I think about the technical feat accomplished by Blizzard when they created World Of Warcraft. So much time, effort, money, and great minds working so that you could walk around in a virtual world with your friends.
"One of the things that blows students’ minds is to realize that women disproportionately, about twice as much, suffer from all anxiety and depression disorders relative to men, and almost all our models for studying anxiety disorders are based on male animals."
This right here is one of the concrete reasons for why we NEED to recognize neurological sex differences, and have studies that focus specifically on genders. We could discover loads about treatment differences by gender, and really help a lot of people who are suffering from depression (something that is becoming more prevalent by the day).
The NIH has moved the requirements in rodent research recently. Previously, using only male rodents (bucks) was considered just fine. After some really alarming studies out of McGill [0], much of the field has changed. Now, you must garner a waiver to only use one sex vs. the other in rodent studies. The effects of this change remain to be seen, but are generally thought of as positive.
Some context is needed though. The estrous cycle of dams is fairly complicated[1]. Controlling variables in hormones, hydration, etc. is much easier in bucks. Since the experiments are easier to control for, you need less rodents and therefore you need less funding for rodent care and housing, and you need to sacrifice less rodents to do the experiment (generally). Hence why they have been the 'preferred' rodent sex historically, among many other reasons.
Additionally, rodents are some of the 'first' level in vivo models, but are far from the last in the long line of research that is human applicable. It is very common that research done in rodents will not translate to other mainstay research vertebrates like dogs and monkeys, let alone into humans. The differences in the sexes are vastly outweighed by the differences in species.
Generally, yes, it is good that we are now defaulting to having to use both sexes of rodents. However, costs and sacrifices per experiment have risen as a result. All things have trade-offs in our world.
It feels good, and is a good motivator, when your code is received positively. Especially early on when you aren't necessarily confident that you are a "coder" yet. I think that is a great nugget of truth for anyone working on an engineering team.
That said, this person graduated a coding bootcamp + joined their first team less than 3 years ago. I'm not sold that they have much to teach about managing an engineering team (not that I do either).
> Especially early on when you aren't necessarily confident that you are a "coder" yet.
When I was lacking experience, I actually really just wanted negative feedback. The absence of feedback, to me, was synonymous with "your work is correct." But no one would ever tell me what I was doing wrong. Even now, half a decade later, I have yet to get that negative feedback. I hope that means I'm just a good coder, but I always have this nagging feeling that it's because no one has actually reviewed my code before.
I’m actually in your position, and I agree, sometimes what you really want is to know what you did wrong.
That said, imposter syndrome is a very real thing, and it’s felt disproportionately by women and minorities in tech — I think we should be cognizant that a lot of our colleagues have been told throughout their lives, implicitly or explicitly, that their work isn’t good enough, and so that positive affirmation can do a huge amount of good.
Same; I wish I got more feedback on my patches. I tend to just get 'LGTM'. But I know there's always something that could be better, even if just a little bit. I'll see it in a month, maybe, when I come back to something I wrote/changed, but I wish my teammates would tell me now.
In a past life, long ago before I was but a wee bootcamp graduate, I was successful in other roles. If you'd be curious to get a glimpse into those experiences I wrote a bit about them here: https://medium.com/@HendersGame/is-coding-bootcamp-right-for...
Well said and applies to me as well. Thankfully myself, and the founding team of my company are all very aware that this is the case, and feel extremely blessed to have been born in such a fortunate position. I think in this case being self-aware is half the battle, the next half is to aid those without this luxury in concrete ways.
I agree with your point, but having worked extensively with React, it really does make development easier for me. While it feels like there is always a new shiny front-end framework out there, the ones that stick out like Angular, React, Vue, etc. all have real value that developers like! So I don't really see it as a bad thing.
I don't deny that they make things easier. But there's a cost to that, sometimes a significant cost. In my experience (and confirmed by others I know--including the author of the post), frameworks get you to 80% of where you need to go in a project _really_ fast. The next 10% takes a little effort but it's not impossible. But that last 10% is like pulling teeth from a lion. That's because inevitably the project has requirements that the framework designers didn't and couldn't think of.
I submit that that last 10% is the reason why OP got more done faster with Vanilla than he could with React.
Why not? E.g. now the market price for where I live is to a first approximation something like 2000 EUR/month for an apartment on a single floor in a 4 floor house.
Meanwhile I can simply apply for a parking space right outside my place, and only need to pay something like a 250 EUR/yr road tax (depending on vehicle & weight etc.). That's a flat fee for the entirety of Nord-Holland (my "state"), I'd pay nothing for parking other than needing to apply.
Assuming a parking space is 6x3m = 18m^2 then 4x of those add up to 72m^2, a typical size for an apartment around here.
So if someone parking a car in a 18m^2 parking space had to compete with the market for real estate they'd need to pay 2000 EUR/month for parking their car, because we could otherwise build housing there.
That's before you even get to the problem that the fact that you can only build up to 4 floors around here is also an artificial government restraint, so the true market price of a 18m^2 parking spot is way more than 2000 EUR/month in the center of Amsterdam.
There's no reason to ban cars. You just need to make them pay a fair price for the land they're using and the problem will take care of itself.
If I were allowed to buy the parking spots on my street and build flats I would do it in an instant. Drivers get parking welfare from walking and cycling taxpayers and are blind to it. Not to mention that bearing the cost of a million dead poeple a year would affect behaviour a bit.
