Depends what you consider fun, and how far you take it. Some people enjoy programming more than repetitive clicking in a GUI. For a clicker game, writing a bot lets you iterate on strategies easier - is it faster to get to level 2 if I buy the upgrade for A or B first? For Trackmania, it lets you get a world record and a YouTube video with 14M views.
Yeah. I appreciate the warning & enjoy the personal tail, but it's just that guys story & it's being projected as an absolute.
If I don't enjoy the experience anymore that's fine with me too. I think I'd still feel a sense of accomplishment, feel like I'd advanced as a human and mastered my environment and machines for diving in here.
I don't feel the agency I want to have. These games make me want to extend myself, my agency. Playing them manually offers some very low grade enjoyment but that sense of missing out gnaws at me, and I'm not at all dissuaded by parent trying to ward me off, and if I do end up winning so hard I don't care anymore, me right now would regard that as a victory condition & rief from this pressure I feel about ineffectively plodding through as I do now.
I run tech at a venture studio (gateway.xyz) and I _rely_ on part time developers.
None of our businesses sell software and none have any full time engineering support. That said, there are lots of little tools that have been custom built to enable the businesses to scale. It's not enough to support full time roles, so I go to part time contractors when I need it.
Weirdly, I struggle to find part-timers with availability! Where have you been looking? I'll make sure I start posting in those places.
We actually switched FROM cloudflare TO cloudinary. CF seemed cheaper, but we found the service, the dashboard, and the service to be wildly erratic. Price went all over the place, we'd get double billed, the dashboard would stop working for a week.
Maybe Cloudinary is more expensive (though not by a lot for our use case) but I can say that nobody has had to log in or think about it for months. The thing just works.
Most of the CF add-on services seem to be hobby-quality. We used to use their video stream/encoding service too but have since switched to another more robust platform.
I've never used imgix but I find Cloudinary (and specifically the Media Optimizer product) to be extremely reliable, reasonably priced, and as close to zero-maintenance as a thing can be.
We have a slack channel, #aws-budget-alerts, where AWS sends a notification any time our forecasted spend reaches certain milestones or the actual spend reaches certain milestones.
Me too! I've normalized it in our organizations. We use a combination of app scripts and what we call "Single Button Apps" that are web pages that have a text box (paste the URL of the Gsheet) and a "go" button. The input and output are all in the sheet, but putting the button in a web app makes it easy to iterate on feature set as/if the application grows. https://blog.adambuilds.com/sba-not-spa-the-most-minimal-ui
I read your comment and your blog post and I still don't understand what happens when I put a link to a sheet in the text box and click Go.. what happens? You say your inputs and outputs are all in the sheet.. ok.. what does the button do?
Are you just calling some API and giving it the sheet as the input, and then writing the output of the call back to the sheet? So then these Single Button Apps are just API endpoints that you're calling with sheets instead of json or, say Postman (if you want a nicer UI)?
Same here. If the idea was to make it so non-technical people can use the google sheets + API app, just put a script in the sheet that calls the API? It will appear in a menu inside google sheets itself
I used to put buttons in the menu ( or even side panels ), but nowdays I draw a big button and attach a apps script function to it. Looks more bad ass.
If you're consuming it as a supplement it's a lot cheaper (and safer) to just make it yourself. The process is basically: cut it up into thin slices, dry it out in the oven, grind it up.
If you're not taking it in supplement quantities, then I'm not sure I'd be tremendously worried about any other contamination...
Good question. Most turmeric roots I've bought aren't nearly as bright orange as the powered stuff. I _assume_ that means they're not applying the same chromate brightening agent but it's not impossible.
I find the pattern of "How are you feeling about X, 0-10?" followed up by "What would get you to a 10?" very useful. Almost nobody ever says 10 and when they do, when you pressure test it, "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?" it gets revised down appropriately.
"What would get you to a 10" is as very constructive way to think about it as well. It's not just complaining, it's articulating what you'd like to change.
Once teams get used to this, it comes part of the vernacular, "I'm only 6/10 on this idea". The follow up is always, "What would get you to a 10"
I always feel there is an alterior motive when managers ask me these sorts of questions. Like the GP post, I'm rarely honest; I tell them what I think they want to hear. This has been learned over years where being honest resulted in the manager getting defensive, a lecture about "getting with the program" or at best an attempt to pursuade me to see it their way. Rarely have I ever had critical feedback accepted and used to improve anything.
I am a manager, but when I was an IC, I held your view. I learned that giving even softened feedback resulted in being at best ignored for a week, at worst, becoming a marked man.
I resolved to change this for my team. Ask for feedback broadly, and about projects, not me per say. Peoples end up commenting on the project/ sprint, and they feel safer. Much of what they talk about however, I have power over, so I view it as a comment on me and my execution.
Second thing, never once have I reacted negatively to negative feedback. Not in a team meeting, not in a 1:1.
Third, my boss has 1:1s with all my reports monthly. If I stop accepting negative feedback, my boss will hear about soon enough. I wish every manager had this hanging over their head. As an IC, all my code was reviewed. Managers need to have their performance reviewed frequently as well, not just bi-annually.
The one thing about my method is you have to be careful not to let the team become so free with criticism they just start ranting all the time and increase negativity where it isn’t warranted.
Sincere question. While you're sure you aren't doing what you remember managers doing back when you were an IC, do you actually know that your ICs don't think of you the same way that you used to think about managers?
In my experience the managers who are most convinced that they are doing well who are least likely to take negative feedback well, and are likewise least likely to recognize that they actually just did all the things they think they don't do. It is only the ones who have a lot of self-doubt that I've seen actually do well on this.
And skip level meetings are scary. Because if I have any positive feelings at all about my manager, their manager is the LAST place I want to tell anything negative to. (I only made that mistake once...)
I've been told before that I 'have a healthy disdain for authority'. I have always been honest, but not an asshole. Promoted many times.
'Harshly negative' sounds like being an asshole. My question to you would be do you want to be right or effective? It can feel good to be right and stick it to someone, but how often does that lead to effective change?
You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once.
It honestly sounds like you’ve got an axe to grind in this comment. Plus, “harshly negative” is both ambiguous and loaded. Not to open up the “radical candour” can of worms too much, but there’s a difference between being honest and being a dick.
I don't have any particular axe to grind. Agreed about being a dick, but there's the thing right? Shooting the messenger is a trope for a reason, and there are some people, who cannot receive some messages, no matter how wordsmithed they are, without reaching for their sixgun.
The SNAFU principle[1] is a joke, but it's one of the "haha, only serious" ones. It's entirely impossible to avoid the SNAFU effect altogether. So perhaps I should have said "when was the last time you rewarded a bearer of bad news with a highly desirable outcome like making staff?" In any event that was what I meant.
It's a fair question to ask. It's easy to be trapped by a false sense of security.
You know you're doing well, and everyone only has small improvements to suggest. Why keep digging? There's nothing bad to find. After all, you're doing well.
I feel sorry for other answers to this question. I feel they mostly duck the point and put the manager in the position of "right by default" too much.
Look, in professional setting truly being a dick - especially regarding this question - is relatively infrequent. Often someone doesn't understand that his arguments - or general actions - are off by substance (i.e., he's wrong and should be able to see and correct the mistake) or form (often he's telling not enough, assuming people will understand the way he means, and the form is such that they understand it differently than intended). Harsh criticism could be a lack of form - when the person doesn't put it in a shape somehow convenient for understanding, acceptance, analysis - or substance - when the person is wrong because either he doesn't know something, forgot something he did know... Truly being a dick professionally is to be "lazy enough" to systematically make these mistakes without taking care to fix them, or "evil enough" to do them on purpose. A decent organization has ways to hire and keep professional people, improve less professional and leave those not improving; the level of dickiness is under some control.
Sheep can be skinned once, but people aren't sheep, and power imbalance requires those wielding more of it to have the ability to grow that skin. Your question is valid and rather to the point, and I would like to learn more of the answer.
I tell my team that they are my first priority and I 100% mean it. When difficult situations arise I explain to them the pressures that are on me and ask them to do their best to help, and in return I try to make their lives easier the rest of the time. Of course I play the upward game, but in my mind it's in service of the team. This has the intended effect of having a very productive and functional team that seems (to me) to be honest with their feedback.
I’m a new manager. I say this too, and I mean it. I understand that the reality is that people are naturally skeptical of it, and that part of the gig is to overcome that skepticism, deliver value regardless. Part of me trying to overcome that skepticism is…writing this very comment. I don’t operate adversarial-by-default with my boss. I’m quite often quite honest, and I’ve certainly gotten value from that.
> Almost nobody ever says 10 [...] "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?"
But I mean, "it's not perfect" doesn't imply "I want you to change something", right? To exaggerate a bit to get my point across: I'd love our meetings more if they included pony rides in the middle, but that doesn't mean I think we should incorporate pony riding sessions into our meetings. It feels weird to take all "this isn't perfect" messages to mean "you can/should be doing better" - things might not be perfect but they might just be good enough.
One has to accept that you cannot verbally discuss everything into being a 10, and take note of some of the risks&issues that get raised. Which re-reading your response.. I think is implied, just not stated.
Another thing is you may also get interrogation fatigue and not always get real participation in this process. Kind of like the agile stuff only works when everyone is buying in, and as soon as people are going through the motions its hours of wasted meetings.
That said, not to be negative here..
This method of collecting feedback in a way that feels low risk, if participated in only sometimes, is way better than the standard methods.
> I find the pattern of "How are you feeling about X, 0-10?" followed up by "What would get you to a 10?" very useful. Almost nobody ever says 10 and when they do, when you pressure test it, "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?" it gets revised down appropriately.
I could potentially see myself responding well to this if it was from a manager I already had enough experience with to know and trust, but at that point, I wouldn't really need extra prompting to give honest feedback. If a manager who I only started working with more recently tried this on me, it would probably make me even _more_ hesitant to be candid with them. Not every manager in the world has their employees best interests at heart, and I'm not going to risk rocking the boat if I don't know whether the captain might react by throwing me overboard. Pressuring people to trust when trust hasn't been earned doesn't just magically work; at best, it might result in the appearance of trust, but it will actually just foster resentment that they'll go extra lengths to hide for fear of repercussions.
A similar idea in a group setting is the fist-to-five idea suggested by Marquet. On the count of three, everyone shows either a closed hand (lowest score) or anything up to five fingers (highest score) and then you can discuss both what would get people to a 5, but it's usually also very instructive to dig into why different people make different assessments. (As long as you don't do it in an adversarial way, of course.)
We have a similar feedback system at work, and I'm always wary of giving my true opinions, mostly because of the "beware what you ask for, you might get it" possibility.
What if other people don't give feedback, and my feedback stands out, and in turn management makes decisions based on my feedback and everything gets worse?
I don't want to be responsible for management failures, even if only indirectly.
Mine is: No people discussions, how do you feel about the project, if there was one thing that could change in 5 mins what would that be? If there was a very complicated thing that might need years but we could magically change instantly what would that be? Which are open risky things?
The best way to learn is to build something for someone else. When someone else sets the requirements you have to engage in real problem solving and research the best tech to solve the problem. This keeps you from following just the easiest path as well as exposes you too new ideas.
You can do this at work, for a local non profit, for your friend's weird startup idea, ...
That's one way to learn time schedules, efficiency, but not necessarily the rest of a programmer skillset
I had the most prolific time of my life, when out of work for 6 months, and I did completely random projects, a 2048 solver (it was trendy at that time), a connect-four adversary and many others ideas https://caub.github.io/misc/, just imagination, learning the algorithms, also some leetcode for future interviews, still then this moment helped a lot building myself
What should I make that captures the awesomeness of this project without the insanity? Hmm...