One thing I've discovered and utilised from a relatively early age was synergising the difference in how my conscious and subconscious processes information. It's really just the usual advice of "when stuck, go for a walk" but in my experience it's a very useful tool when done mindfully.
Apologies for my meta-meta-comment :) I've been writing code for ~30 years in various languages, and today my brain can't compute how people find any syntax other than this more intuitive:
data Thing
= ThingA Int
| ThingB String Bool
| ThingC
To me, the above syntax takes away all the noise and just states what needs to be stated.
I know next to nothing about these but a friend of mine was grumbling the other day about why can't he just use his electric car's huge battery to power his house. It sounded like a great thing? During the day his solar panels charge his car and at night it could power the house (to some extent). I remember him saying something like this is being trialled in Japan maybe? Anyone knows more about this?
That functionality is called "vehicle-to-grid" or V2G sometimes. The F-150 lightning has that capability built in, and there are several companies working to bring devices to market which will act as an interface between the vehicle and your home's electrical panel.
It’s coming soon. Our car’s battery capacity is comparable to the house batteries, so during extended rainy power outages, I’d love to be able to fast charge the car, drive it home, and top off the house battery. (Adding 50% per trip.)
The only other alternative is installing and maintaining a propane generator, but that’s more time then a few round trips into town per year (especially since the grocery store has a fast charger, and we invariably need to purchase food during these events).
Also, they ended up rationing propane this year, since the delivery progress with the big trucks was hampered by road conditions, and demand was unprecedented.
> I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of gargantuan projects.
Honestly, this would make me depressed rather quickly. I can't imagine not knowing/experiencing my impact via the work I do. Maybe it is one of the personality differences between people choosing to work for startups/scaleups vs. big tech (no judgement either direction, just my conjecture).
It’s a trade-off. I don’t get to implement the cool ideas I feel might greatly help my current employer, but their expectations of me are generally low and I get paid enough that I can retire a little over 40. Works for me, its not like I’d actually get paid more if I did something cool anyways. That energy is better spent on my own projects.
I’ve generally noticed attaboys and prestige aren’t really personally fulfilling anyways, no one cares and my work will probably be irrelevant in a year or two regardless. A bit nihilists, but it helps one detach after a long day and deal with the occasional failure.
I know a lot of people dislike bitcoin here but I'm wondering (with the huge assumption that its value stabilises over time) would it not actually be a better solution? Not just from an obvious logistical but also from an environmental perspective? I'd imagine gold mining to be much more destructive (both to nature and to human life).
I wonder if they can use it? As a noob I see that crypto value is very volatile and don't have intrinsic value, unlike gold that somehow is accepted universally as valuable.
Not sure if you’d win that bet or not but my anecdata is that me and probably the majority of my social circle spend near-0 on alcohol and sweets. They/we buy good quality food and that became mighty expensive.
Pretty much yep. I'd also say it boils down to age which tends to correlate with having a family and also better WFH conditions. When I was young, single, living in a small apartment going into a nice office was great. Nowadays I'm older, have a wife, a kid, a house with a nice garden office. I still love and enthusiastic about what i do but thanks to the internet i can do it from the comfort of my own place.
At our company we came to the same conclusion. We have a DSL that is essentially a programmable schema to describe the shape of the data (more specifically a contract) you want to capture as well as how answers and decisions are derived from it. The only hard validation we have are types, eg. you can't put letters in a box that captures a number type. Other than types the rest is soft-validation which means that you can input anything, even if it is partial or not quite correct, and the system will do its best with what it has. In tandem, at any point in time you can ask the system to tell you what is missing and/or incorrect. All this then affects the lifecycle of the information, ie. you can't move past certain checkpoints in the workflow if the information is not in the required shape. In the context of a medical software imagine you can fill in just the things that will get you back meaningful answers to help you treat someone and you can deal with the rest after to make the case complete.
