TL;DR: she thought kids would like grown-up stuff but was wrong.
"Giving my kids unadulterated fun allowed me to relax, at least as much as I could as a mom of three young ones.
I'm not the type of parent who wants to spend all my time off at an indoor water park with dozens of other screaming families, but I'm learning that we need to have age-appropriate fun. And that looks different from what I'd imagined (or what I saw on social media)."
Many people can't mentally context switch for game and aren't prepared for the behavior that is required of the game from those that can. It's an assault on their world view.
For a small but complicated project I got thrown into a while ago, the only way for me to understand it was to print out all the source directly, vertically tape together the pages for a single file, and then lay them all out on a huge table. Then I took multicolored markers and started physically drawing out the call chains. I then I sers-toi the system, and also found an enraging bug: the system widely used the variables "blah_name" and "blah_id", including in many functions' parameters. Except, in one case, blah_id was passed in as blah_name and thenceforth became known as blah_name.
I don't know if an automated visualization system is possible, but you'll have to understand the whole thing before doing so. Pen and paper was the most expedient solution for me at the time.
I use pen and paper as well, but rather than print out all the source code, I write down the call stack. A calls B calls C, etc. along with the line numbers of the call. Much easier than printing out the source and you still have the IDE niceties like go to definition, find in source, etc.
This reminded when I had to maintain dozens of old 10,000 lines COBOL programs as a junior programmer. I felt so lost I made a program that would print only the names of data structures and functions. Seeing the source resumed in a handful of pages, and being able to highlight and draw on it, helped me a lot. Digital has flexibility, but sometimes paper works best.
Hah! I did the exact same thing for ages on paper and eventually evolved the system to manage my workload and context switching… I still use it a lot for going deep while debugging/understanding code. I ended up making it into an app when I broke my wrist and could still type but couldn’t hold a pen. I can’t remember if there’s rules about self promotion in comments here but it’s up at journalist mode dot com
I've done this too, taped a bunch of impenetrable code to the wall and scribbled on it with pen to figure out wtf was happening. I propose that this be called the "Pepe Silvia" debugging method since it looks like a crazy conspiracy chart. Eventually you'll figure out why nobody is getting their mail ...
I also used to do this when working on a big convoluted system. I had a conference room near my desk with all the walls completely covered in code. A big pack of multicolored highlighters is key.
I remember a whole bunch of light bulb moments when I showed other developers the "big picture". It's an awesome technique when you're forced to work on spaghetti!
First principles! I've totally done this. Especially in a large pub/sub oriented frontend codebase where it's really hard to map out where any given data could have come from
Beyond her own professional search, I'd suggest you making more time to be with the kids and handle household crap that she might be dealing with. Take things off her plate so she can recover from her previous situation and reflect and act on her future path. In my experience, this will be hard for you because you'll necessarily do less at work and have less time to improve yourself professionally and personally outside of work, but the payoff in stress reduction for your wife should be worth it in short- and medium-terms until she gets re-settled.
Background: Software engineer for over 15 years; twin 3 year-olds at home; wife is a teacher.
It will be hard, but there's ways to balance this at work - when my wife was attending a bootcamp, my work was flexible enough to let me change my hours to work early mornings and evenings on more asynchronous tasks, while I took the main 9-5 hours to handle childcare.
Everything else suffered, of course - forget improving myself, I had little time for basic maintenance! - but she graduated from bootcamp, got a job, and now has a much better career trajectory than at her previous career.
This resonates with me too. When my wife had a great career opportunity some years ago, this is roughly where it went. Unless you have deep pockets, working odd hours and managing the home ~9-5 is probably in the cards.
I found it incredibly exhausting at the time (definitely didn’t take care of myself either) but it was fortunately worth it. My wife went from soul crushing, dimly lit, repetitive, poorly paid hydrographical work for the navy to real ocean sciences. She gets to survey the coastal waters of BC, Canada, participate in technical dives, install cool tide sensing units, check out places we’d otherwise never see, and is something like 9000% happier.
I probably set my career back less than hers went forward, and ultimately, I think we’re both happier for it regardless of our earning potentials.
But yeah, what a slog. I get tired just thinking about it. To be honest, there were times where it was hard on both of us and I wasn’t sure we’d pull through! That’s why I wanted to add this note and say yes, it takes sacrifice, it’s hard, etc. Go in more prepared than I did. Above all, support the people you love. You’ll be glad you did.
This is something I like to think I'm decent about. We tend to have a fairly decent work split, but you're right that picking up a bit more would probably be a good thing. It's a bit of a balance because having something productive helps her feel better about the job search dragging on.
+1 on the health. At this point, you probably have a lot of time on your hands. Use some of that to learn how to be healthy. Exercise, food, cooking, etc.. are all deep rabbit holes to explore, so develop your baseline of knowledge and habits now so that you can fall back on them when life inevitably takes you away from them.
Why do you focus on the mice, when the article talks about two studies, one of which was longer term and done on humans?
"Crucially, these changes in gut bacteria have translated into behavioural changes. Even 18 weeks after treatment started the children had begun showing reduced symptoms of autism. After two years, only three of them still rated as severe, while eight fell below the diagnostic cut-off point for asd altogether. These eight thus now count as neurotypical."
Because he knows something relevant about the mouse study, but not the human study. He's not objecting to the conclusions or tone of the Economist article, just the mouse study. Seems legit to me.
This environment reminds me of the one I faced graduating into the 2001-2003 post-Dotcom Bust market.