Great question, I will come back to see what ideas people have. Thanks for the Turing book suggestion too.
I have read lots of non-fiction books about programmers and engineers that have been very inspiring, they're just not technical: "Masters of Doom", "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels", "Coders at Work", "The Idea Factory", "The Soul of a New Machine", "Dealers of Lightning"...
I'm on the same boat. Although I probably won't write games professionally, considering the golden time of game development was long gone, Romero and Carmack's early stories inspire me a lot.
I especially love the early story of ID, before Romero left. That was probably one if the greatest teams a technical person can be.
There are plenty of "cool" things to do today, and every few months as technology evolves a new number of "cool" things become doable. The golden age of technology is gonna be always one step ahead
Gee, I've read 6 or 7 and found all of them extremely inspiring. (I've not read Code or CLRS Algorithms, and only parts of SICP and TAoCP) Well ok, 'inspiring' maybe is not exactly the word for Man-Month, but it is fascinating. Looks like the list of 10 most-recommended programming books, and things don't get on that list for no reason!
The way it's been explained to me, Rails packages (gems) are like prefab bathrooms and kitchens. Compared to e.g., Node.js packages which provide things like "sink" and "tap" and "door handle."
E.g., in Rails there's a popular auth package that includes password reset and recovery functionality:
EDIT: It sounds like I'm picking on those packages. I don't mean to, just want to highlight the difference in philosophy between the Node.js and Rails approaches.
like the site + graphics. it's a really hard problem.
we've committed to making our search engine site at breezethat.com as minimal as possible -- hand-coded HTML, etc. and even now it's still too big -- one big next step is creating a boostrap & fontawesome subset package which should reduce our total asset size by 50% or more
we haven't and probably won't minify for a while mostly cuz wholly bootstrapped and it's one layer of potential debugging for which we don't have spare bandwidth
we'll likely switch to images off by default for similar reasons + speed
the most striking thing is when going to regular sites and running into all the bloat; working on a separate extension people can use to mitigate that and also better set options-per-site in general.
I built a very similar product 10 years ago and even back then we heard feedback like this. And I believe the situation may be more pronounced today.
There seem to be markets (or large enough organizations?) where coding job ads get a tonne of applicants, many of them inexperienced, and so automation is a good fit. But not when things are tipped the other way.
Our bet was for real-world tests too but it wasn't enough. A few things we missed that might help…
- Candidates don't want to be treated like cattle
- For many companies a good interview platform will be more beneficial than automation
- Companies say they care about the experience candidates receive, they'll say they're rigorous and try to be as objective as possible with the way they collate information and make decisions, they'll talk about how high their standards are, etc etc. Be weary
- There may be more gains to be made outside of the tech space
- The problem most companies complained about and is probably still the hardest: going out and finding people
I like the way you've solved the "real-world challenge" problem.
My friend Ricardo and I feel very strongly about climate change, so we've built a service that makes websites carbon neutral. To get an idea of the impact of the internet on climate change, if the internet were a country, it would be the 7th most polluting country [1]. If unchecked, one prediction puts the internet at 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 [2]. Our service looks like this:
- You add a script tag to your site
- The script calculates the electricity used
- The greenhouse gas emissions are removed through carbon removal technology
Also work in progress is a way to provide insights to help reduce your website's emissions.
Obviously the web is only one part of the internet emissions equation (the other parts being streaming, large file transfers, computationally-intensive applications, etc), but it's a massively visible part which is what we think can make this worthwhile.
We believe people who work online—developers, content creators, publishers, etc—have a huge influence, and a message like "This website is carbon neutral" could have a knock-on effect and really help push things in the right direction.
In terms of carbon removal providers, we're using services vetted by Stripe and Microsoft. We rely on them because the space is complex and they have very high standards.
Another benefit is that they back novel solutions that have a while go until the costs are affordable enough for global adoption. This is important because the more support these solutions have, the more likely their costs will come down and become easier to scale.
We'd love to hear your thoughts. If you have any questions, we're both around.
Thanks for sharing the article. He has a nice way of framing things:
> My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.
I'd be very interested in actual data that compares virtuous and unvirtuous cultures, out of curiosity of course!
It's similar but doesn't need a click to start the drag and another to end it. You just grab things with three fingers and move them; lift when done.
It also lets you select multiple whole words with the mouse: single tap quickly followed by holding three fingers and dragging.