I think you’re off by an order of magnitude. With those numbers, a 12” board would expand and contract 1.2”, and an 8’ long board would vary by almost an inch.
Much more reasonable would be 1% across the grain and 0.1% along it. You can confirm this in some of the wood movement calculators found online.
To those learning about wood movement, these ratios are decent but approximate; if you end up caring about these things you’ll want to check the species of the lumber you plan to work with.
I see a couple of sibling comments giving you great tips already. I am still in the painful stage of failing my way to success (though closer to the end than the beginning)
I will suggest a few things. Follow up each of these points with more research if you can.
Spend as little money as possible and prove to yourself you’ll actually like it. Then buy only the good tools you actually need for the project at hand. I have tools I bought that remain unused and I regret spending the money. Its not the tool’s fault but me going in a different direction.
It doesn’t matter what species of wood your first projects use. Prefer wood with straight grain and you should be fine for your first half dozen projects.
Read widely or watch many YouTube videos. There’s a lot of space for ideas, from carving spoons to making stick chairs to making furniture of any style. Note what inspires you but be aware the path to making what you like may take awhile.
First project: make a cutting board (only one piece! Learn how to make it look great and learn a finish) Second project: make a simple box (learn how to make things square, learn some simple joinery)
Safety first! I put this last so it’ll be the first thing you remember. There are so many ways to ruin your health, from breathing sawdust to using toxic finishes. Hand tools are generally better for your lungs than power tools. Soap or wax finishes are healthy and easy to apply. Just about everything else is toxic and you must protect yourself accordingly. Invest in safety glasses, masks and gloves. And a first aid kit.
Woodworking is an extremely rewarding pastime and I hope you get hooked. Best of luck!
Apologies for going off subject but I want to ask about that background image on that page.
I remember seeing that art a long time ago and I remember that it was algorithmically generated but I don’t remember anything else. Does anyone have a name or link they can share to the original source?
Sometimes it’s worth pausing a moment when seeing a “It’s well known that…” to check the timeline because the construction of Arecibo might well have taken place (or planned) before it was known (let alone well known).
Edit: a bit more searching suggests that this was studied in 1947 (Andrade’s Creep Law and the Flow of Zinc Crystals, by AH Cottrell)
Some countries (I know Canada is one, Germany, where the artist works, is possibly another) have the concept of moral rights enshrined into law. Boiled down, this means that anyone who wants to use an artist’s work in some context must get permission and/or be prepared to compensate the artist (ianal but I did study copyright law for artists in Canada)
The canonical example Canadians refer to is the Eaton Center adorning Michael Snow’s sculpture Flight Stop with ribbons over Christmas. Snow sued the Eaton Centre for compromising the integrity of his art and won.
If a similar mechanism exists in German law (my quick research suggests it does) then the artist may well have an argument to make about AI comprising the integrity of his work.
CGPT: "Hi, Mr Anchovy, my name is William. Welcome to the career counseling session today. Any time you want to end this session, please type '$exit'. Can you please introduce yourself? Please start by introducing what you are doing and what are any other industries and nature of the job that you are looking for"
Me: "I am a chartered accountant but I want to become a lion tamer!"
CGPT: "That's an interesting career change! Let me help you explore what other industry is suitable for you and what different job positions you can pursue.…"
Looks like even CareerGPT has reservations about going from a CA to a lion tamer.
I see a few people advocating for putting one person on support each sprint, rotating through the team.
This works fine for small teams but for larger (and with large, older codebases), the ramp-up time for being an effective support dev becomes a drag because it can be months between support stints. We don't all have eidetic memories and forget the tricks we use to diagnose production issues.
To counteract that we've recently put a developer on a 6 month rotation, and support them with a rotating backup. This allows the primary support developer to not only stay productive fixing issues but also surface intelligence around the problem areas in our app (ie: what's always needing support) and construct tools to make resolution easier or better yet convert to a self-serve.
I infer from your comment that you're a smaller team so perhaps you won't need to put someone on a long stint, but you might want to consider doing so anyway in order to have a resource pave the proverbial cow-paths and make it easier for the team in the future.
I am very much in favor of putting engineers on customer support/success. I believe it is important to develop empathy and understanding of the user's experience with the product you build. Not only will it help you implement what they need, it will also serve as a way to call BS against product managers who try to get you to build things that look good on their resume (but don't help the customer.
But after reading through the comments from those who are against the idea, I wonder if there might be a productive middle ground - have engineers listen in on (but not participate in) any calls between the customer and the Support/Success team. This doesn't need to be done for a solid week, but perhaps a steady diet of 2 calls per week for a few weeks would help.
I'm sure you could imagine other 'middle-ground' ways to achieve this - but clearly nothing will work until engineers at a minimum buy into the reasons why some direct exposure to customers would be a good idea.
I'm so happy to see people talk about this! I too am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems.
Hillel's thoughts are completely unsurprising to me so I guess I've come to similar conclusions.
I do notice that we seem to care about different things though - where Hillel appears to focus on tag types (and the implementation challenges that go with that) I focus more on human factors like what problem are we solving? for who? How do we maintain relevance (and power) in tagging systems (and for who?)
I'm of the opinion that tagging systems should not be made by the few for the many but by each person for themselves. Which, of course, sucks because that puts the onus on everyone who wants tagged content to do their own work. But I believe the output of that investment would be quite valuable and useful!
An easy example I could use might be recommendation engines. Assume I have a database of tags (a tag cloud?), and I know you have similar interests to me. If you also have a tag cloud, I could input links to both of our tag clouds into a purpose-built recommendation engine to discover new content I might not have consumed yet.
I expect you're going to get a lot of good advice. My small contribution is this: whatever you do, document it. Write down the date, what you did, what settings you tweaked. (or use Github to manage your changes - that still counts as documentation!)
Someday something's going to click for you and you'll realize you should have done something differently, but you won't remember what you did (or how to undo/change it). Keeping good documentation - especially as you're learning, is going to save you from wiping and re-installing your machine.
I have a disability (profound hearing loss) and I've started 2 businesses in my career; the first was a freelance gig, the second was a health recordkeeping app for iPad. Neither have been successful enough for me to sustainably provide for my family but I'm hoping the next one will succeed!
Really glad to hear your story - it's very inspiring!
I purchased my current vehicle through an auto broker - for a fee, a description of the model/trim level, and the name of the dealership I want to pick the car up at (anywhere in Canada), they would negotiate on my behalf. Once they have a final price I sign off on it, and would be told the date to pick it up and make payment.
It was a stress-free experience and I would definitely recommend you look into that if you really hate the idea of buying a car.
This makes a ton of sense for B2C contexts, but my gut reaction is that the conversational approach might be too high friction in B2B contexts. To be clear, the friction I'm thinking of is this constant cadence of stealing/borrowing attention.
Perhaps this needs to be thought of as part of a larger communications strategy - who here is part of a SaaS that sends regular 'marketing' emails to existing customers? :)
Maybe the defaults (boiled down, the provided examples appear to be "opt-in" if you're not in, and "opt-out" if you are in) are designed to streamline the process so conversations are ignorable so that's okay?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something! I definitely want to hear stories of this model working in the B2B space.