Great question, I will come back to see what ideas people have. Thanks for the Turing book suggestion too.
I have read lots of non-fiction books about programmers and engineers that have been very inspiring, they're just not technical: "Masters of Doom", "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels", "Coders at Work", "The Idea Factory", "The Soul of a New Machine", "Dealers of Lightning"...
The way it's been explained to me, Rails packages (gems) are like prefab bathrooms and kitchens. Compared to e.g., Node.js packages which provide things like "sink" and "tap" and "door handle."
E.g., in Rails there's a popular auth package that includes password reset and recovery functionality:
EDIT: It sounds like I'm picking on those packages. I don't mean to, just want to highlight the difference in philosophy between the Node.js and Rails approaches.
I built a very similar product 10 years ago and even back then we heard feedback like this. And I believe the situation may be more pronounced today.
There seem to be markets (or large enough organizations?) where coding job ads get a tonne of applicants, many of them inexperienced, and so automation is a good fit. But not when things are tipped the other way.
Our bet was for real-world tests too but it wasn't enough. A few things we missed that might help…
- Candidates don't want to be treated like cattle
- For many companies a good interview platform will be more beneficial than automation
- Companies say they care about the experience candidates receive, they'll say they're rigorous and try to be as objective as possible with the way they collate information and make decisions, they'll talk about how high their standards are, etc etc. Be weary
- There may be more gains to be made outside of the tech space
- The problem most companies complained about and is probably still the hardest: going out and finding people
I like the way you've solved the "real-world challenge" problem.
My friend Ricardo and I feel very strongly about climate change, so we've built a service that makes websites carbon neutral. To get an idea of the impact of the internet on climate change, if the internet were a country, it would be the 7th most polluting country [1]. If unchecked, one prediction puts the internet at 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 [2]. Our service looks like this:
- You add a script tag to your site
- The script calculates the electricity used
- The greenhouse gas emissions are removed through carbon removal technology
Also work in progress is a way to provide insights to help reduce your website's emissions.
Obviously the web is only one part of the internet emissions equation (the other parts being streaming, large file transfers, computationally-intensive applications, etc), but it's a massively visible part which is what we think can make this worthwhile.
We believe people who work online—developers, content creators, publishers, etc—have a huge influence, and a message like "This website is carbon neutral" could have a knock-on effect and really help push things in the right direction.
In terms of carbon removal providers, we're using services vetted by Stripe and Microsoft. We rely on them because the space is complex and they have very high standards.
Another benefit is that they back novel solutions that have a while go until the costs are affordable enough for global adoption. This is important because the more support these solutions have, the more likely their costs will come down and become easier to scale.
We'd love to hear your thoughts. If you have any questions, we're both around.
Thanks for sharing the article. He has a nice way of framing things:
> My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.
I'd be very interested in actual data that compares virtuous and unvirtuous cultures, out of curiosity of course!
As much as people describe just intonation as pure, etc, at least in this example it just sounds wrong to me.
As far as I understand, just intonation requires instruments to be tuned differently for different keys and stops "working" if a piece strays from the key (which music from Bach's time will often do).
Equal temperament is our workaround for the physics which doesn't quite match the 12-tone system.
On the subject of sustainability, I'd always heard the story of eating local, presumably to avoid the environmental impact of transporting food over long distances.
It seems that that's insignificant compared to the type of food we eat:
> Shipping one kilogram of avocados from Mexico to the United Kingdom would generate 0.21kg CO2eq in transport emissions. This is only around 8% of avocados’ total footprint. Even when shipped at great distances, its emissions are much less than locally-produced animal products.
Apple should tone down the way they promote their products.
They can't keep pretending to be aligned with the environment and then put on a big show every year for products that provide tiny incremental benefits. I'm thinking mostly of the iPhone, but even things like M1: yes it's a step forward but that doesn't mean I *need* one right now.
For the record, I'm using a 2012 MacBook Air (8GB) for everything. The fans will spin up sometimes when browsing, or when Docker becomes uncontrollable, but it does everything I ask and it doesn't feel at all slow.
I want to believe that the work started by Ivan Sutherland, Douglas Englebart, Alan Kay, etc still has a long way to go.
On the other hand,
1. It feels like they addressed most of the low-hanging fruit
2. A lot of what was done by these people was build user interfaces. Does that qualify as thinking tools? Sure, the tools give us the ability to e.g., build crazy-looking buildings, but is that all there is?
The idea of inventing Arabic numerals in a world that uses Roman numerals is very powerful and transformative. But the bicycle-for-the-mind metaphor which we like to talk about in relation to graphical user interfaces is more augmentative (I can go further) than transformative (I can instantly teleport to another dimension).
3. Is it also possible we don't recognise modern advances because they're more gradual and diffuse? There are no PARCs and Bell Labs anymore because there are many PARCs and Bell Labs. Recent examples: how computing is helping with drug discovery, protein folding—these should count for something.
Having said all that, I have one big hope (dream?) for computing in the political space that involves complete transparency for democracies and a lot more citizen involvement. I imagine something like that evolving over a long period of time, as people adapt and begin to think differently. In my head, computing provides the vision of how things could be, but doesn’t necessarily lead the way with implementation.
It's similar but doesn't need a click to start the drag and another to end it. You just grab things with three fingers and move them; lift when done.
It also lets you select multiple whole words with the mouse: single tap quickly followed by holding three fingers and dragging.