"With the right person, the right curriculum, and the right instructors, it's possible to train a person in ten weeks to be competitive with a college graduate with a computer science degree, even for a position at a tier-1 engineering organization. Beyond that, it appears to be repeatable."
-- Well said. Hackbright has repeated this process 3 times in the past year.
What I found from using this product in the past few weeks is that it helped me re-engage with the people I missed their tweets, either by replying or clicking through the links.
Twitter also has the dailiy / weekly digest functions, but it's organized by most popular tweets (https://twitter.com/settings/notifications). Sometimes I just want to know what my cousin back home or an ex-colleague tweeted about, which is useful for.
One thing I'd like to see is to make more than one list, or be able to set email digest for some of my existing lists.
He made a good point here in eliminating unnecessary risks (for him, dropping out of college) by retaining as much optionality for as long as he can, and at the same time working hard at his startup. As an entrepreneur there are lots of risks in running a startup, a lot of which are not within the founders' control (traction, market direction, etc). Managing risk is an important part of managing one's psychology as a founder.
Leo's story is one of humility and gratitude - I have always found them(the Buffer team) as an inspiration not just because of their startup's traction (which can be unpredictable) but more because of their character, endless seeking of improvement professionally and personally, and passion in giving back to the startup community.
Hi bcambel, big congrats to your courage and honesty - one of the biggest learning for me of being an entrepreneur is the humility.
Just a thought, you might want to think of yourself as "an entrepreneur that failed once" rather than "a failed entrepreneur". In psychology that makes a big difference in how we label ourselves. Relate the failure to an incident in our lives, rather than an attribute that we belong to.
Also, just curious, what made you decide to give up? What are your plans now? All the best.
Definitely. Meta-learning is something that's tough. Recently I enrolled into CodeSchool.com and there are lots of interesting sounding tutorials. I code in Python and want to be more proficient in web development, the problem I face is, okay, where should I start?
Another example is, if I learned programming in python, what do I do to get to the next level?
Likewise. Flow is achieved with overlap of skills and a clear step by step path to a goal.
As a new full time coder, I experience coder's block perhaps few times a week at the job. I think tomasien's suggestion to write things down is very useful, something I've started doing and help me get through some difficult problems.
Specifically, it is helpful for anyone that is solving a problem whose scope is not clearly defined. Writing, instead of talking, helps to map things out and takes out the pressure in verbalizing an eloquent solution / interpretation, which usually comes a lot later in the problem solving process.
I resonate with the post a lot. Recently moved to the bay area, after spending undergraduate years in chicago, working in nyc, hong kong, beijing, I feel that where we live determines a lot of how we live our lives, and people we associate with.
I disagree with the comments here that the author is suggesting that happiness is a goal. He's merely, in my view, presenting the fact that we should strive to make difficult decisions on our lives before it's too late. Choosing where we live is one of the most difficult things to change, however, all changes can start small.
Two years ago I took a sabbatical from my finance job, and never went back. It was a zig zag path to where I am now, but I would say the inconvenience and uncomfortable situations are worth it. So many people tell themselves, I'll stay in this job / city / relationship for one more year, till I get more experience / savings etc. Making difficult decisions (instead of putting them off) forces us to clarify our values. We might decide in the end to never leave the city, or the job, but we are happier because we decide consciously to, not because we dont' have a choice.
Yeah, it's a visible improvement. And it's now my daily routine to go to Hacker News and getPrismatic.com every morning! :)
One thing I missed was to navigate to topics from my home feed. Before I used to be able to on the right menu I think, now I need to click into my profile every time to go back to my subscribed interests.
It was useful to be able to view by topics because the home feed is a mashup of all topics (which can range from work to personal interest). Would love to hear your thoughts as well!
Awesome, very useful product, definitely one of the most relevant news aggregation services currently. The recent web redesign also enhanced desktop use as well. Congratulations team!
Thanks @poof131 - I'd like to go deeper into algorithms / data manipulation / social network analysis (for my job), and also web programming using python (weekend reading).
I'm currently reading Python for Data Analysis but feel like I can read about how to use a library but it's hard to retain specific syntax use cases if I'm not using those libraries immediately / frequently.
Great! Big fan of Prismatic :) One thing I don't understand is that sometimes there's a dollar sign next to an article (eg one from Forbes.com). What does that mean?
The best part of these toilets is not the washing function, which in Asia frankly not a lot of people use (I lived in Hong Kong, Beijing and traveled extensively across main cities in Asia) but the heated seats. Once in a ski lodge in Niseko, Hokkaido, Japan, after a long day of snowboarding, these heated seats really save the day - Japanese perfectionism at its best.
I'm curious about your experience running your own early stage startup and raising kids at the same time. (I was also inspired after meeting with Joel to start blogging!)
When did you start YouSites, was it before or after having kids? What was the reason behind that decision?
As an entrepreneur and a new parent, what experiences have been most rewarding, and what would you have done differently?
I have the same experience as a student at Hackbright, a 10 week programming course. Prior to hackbright I took a lot of codecademy courses, but it never got me from newbie to 'yes I can do this' programmer. Yes, I can follow the exercise and figure out how to pass each quiz, however, I believe CodeCademy essentially suggests that you have to follow 1 way to do things to be correct, which is not how problem solving (and programming) works.
At Hackbright however, I found learning with CodeCademy to refresh some knowledge is helpful, especially with a teacher around to ask questions. Most of the time, the questions confirm that my solution is also valid, but it's just different from the CodeCademy answer.
I am relatively new to actively posting / discussing on HN (have been a passive reader for over a year now). This blog post is my attempt to share with the community what I thought of my experience learning to program this past summer.
There may be some people in the community that are considering attending one of the full time programming courses in SF/NYC, and I'm happy to share more here about my experience and answer any questions.
Thanks for the post, I am starting a role as a data analyst soon and am curious to hear more about two aspects of your role:
1. How are the dynamics between engineering team, product managers and data scientists. Understand that LinkedIn's data team plays a huge role in creating and improving features (like People you may know), how is it like at Facebook, and in general other companies?
Engineers build things, managers make decisions, data scientists answer questions
2. What are the tools you use ( I see R mentioned in the thread), what books would you recommend? I mostly write in python, use D3 and gephi for visualization.
Am also taking the Coursera course on Social Network Analysis (https://class.coursera.org/sna-2012-001/class/index) and reading the course book Easley & Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds and Markets. Thanks for sharing again.
-- Well said. Hackbright has repeated this process 3 times in the past year.