- ask for help! you've done nothing wrong. one of the core responsibilities of experienced engineers is to help out less experienced engineers - if they don't know how to do things then hopefully y'all can figure it out together. "Hey _____, I was assigned ______ and I'm having a hard time figuring out the best approach to take. Would you be willing to sit down with me to talk through approaches?"
I can't stress enough how many of my "failures" in my career were due to me being too stubborn / proud / egotistical / etc to ask for help because I thought it would look bad.
If your senior engineers and leadership aren't setting you up for success that's a problem, but other than that…breathe.
you're conflating technical ability with the rest of the creative process: intuiting narratives in the collective unconscious & channeling inspiration from a much, much greater source to make something wholly outside of the artist.
that's not to say that artists are "geniuses" who should be put on pedestals, but it's a fundamentally different thing than a vocation
Absolutely agree. I've been playing music for basically my whole life, and am now, finally working on producing my first record of solo singer-songwriter material.
Every time I thought I've been "close" over the past 18 months it turned out I still had so, so far left to go. My "scope" is creeping, sure, but it turns out there's so, so, so much work in-between "recording & mixing one voice & one guitar" and "having a really well arranged song with just the right musical details" etc.
I've done a bunch of big, original projects in tech over the years, but I've never worked as hard at anything in my life as I have on this music.
And I'm still barely scratching the surface of where I want my music to go long term, and I know that the closer I get to recording the music that's in my head, the more ambitious my future records will be.
This book single handedly saved my butt a few years ago when I was diving deep into deep learning without a math background. It’s very slim, which is a huge selling point in a world of 9000 page textbooks. I love it.
Some reflections at 31:
- you can’t buy self-actualization. The most devastatingly miserable times in me & my friends’ lives have often been when we worked at big corporations doing nonsense work. they’re extremely good ways of earning good money whilst becoming extremely depressed, watching your life pass you by, whilst also losing agency & willpower to escape.
- work on projects you actually care about. I can’t stress this enough. If you take a project or a role for the money, make sure 1) you’re honest with yourself about your reasoning, don’t lie to yourself to sugarcoat it 2) you have a plan for leaving (e.g. taking a role with a high signing bonus so you can pay the down payment on a house or buy land, and leaving after the 12 month probation period so you don’t have to pay it back), 3) consistently checking in with yourself about how things are going. Which leads me to...
- go to therapy regularly, even if you don’t think you need to. and journal regularly. like...on paper, in the morning, with a cup of tea, about your feelings. don’t let things fester, don’t live with regrets or sacrifices.
- have creative hobbies. don’t let your guitar gather dust, don’t let your paint dry up
- enjoy having a lucrative job, but don’t let it turn you into a yuppie. I’m a terrible person to take financial advice from, but I could never do the “high paying job, save 95%” thing - it’s soulless and you want to have fun whilst you’re young or you’ll just be old, financially independent, and bitter about all the things you missed out on. Have fun, eat at fancy restaurants, travel as much as you can. But don’t waste your wealth on expensive yuppie materialist goods either - especially if you end up in London, NYC or SF it seems hard to not blow your money on all of the trendy expensive things that everyone else in tech buys. Spend money on experiences.
- live in community as much as you can. live with lots and lots of roommates because you’re excited about living a life together, and then invest your time in them. Cook with them, hang out with them, do wacky art projects with them, put on events, raise kids with them, build something greater than yourself. Isolation is a disease. The Bay Area has an excellent co-op community - imo no one in the Bay should be paying $3500 to live by themselves in a nice-but-boring studio apartment. It’s SO nice to come home to a house full of people who care about how your day was.
- party more - your 20s will go extremely quickly and I promise you won’t look back wishing you spent more time in an office. seriously. go to that party.
A motto I picked up from a dear coworker at the one Big Corporate Job I had: “tell good stories”. Live a life where you amass interesting anecdotes to tell at dinner parties, or to your grandkids, or to your roommates when you’re stuck in isolation because of a pandemic. “And then I spent 5 years in an office” isn’t an interesting story.
I adorrrrre my Iridium. I have Guitar Rig & Bias FX and a bunch of other sims, but the Iridium is really special. The sound is _inspiring_ - in that it makes me want to just sit and play guitar for hours on end because it sounds so damn good. It's expensive and I try to not be a gear addict, but imo investing that much in my joy was money well spent.
Yup! I went from "I don't even sing karaoke or sing in the shower" to really liking my voice, performing super comfortably in public & preparing to record my first studio EP. I guess it's been 3-4 years at this point.
I had a musical background which definitely helped, but the main thing is I desperately wanted to be able to sing.
The main thing you can do is take weekly vocal lessons with a good vocal teacher who you vibe with and practice every day. I didn't have lessons for that whole time, but the periods where I have had a teacher I got better quicker way better than when I just practiced by myself.
The cool thing is that singing unlocks songwriting, and songwriting is absolutely transformative as a self-care practice. It's also infinitely more fun to sing your own songs than covers. But also performing your own songs gives you a drive to get better at singing. Virtuous cycle.
The most important thing is to relate the theory you learn back to your instrument, and to use your ears as much as your brain.
I have a hunch that so many of my engineer friends are musicians because music theory is happily systematic - it reminds me a lot of category theory & FP. It meshes perfectly with my brain at least - but just knowing theory without feeling it is useless. Learn to feel.
Totally. The SharpieClassifier we built at Airbnb was super simple because we had a relatively fixed set of components that could be declaratively rendered with React or react-sketchapp as simply as <Marquee /> etc. I can't imagine how much more complex UIzard & Zecoda are - mad respect to the developers and for being able to commercialize these ideas.
Aside: I actually built react-sketchapp as a roundabout way of being able to build more interesting AI plugins for Sketch.