willjp

I think one issue is that meetings aren't deliverable. Their benefit is abstract, it does not directly affect the business goals, or the bottom line.

I think another issue is that task switching can be very difficult. If your work day is split up into 1-1.5hr chunks of work, for some of us (myself at least), it is difficult to get enough momentum to steamroll through a task. I find it much easier to work after everyone has left, the pressure decreases and I find myself calm, and with regained control of my wits.

An alternative take. I’m an insomniac that tries to get to sleep before midnight, but usually has 2-3hrs awake in between sleep and time to wake up. Sometimes I wish I could pretend I was in a different timezone.

You can setup a wireguard network then proxy pass from a cheapie VPS if that’s helpful. Probably only worth it if you have multiple services though.

I like recording how I'm spending my time, so that later when it feels like the day got away from me, I can see why. Ideally, I can make adjustments that help unlock longer focus periods while still keeping family, coworkers, bosses, and other stakeholders in my life happy.

I get the impression that most people's chemistry experience was much different than mine. Ours was about rote memorization, period. I kind of feel like I missed out.

Not alone! I do this too. I have a mediawiki instance I use to keep notes on things I learn. I try to keep a rough heirarchy (ex. Editors), and I use it’s “what links here” to navigate from a related page (ex. Vim) to get back to that list of related pages.

It’s consistent enough that if I want to start learning something, I’ll usually try to create that page only to find it exists, and then I can start with the links (or purge them if they were not useful after all).

You can source your .vimrc from neovim if you’re interested. I’ve been separating plugins based on the environment they depend on as well.

Hopefully not oversharing. Perfect for communications with my therapist. Thank you!

I'll bite. Haven't they? Is higher education about the material, or the order it is presented in, and the contacts that you make along the way?

You're right, there are certain types of things that you can learn quite a lot about on the internet - this is especially true if there is no prerequisites. It's my favourite thing about the internet, and I'll never stop being grateful for it. I'm a self-taught hack, but I have a very intelligent/fortunate cousin that went to Berkeley (granted for business), and my interpretation is that it's a contacts/prestige thing. The information is mostly available elsewhere.

I'm curious to see where this discussion goes.

The first thing I do when renting a new apartment is map out the circuits to outlets and leave a map next to the breaker box. We have also consistently had illegible squiggles (and strange circuit layouts) in Canada

Talon is exceptional, I only wish it was more natural to drive cli commands, I find I need to spell them out which I’m still quite slow at.

Sure! It’s an acronym for “technical director”. I don’t think it is standardized across the industry at all, besides it employing people that can code that are also familiar with art production in some capacity. Don’t let the “director” in the title scare you, it is primarily writing tools to serve production.

You might be working on tools to help set scenes, versioning assets, managing asset pipelines, tracking, CI/CD, rigging, managing levels of detail so that scenes are performant for animators, tools to help with animation etc.

I think you’ll mostly find this role in larger, more established animation and vfx companies. I think that applying for one of these positions would be the easiest way in. Apparently it is a difficult position to fill. My way was slower, I taught myself to code and started writing tools on my own time to help solve issues I encountered as a generalist at a smaller company with tight deadlines. I don’t recommend this way, besides as a stepping stone to something more formal.

Enjoy your studies! Sheridan is a good place. As a third option, you'll find many opportunities in the industry as a hybrid artist/coder "TD" jobs if that area holds any appeal. Larger salaries are possible if you are dedicated and are willing/able to travel to where the high profile work is being done.

My only advice would be to research the available jobs, and if you can, visit a studio or two so that you are going into this with realistic expectations of the industry you are about to enter into. Keep sketching and good luck with your portfolio!

Thank you! This is fantastic

I think part of the motivation for one assertion per test comes from the fact that you stop getting information from a test as soon as one assertion fails.

I think it was a guidance, like the SRP where you should be testing one thing in each test case. I also think a growing number of assertions might be a sign your unit under test is wearing too many responsibilities.

Maybe it’s better to say “few assertions, all related to testing one thing”

It also grows scope over time, as more systems are built around it. Which means to fix it, someone needs to learn several systems.

This sounds eerily familiar. Thank you for posting, I have some reading to do.

It’s hard to solve. I’ve read blogs where people find it condescending but the opposite can be harrowing, especially if it is clear the other party is annoyed.

Empathy tends to drive my own novelistic explanations, not conceit. It might help to mention something if you haven’t yet. Everyone is different though.

I think it helps if you can preface your paragraph with a short summary.

The reader then knows generally the scope of what you are trying to communicate, and the details become more approachable. That said, I’m pretty horrible at this balance as well, and often lean towards long form “walls of text” that eat office hours, then work OT to compensate.

That’s a great idea! Thank you!

This is so interesting. At home, we absolutely have wait culture. My mother moderates informally using a round robin format.

Most places I have worked have had interrupt culture. I hated going to meetings, it felt like the people that spoke loudest “owned” the meeting. After a while I started taking notes, but never participating. It was easier to get answers afterwards by talking directly to the stakeholders once they were identified.

It is so interesting to me to hear the counter argument here, that some people actually prefer this method of communication, I’ll need to think about what my participation looks like in this culture.

Mhm. Anyone trying to buy health insurance?

I love the idea of this, I love the convenience of it, but this was always (sadly) going to be a hard pass for me.

I strongly (but politely) disagree.

While I agree that it's better to have notes than not to have them, I think putting some effort into their structure is a big deal. 100 pages is not a lot of notes. At that scale, you can still comfortabley ctrl+f a google doc if you like.

But over the course of your career, I suspect you'll keep a lot more notes than that. I have a personal wiki with around 3000 pages of notes, and I'm just a beginner. I think it's important to optimize your notes for retrieving information that you only partly remember. I think that formatting and the SRP are just as important to docs as code.

zathura is fantastic. minimalistic UI and vi-style keybindings. It has a searchable table of contents, and customizable keybindings. recolor (invert-colours) is nice for night-time reading.

Definitely yes. I love them, seeing them on my bookshelf is motivation to return to them and complete them. Separately, I also love ebooks for night reading and not requiring space on my bookshelf.

This is brilliant, I might try this at work.

I use bandcamp as well, it is really amazing.

This sounds like my setup exactly, except instead of LXC/ansible, I’m using FreeBSD jails/saltstack.

I completely agree about the value of isolation. You can update or up-rebuild for a new os version on one service at a time - which I find helpful when pulling in updated packages/libraries. You can also cheaply experiment with a variation on your environment.

I don’t feel disconnected. My workplace/manager is pretty exceptional about scheduling some time for us to get to know each other.

That said, I’ll acknowledge my bias - I’m fairly quiet and introverted, I feel more comfortable with video chats than water cooler talk.

lol, former animator/illustrator. It's a race to the bottom. The jobs looking for quality won't be replaced, but the entry-level jobs are changing. Where in the 80s they used to develop skillsets that you could build on, working towards feature work, increasingly they are optimized for quantity. The skills are not necessarily transferrable.

Look at 3D modelers. There used to be several more environment artists that have been replaced with 3D scanners in videogames. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just a different skillset. It reduces the unit cost.

I think entry level illustration jobs are at a higher risk. I've done plenty of album covers, promotional posters early in my career on a shoestring budget. They don't care if it's interesting - they want something cheap that gets the job done. Storyboard artists have a very different skillset. You need to communicate an idea as a cohesive sequence of images. Dall-E isn't designed for this, it's designed for standalone images. If you're investing in storyboard artists to begin with, you care about this visual communication, otherwise it's much cheaper to just yolo with a camera and and hand it off to post.