Thanks for posting those Jerry Weinberg quotes. I'd never heard of him, and just spent a few hours reading up on him. I think I've found another role model tonight :)
I got to meet him, several times. He is as thoughtful and eloquent in person as he is in writing. He's certainly one of my role models, so I commend your choice :)
This thread may also end up exploring how people decide when they're dealing with an irrefutable truth (2+2=4), versus not (The world is flat, obviously.)
My current strategy is to take thorough notes whenever I pick up a new programming book.
I organize my notes by topic (i.e. "node.md", "swift.md", "git.md", "statistics.md", "cpp.md").
If it is the 3rd book I've read on JavaScript, I'll find myself speed reading my way through it, only slowing down when I encounter something unfamiliar.
In order for the above strategy to work, I need to make time for regularly reviewing all of my notes via spaced-repetition strategies so that I have a good understanding of what's in my notes and what isn't. (I use pandoc to convert my .md files into pretty html files.)
The above is definitely time consuming, so I'm eager to hear about how others tackle this problem.
Depending on how much focus my current task requires, I'll listen to different genres. For intense concentration, I'll blast ocean waves. For medium-difficulty tasks, I listen to classical music or pop music in a language that I don't know (so that I'm not distracted by the lyrics). For easy tasks, anything goes :)
If anyone on the Microsoft Planner team is reading this: I haven't used it yet, but did watch the video on the landing page. I'm impressed how you made solutions that will work well with both touch and nontouch screens, along with the ways users can filter and visualize their team's progress. These aren't easy challenges to overcome so effectively, and I really enjoyed seeing your solutions. Congratulations on your launch!
From one stranger to another, thank you for posting this essay. I'm at a bit of a crossroads in my life, and your essay came at just the right moment. (This is one of the reasons I love the internet.)
If anyone wants to use IoT data, personal search queries, etc., to build a recommendation engine that increases the probability of 'reading the right thing at just the right time in life', I'd sign up for it! For subtle/complex things, this seems like an overly-intimidating task, but to get started on the project, someone querying illness, loss, etc., might benefit profoundly from this. You'd be essentially be creating a 'skewed Google' that returns what the user _needs_ rather than what the user _wants_ at the moment. (That said, don't pursue such a project at the expense of spending time with family... :) It's a tough balance to strike, isn't it?)
