Sometimes I worry about the incentives for innovation in the US.
Step 1, find something to innovate on, sell the promise of it to investors.
Step 2, build a prototype or worst case, build it for real and start generating income from your truly innovate and unique product.
Step 3, get acquired by a large company and then shut down because your product competed with theirs.
End result, general public possibly benefited from your innovation, but in the long run, it was temporary.
Maybe the incentives would be better if it were harder for large companies to acquire small ones? If the path to riches where driven primarily by delivering value to customers. Would love to hear other's opinions on this.
This comment reminds me of a book by Italo Calvino. Probably my favorite of his. It's a collection of stories told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan about cities in his domain. Somewhat fantastical, but strikes deep to the heart to transitory nature of cities and perception itself.
It takes me lots of energy to ignore something. Like someone walking behind my computer monitor. Like someone having a loud unrelated conversation next to me. Like being conscious of my appearance and behavior (out of respect for others). And it takes energy to solve problems and write great code.
I simply can't do it all every day, day in and day out. Monday is fine. I can work long hours on Monday in the office, getting lots of good work done. But on Tuesday, I am irritable and can't focus as well. By Wednesday, I'm useless. If I go into the office, I come home exhausted, unable to even speak.
Fortunately I can work from home, but it's a heartbreaking trade. It's not as much fun (or productive) to collaborate over the internet as it is in person. I am definitely not going to accidentally end up going out to lunch or coffee with a new friend. Etc.
Comments to the tune of "suck it up", "wear headphones", are nothing new to the ears of introverts. We've been dealing with this _extroverted culture_ all our lives. Extroverts thrive on stimulation. Introverts drown in it.
I'm both a vim and emacs user. I love vim for all the reasons everyone always mentions, but emacs comes out ahead consistently basically because emacs-lisp is so much more usable to me than vimscript. I find it much easier to create or modify plugins in emacs... Don't like the (often overfeatureful) functionality of a plugin? Change it!
I'm coming from music as a profession to programming as a profession.
In music you can craft repetitive exercises to improve small aspects of your skillset, but in computer science you can't do that exactly (or sanely). However, I do find myself directing my study in a similar way. I have various high-level goals and I try to find some way to get at them on a daily basis. I use concrete projects like reading a book, doing exercises, or taking on a hobby project. It feels very similar to practicing music, but I wouldn't call it practicing. It's my practice!
I agree. Once you understand typechecker error messages a little bit, refactoring becomes very simple (and fun!).
1. change a core type or function
2. fix all the type errors
3. yay
This is wonderful. I think the tradeoff is that you start a new system, you have to delay running the code for a while. Until you have your core. (Fortunately there is undefined :: a for such uses.)
This reminds me of one of Russell's essays, "In Praise of Idleness". Despite the fact that collectively, we would be extremely comfortable working very little if we all worked the same amount, in reality some of us work extremely hard while others work not at all. So an innovation that makes work less necessary is seen as an evil (reduces the number of jobs), where it could instead reduce work for everyone uniformly in principle (assuming massive job training and education opportunities). I think it's an interesting argument.
Step 1, find something to innovate on, sell the promise of it to investors. Step 2, build a prototype or worst case, build it for real and start generating income from your truly innovate and unique product. Step 3, get acquired by a large company and then shut down because your product competed with theirs.
End result, general public possibly benefited from your innovation, but in the long run, it was temporary.
Maybe the incentives would be better if it were harder for large companies to acquire small ones? If the path to riches where driven primarily by delivering value to customers. Would love to hear other's opinions on this.