosine weekly, and so then switched back to EV charge-points and solar. I am not sure if it makes real impact, but I feel subjectively better and find more satisfaction on every day basis.

I started as a full-time employee, now I work remotely as a freelancer/contractor.

I am pretty glad for the switch. The type of work I do (data engineering, tech leadership) is quite similar to the airline business; but in the clean-tech side.

For finding a job, maybe remote job listing sites might help [1], or then clean-tech related job sites.

[1] https://twitter.com/insharamin/status/1554160501550358528

jugjugon More Control with Idempotency

OP here. I draw them on a tablet. For more, see https://marcel.is/drawings-first-steps/

jugjugon PostgREST 9.0

As far as I know, AppSync doesnt provide GraphQL resolver on top of an RDS out of the box, one needs to write these resolvers by hand.

Or am I missing something?

jugjugon Ask HN: How do you take notes throughout your work day?

Love Obsidian as well, for about 1y now. I have a tech background, but typescript and aws serverless were new to me, so I decided to learn-in-public. Regarding categorization (and design), I was inspired by Julia's web: https://jvns.ca/

jugjugon Ask HN: How do you take notes throughout your work day?

For technical things where I'm a newbie, I'm trying to learn-in-public [1]. I write a TIL usually at the end of the day, it typically goes quickly.

In those cases where the matter is private (maybe 1/4 of all), I attempt to document it in company's knowledge base or at least share it in the company chat.

All other things go to my personal Obsidian.

[1] https://marcel.is/tils/

jugjugon Ask HN: How to build empathy?

I use two complementing strategies:

- Developing empathy towards myself first, that is, being able to observe feelings that arise within me and then being able to accept these feelings as they are. I have found this to be very relieving. A technique that helped me was meditation; training the mind like a muscle to be able to observe & recognize feelings.

- Turning this outwards to others, the works of Marshall Rosenberg on the NonViolent Communiction (NVC) [1] had a profound impact on my perception of feelings of others. I'm trying to follow the essence of the book, rather than copying the phrases outlined there. I'm seeing more and more that NVC can be applied to business as well as personal relationships [2]

Applying these to your example, it might be interesting to explore what do you _feel_ when the other person just wants you to listen. What is it that you _need_ out of the relationship and what is it that the _other_ side needs [3]?

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71730.Nonviolent_Communi...

[2]: https://marcel.is/contractor-didnt-deliver/

[3]: https://marcel.is/conflict-resolution/

jugjugon Fzf – the basics part 1 – layout

Yeah, that would be nice. I don't know though from the top of my head.

jugjugon Fzf – the basics part 1 – layout

I love fzf as well. I use it with the npm package manager to select the script to run (we have an app with 20+ scripts):

    npmrf () {
        local script
        script=$(cat package.json | jq -r '.scripts | keys[] ' | sort | fzf)  && npm run $script
    }

Another usecase is tracking hours with Clockify. I was frustrated opening up the web everytime, so I wrote a script using fzf, httpie and jq. Love it now. [1]

[1]: https://marcel.is/tracking-hours/

jugjugon The curious case of if-not

OP here. Yeah, I should have made it clearer, thanks.

jugjugon Ask HN: What are your favourite productivity tools?

Obsidian [1] for organizing notes of any kind, together with the book How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens.

[1] https://obsidian.md/

jugjugon Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?

I think of Rich Hickey [1]: helping others to understand the code faster by identifying and removing most of the accidental complexity.

[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

jugjugon Ask HN: Best book to learn about SQL and databases?

To add to suggestions of others, the SQL Antipatterns was also an insigtful read about basic pitfalls of db design.

I have also found first chapters from Designing Data Intensive Applications helpful to get context around sql/nosql dbs.

jugjugon Ask HN: How much time do you spend on your side project?

This, exactly. Perhaps counterintuitively, having less time enables me to do more.

Also, I stopped doing optimizations & just try to deliver the basics. I realized a lot of time was eaten by optimizations, while other, more important things, were not even done.

jugjugon Ask HN: How do you cope with ever increasing complexity of software ecosystems?

I focus at least one third of my learning time on things that dont change, such as principles behind Hickey’s Simple Made Easy, Hamming’s You & Your Research, Brooks’ Mythical Man Month, functional programming, and technical things like SQL, shell.

New tech is a often a container around those, making it easy to grasp it.

Also, new tech also dont have such community & ecosystem around it as older tech, so I keep it on the radar, but dont use in production immediately. Focusing on boring technology, with a spark of novelty where needed.

jugjugon Ask HN: What book, video, paper, or essay do you keep revisiting over and over?

Rich Hickey - Simple Made Easy

jugjugon Clean code won't save the planet

This. Less flying, less buying, less meet, less consumerism, more local & seasonal food. No need to go full 100%: it would be enough if critical mass reaches a good-enough level.

jugjugon Why Leaders Need to Learn the Skill of Writing

I've found Steven Pinker's book on writing useful & spot-on [1]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821371-the-sense-of-st...

jugjugon Ask HN: Non-web developers, what do you do?

I develop a system to monitor energy production of solar panels. Before I helped build a system to manage large number of EV charge points. There is some web frontend, but most of the work is in the IoT communication, scaling, and insights into many kinds of malfunctions.

jugjugon Ask HN: How does one becomes a pro at Software Engineering

I think a good starting point is to integrate the principles described in the Simple Made Easy[1] & Hammock Driven Development[2]. These are overarching first principles that help in designing and writing code, but also in communication & team work.

[1]: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

jugjugon Ask HN: Best Book for Personal Finance and Investment

https://www.bogleheads.org/RecommendedReading.php

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_r...

jugjugon Ask HN: Service/API for Payouts in Europe

mollie.com seems to target the EU market.

jugjugon Ask HN: What utility function are you maximizing in your life?

Yes, but I optimize death-bed regret at this point, when I am alive. Let's say I regret how I behaved to a certain person in the past. When I wholeheartedly apologize and truly regret it, I see the death-bed regret be lower for all days afterwards.

It's like via-negativa for hapinnes [1]: being more happy by removing things that makes me unhappy.

[1] Nassim Taleb - Antifragile

jugjugon Ask HN: How do you share knowledge in your company?

A lot of functional and technical specs on Confluence, involving as many shareholders as possible. Prevents boring meetings, improves shared understanding, prevents surprises down the road, serves as documentation for new team members.

Inspiration came from this fantastic serie by Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/10/02/painless-functiona...

jugjugon Ask HN: What utility function are you maximizing in your life?

Death-bed regret.

I keep finding surprising consequences of such utility function: balancing daily energy, resting, active work towards higher purpose, enjoying time with friends, calling my parents, helping others, resolving relationship conflicts structurally, long-term investing and financial stability, more courage in general.

jugjugon Ask HN: Which backpack do you use for work and work travel?

A huge fan of Tactical 5.11 Rush72 [1] here. My favorite features:

- large in volume (55L), yet I can board a plane with it

- side pockets can be easily opened even if the main compartment is fully packed

- easily accessible and large front admin panel

- waist straps can be folded and hidden inside the bag

- the zip around the main compartment goes around all three sides, which allows very easy access for packing, unpacking or activities like having a picnic

- space between admin panel and the main compartment allows for extra external storage. for example, today I was carrying a small carpet bought in IKEA in there.

- wide straps which feel comfortable also with heavier loads

- looks ok also in a city, especially darker versions

- plenty of internal pockets everywhere

- dedicated back pocket for a laptop.

The only downside is that I'm not sure if a 15" laptop would fit into the back pocket. I'm using a 13" laptop and it fits. However, the backpack is so feature-rich that it's ok for me to put the potential 15" laptop to the main compartment - there's a half-pocket that can be used for that purpose.

All in all, this is by far the best backpack I have ever used.

[1] https://www.511tactical.com/rush-72-backpack.html

jugjugon Ask HN: Best books you've read in 2019?

- Antifragile by Nassim Taleb

- Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse.

- The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin