is there a book that you'd recommend to a CSS noob so that a hypothetical backend developer could learn modern CSS that allegedly does not suck in a curated and guided, not pick-your-own-adventure via blogpost and tutorials way?
I feel you. I cannot offer much more than that, but if you care for a friendly advice from someone who is still in the same situation and very much still working on it, setting goals became another way to procrastinate for me.
It is cliche, but system over goals has helped me.. or I guess you could see it as microgoals one does not need to think about much.
Write code for at least X hours per day, read a book for X amount of time, exercise X days a week.
It gives me a checkbox to tick and no overhead in thinking about what goals are achievable, what are desirable.. etc.
I can't help but think that the speech must have been a pretty easy grab of political power and historical significance with - now - relatively low personal risk.
I happened to write my bachelors thesis on the effect of mother-tongues on cognitive processes in 2012 and found the literature very vague on this issue.
At the time the literature suggested that the cognitive processes are the same across populations of different mother-tongues but that language can influence the data those processes work upon, EG: exposed to the same events, what details get picked up, built into narratives and remembered.
I would move that language constitutes a very strong mnemonic anchor if nothing else.
Do you know of any research into bilingual people and the effect of switching languages? I feel like I become an almost different person if I switch back to speaking Dutch for more than a day.
I'm not fluent in anything but English, but I've had some basic exposure to a few other languages. I've found when travelling that trying to struggle by in another country's language (avoiding English) is almost like reformatting my brain. It takes a few days to to reach the point where my surface thoughts are in the new language, but at the same time, my knowledge of the new language is so primitive that those thoughts can't have any complexity. I've wondered if that's anything like the mind-emptiness that Zen meditators are known to seek. Of course I could switch back to English when I had to.
I'm pretty sure that doing this a few times made my English permanently worse. I guess it's ok since I'm not a literary stylist or anything like that, but it's something to be aware of.
> I'm pretty sure that doing this a few times made my English permanently worse. I guess it's ok since I'm not a literary stylist or anything like that, but it's something to be aware of.
Oh, that's just your brain suffering from hash collisions during lookup for words. After a while it adapts and switches to a new data structure, speaking from experience.
I don’t, but anecdotally I know this to be true. I speak 4 languages pretty fluently and I can confidently say that my personality is different depending on which language I am using. I only got to experience this well after having left university and all my academic aspirations so never got deeper than experiencing it first person.
Just for fun, I theorised that it’s a rewinding to the emotional states - and consequently behaviours - I had when getting proficient in the language.
Well, for what it's worth, that was my hypothesis as well for explaining my anecdotal experience with this! I switched to effectively speaking English full-time in my late twenties, due to having a foreign partner and later moving abroad with her. I've noticed that I emotionally regress a little bit to teen/tween behavior and anxieties whenever I speak Dutch again for longer periods of time.
This effect is at its strongest when I'm visiting my parents in the Netherlands, so there's an obvious location-component to it as well. Linking places to emotional states is pretty well established IIUC, so the latter shouldn't be surprise.
I was participant in an fMRI study (done as PhD work by a computational linguist) that contrasted native speakers of German and Polish, showing that phonemes that exist in your native tongue are processed in different areas of your brain than phonemes that are non-native to you.
I have ridden motorcycles for 20 years and could not agree more. Defensive riding, assume distraction and reckless drivers, perhaps even willingness to bump into you “accidentally on purpose”. I have actually experienced the latter.
being open, honest and as a consequence sometimes vulnerable in conversations -1 to 1 or not- without overly filtering myself to stay appropriate or to protect my ego or image has brought me to having a number of close friendship that I would not have thought possible.
Those people that I now consider my family made me a better person and I would even argue made me into an adult.
I would simplify this in 1 don't be afraid to ask random questions 2 be sincerely interested in knowing about the other person's answer
I find this easier to do when the people are evidently interesting, but more often than not people are interesting after I exercise some curiosity about them.
50 years ago, in "The Mythical Man-Month" Fred Brooks was already discussing the cost of cloud based solutions.
> Since size is such a large part of the user cost of a programming
system product, the builder must set size targets, control size, and
devise size-reduction techniques, just as the hardware builder sets
component-count targets, controls component count, and devises
count-reduction techniques. Like any cost, size itself is not bad,
but unnecessary size is.
And the why of Agile, DDD and TDD:
> Plan the System for Change [...] Plan the Organization for Change
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