Working on the metro makes a boring commute fly by - blink and you are at your destination already. 30 minutes each way is 1 hour a day. Over the entire year it's 250+ hours or 9 whole 16-hour days.
That's why whenever I move to a new city, I typically look to live somewhere that's at the end of the metro line. It meant in the morning commute I can _always_ get a seat.
That was one of the reasons I liked living in Hammersmith when I worked in Shoreditch/Old Street - it's at the end of the Hammersmith and City Line and I don't have to change lines. There's also the add bonus that the line is above ground until Paddington which meant I have more than enough time to load up any tabs I need to use before the Internet blackout.
In Hong Kong I worked at Central and lived in Tsuen Wan. Literally from one end of the line to the other. This had the added bonus that I was also guaranteed a seat on the way home as well.
Growing up in a culture similar to Japan, where the expectations placed on kids are similar to what's seen in the video, I can say there are pro's and con's.
The pro's are kids learn faster when it comes to STEM subjects, where brute hard-work and repetition pays off (because until you go to university, you're pretty much limited to learning widely-accepted truths, which just needs to be understood and remembered).
The con's are the same work ethics and discipline applied to creative subjects doesn't necessarily work. Yes - you need practice to be good at playing musical instruments, but you also need to have the space to "mess around" and have some fun. In the video, the girl was obviously enjoying her time playing the cymbal, only to be told by her music teacher to be serious and not mess around. It really hurt me to see her creativity and happiness smothered by that killjoy.
Watching the Op-Doc reminds me of the book Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window (窓ぎわのトットちゃん) (there's also a movie) where it showed that some "problematic" children are really just curious children who didn't get their curiosity satisfied.
I was waiting for a happy ending at the end of the article that never came. But I'm glad the Guardian ran this piece, it shows how powerful someone can be when they know how to "use" the law. And how powerless one can be when one doesn't know how to navigate the law.
John Oliver with a quite informative video about why many carbon offsets/carbon credits schemes are most likely not genuine in their attempts to offset carbon emissions.
Very enlightening posts. I appreciate how they tell you that million is not for every situation, it's for sites with "Lots of static content with little dynamic content". Many frameworks boasts about how they are the best at everything, without any nuance or justifications for their claims.
Personally, I feel like we are getting to the point of over-optimization on the front-end. Is a 70% optimization in performance, which may lead to a, say, 5% increase in user experience, worth the increased complexity/maintenance cost of another library integration? I think for most companies that are not Amazon or Google - probably not.
Thanks for clarifying. I agree that rejecting a PR can be seen as negative in some companies, but I'd also argue that it's a symptom of a bad culture to view rejected PRs as something negative. And using tools to mask a a negative culture instead of surfacing it may not be wise.
> they should still be a single input in a more holistic picture though.
Whilst, in theory, no single metric should be used to determine performance, in practice it may (especially if your lead is inexperienced). But it can be prevented altogether by exposing individual metrics to indivuals only, and exposing the less granular aggregate metrics to the team and team lead.
> You can show why you couldn't get to a task sooner if you spent time reviewing a lot of PRs on the day.
I think in a culture where you have to justify AND PROVE why you couldn't do a task sooner shows a lack of trust, and the problem won't go away even if you are able to show, this time around, that the delay is justified.
I do think tracking the cost of a PR is important, as it will incentivize smaller PRs. But my point is that exposing the "wrong" metrics (like individual review times) isn't just a data point that people don't have to use, but that it can be harmful as it'll incentivize the wrong behavior (e.g. knowing the team lead value quick reviews, developers may be incentivized to review quicker and thus less thoroughly).
Q) What's the difference between a blocking comment and a "normal" comment + rejecting the PR?
C) Exposing metrics like "Review time per reviewer" may, at the wrong hands, incentivise the wrong behavior. For example, a team lead may view long review times by a particular reviewer as them being slow, whereas they are just more thorough. Tracking the total review time for the PR (aggregating the times from multiple reviewers) is more useful.
I've quit most of the social media like Facebook, I'm not active on Twitter or LinkedIn. But I've always struggled to quit Reddit.
But now, partially because of this (and partially because they've intentionally made the mobile web experience unusable over the last few years), I decided to quit Reddit a few days ago.
And it feels great. I've spent the time that I would have wasted on Reddit tackling my TO-READ list of books instead. And I feel much happier for it.
I have a degree in biochemistry. Would love to combine my passion in software and biology, but academic research is often funded by governments which means the salary is (super) low.
It's the same reason why there's a lack of qualified computer science teachers in schools.
I agree with everything you said. The best interviews ive had are those where I felt like I am working together with the interviewer.
I think being able to handle criticism is an important trait to look out for. Many times interviewees will defend their method too aggressively.
But if you have to pick between two people who are equally pleasant to work with, but one was able to solve the problem, you'll probably pick the one who solved the problem. When the competition is fierce, the candidate would probably still have to spend some time practicing on these problems.
Personally, I dislike competitive programming interview problems. Competitive programming, when viewed as a sport, requires training and practice. It's a muscle that you must constantly train. If you stop for a few months, it may take you a few days or weeks to get back to the previous level.
So it's always frustrating to find a new job because I know I'll have to spend weeks practicing on problems that will have no relevance to the posts I'm applying to. To me, it's a waste of time.
I think companies that uses competitive programming problems (that are irrelevant to their engineers' day-to-day jobs) end up hiring people who are very good at interviews and perhaps not as good at their actual jobs.
Of course, there are jobs which deals heavily with algorithms and optimizations, for which these types of interviews are relevant. But the article is not talking about these relevant cases.
I've been using Firefox Containers for over half a year now (I use it with the Temporary Containers[1] extension). For most parts, it's working great.
However, whenever I encounter pop-up sign-in pages, such as for older websites and some Firefox extensions, the resulting user session cannot be accessed by the original page or extension. This is even if I open the pop-up with the same container, or with the 'No container' option.
Hello! Author here! The book introduces a lot of tools (~20) and these tools are bound to get out of date eventually. As a matter of fact, the Babel libraries moved from v6 to v7 during the writing process, and I've had to painstakingly rewrite most of the book to keep itself updated.
But the core value of the book is not in the tools themselves, but the concepts and principles of these tools, and how these tools work with each other. And these don't get outdated as easily!
That's why whenever I move to a new city, I typically look to live somewhere that's at the end of the metro line. It meant in the morning commute I can _always_ get a seat.
That was one of the reasons I liked living in Hammersmith when I worked in Shoreditch/Old Street - it's at the end of the Hammersmith and City Line and I don't have to change lines. There's also the add bonus that the line is above ground until Paddington which meant I have more than enough time to load up any tabs I need to use before the Internet blackout.
In Hong Kong I worked at Central and lived in Tsuen Wan. Literally from one end of the line to the other. This had the added bonus that I was also guaranteed a seat on the way home as well.