Wish I'd discovered #3 much sooner. Much easier to talk to someone you're paying. Everything else felt like I was burning the patience of the few friends I'd made.
Getting a boyfriend/girlfriend that doesn't want to speak English is probably the biggest language-learning hack.
I also wish I'd tried reading books sooner.
If you don't talk to people, you'll be able to read books in Spanish yet be useless at speaking/hearing. That was me for quite some time.
My initial problem was that I didn't come to Mexico to learn Spanish. I came to escape and work on my own projects and do my own things after burning out and quitting a job in the States. It was the eventual shame of "so how long have you lived here?" that got me serious about learning Spanish.
I think "web development" is too generic to say something like that.
I'd consider a small data processing service, maybe a service invoked from the web server you're already using in Ruby or whatever, is a perfectly pleasant place to use Rust, and often likely to be 1:1 identical to those other languages.
No, the alternative here would be to just let the write()'s throw and let upstream handle them. You don't try/catch to catch an error just to re-throw it for the same reason you don't try/catch every single line of your program.
Exceptions are one reason other languages don't need this "if err throw err" code, without making a comment on if either is superior.
It gets pretty tiring on HN/reddit to watch people demand so much shit for free, namely other people's time. If you've ever run a project with users (most people haven't), you've experienced these demands first-hand.
It's nice to read these sorts of posts when it's getting you down.
For me it was the recent outrage at Elm's creator. Random people on HN/reddit basically acting like they were some disgruntled paying customer. You can see a common thread with Rich's defense of Clojure.
Also, what made this interesting wasn't the question but that the question won the lottery of someone contributing substantial time to craft a great answer.
I don't think you could've done a better job than linking that moderation queue of "toobroad" to make your point. It was a never-ending channel of straight shit. Ranging from "here's a copy and paste of all my unformatted code that won't work, whatever that means" to "how do i use python on windows".
Everything looks easy to someone that has no stake in the solution. We get so used to being end-users that we take everything for granted, as if our experience is the natural ordering of the universe, rather than the result of all the work that goes on behind the scenes.
Read enough posts from HNers condemning Stack Overflow and you'd think they believe Reddit/HN's "new" queue is the ultimate browsing experience.
There's the idea that a corporation has at least some economic incentive to do a decent job and government doesn't since it has zero competition. The classic example to the average person of the government's level of hustle being your local DMV.
One issue with cryptocurrencies that pretty much everyone has a vested interest and you can't separate out the bullshit.
And it's not just vested interest though, there's vested delusion. If you read enough comments on /r/bitcoin, for example, you'll find people who seriously think their 0.001 BTC will buy them a Lambo one day. Completely rational people must have trouble resisting the temptation of just quick-plugging their pet cryptocurrency here and there because they own some and they're super enthusiastic.
And, on the other side, there are people who overreact to that, unable to separate the community from the tech when they are just talking about the tech. But I also think a lot of people dump on it because they are bitter that they missed out. I think the latter group explains more than we realize. Read patio11's bitcoin rants on twitter and tell me you don't see a flare of that.
It all creates a scenario where it's hard to really trust what anyone says about anything.
I interviewed for a week at a consultancy known for pair-programming a long time ago.
Each workstation had two chairs, a large iMac in the middle, and the developers had an individual macbook/kb/mouse on each side.
The code was on the middle machine, and either kb/mouse could control it. They also were using software named Teleport(?) that let you seamlessly interact with both the main iMac and your own laptop. I don't remember exactly what it did, maybe let you drag files between the two computers or something.
I got to pair-program with them on assorted real world tasks that week, a different employee each day. I was generally impressed with the workflow. There was basically zero downtime in terms of progress. I can easily them imagining at least getting a 2x productivity boost, but I'd imagine it was more like 2.5x or more.
Sheepishly, what I didn't like about it was that I'm the kind of person that likes to get a lot done and then work on my own stuff on the job, or have the freedom to surf HN when I'm ahead of schedule, and that was kind of impossible there without your teammate knowing it. :)
But I will say it was very stimulating and fun. The other developers were really nice and fun to talk to. I work remotely, but I would certainly consider that arrangement if I were to get a desk job again.
It's better than the sort of office job where you're languishing on your own and nobody has a firm grasp of what exactly you're even working on in precise terms. I've been there before and it's incredibly stressful when you fall behind pace and your work performance starts to suffer. I feel like pair-programming eliminates that kind of thing.
Getting a boyfriend/girlfriend that doesn't want to speak English is probably the biggest language-learning hack.
I also wish I'd tried reading books sooner.
If you don't talk to people, you'll be able to read books in Spanish yet be useless at speaking/hearing. That was me for quite some time.
My initial problem was that I didn't come to Mexico to learn Spanish. I came to escape and work on my own projects and do my own things after burning out and quitting a job in the States. It was the eventual shame of "so how long have you lived here?" that got me serious about learning Spanish.