throwaway74829

Hate to be that guy (just kidding ;). This isn’t one of those things you pick up in a book. It’s like lifting or any other exercise: you just do it.

Go outside, sit down somewhere, and focus on the external world and not your thoughts. You could even do the whole “breath in, breath out, and empty your thoughts” meditation schtick — if you feel it’s necessary.

If you haven’t been able to focus in a long time, 15 minutes will be hectic. You’ll know you’re being mindful when it feels like you’ve melted into the environment — and are simply an antennae to the stimulus.

Also good for disassociative traumas — the kind that give you the “1,000 yard stare.”

Have you gone down this route?

I think the biggest issue deep generalists fall into is that they can be above average in the entire stack, but not exceptional enough to make the cut for a specialized role in any single thing (i.e the vast majority of publicly advertised roles).

Going down “specialized in boot-strapping startups” route is an interesting remedy. I would imagine the only way to find these opportunities is word of mouth.

Vue / C# / Postgres / AWS / Linux Sysadminery here.

Glad to see there’s still some love for DB knowledge. Seems like everyday someone is coming to me with an issue that could be quickly solved by leaning on a mature RDBMS, instead of an ORM/NoSQL/flavor of the year tool.

Too bad most roles in this industry (that pay well and don’t work you to premature balding) need niche specialists, instead of deep generalists.

And all the faddery (see: MongoDB, MySQL, DocumentDB). “We don’t need a full-fledged RDBMS. We’ll ride this malnourished pony all the way past the finish line. We gotta stay lean; we gotta stay hungry. There’s no ‘OLTP’ in first to market.”

t. TC 75k 7yoe