Kathy Sierra

What's the point of railing against "PC culture", though? There's no leadership; it's not centralized. From what I can see, "PC culture" and related/contrary forces are an emergent consequence of the Internet a) giving marginalized groups a loud collective voice, b) granting individuals the power of global publication, c) enabling echo chambers that reinforce and concentrate disparate opinions, etc.

It's neither good nor bad; it just is, and we must collectively learn to navigate these new waters. Parts will suck, parts will leave us better off as a society. I think it's an inevitable consequence of our exponentially increased global connectivity. You can't really stop it.

Personally, I've found that the best way to deal with difficult topics is to just not discuss them online. Those kinds of conversations don't really work when you can't have interruptions or interludes, can't react to your companions' body language, can't experience genuine empathy and pain -- can't even sense that there's a living, breathing creature on the other end of the line. On the internet, everything is a manifesto. In the real world, ideas are ephemeral and flexible.

"If you KNOW someone is wrong, why not debate them?"

To answer your question, you can read Kathy Sierra's article[1] on her interaction with gamergate. Basically, it's because there's no right answer and the questions never ever end. It's railing against a tidal wave of identical ideas, and the only apparent solution is to join an…

Willpower is a muscle, which uses the same resource as brain tasks (programming, arguing)[1] - let's call it "cognitive energy".

1) don't waste cognitive energy on silly tasks (games, arguing in comment threads, etc.)

2) practice exercising willpower - it's a muscle, you can train it to be better. Start by forcing yourself to complete a routine every morning (the trick with habit forming is to not give up after you miss a day.) examples of habits to form below.

3) look into mindfullness meditation[2] - this can help you identify distracting thoughts as they arrive and practice ignoring them.

Meditating is a good habit to form as practice, and it will also help you get better at habits. You could also exercise on a schedule (and record when you do, including how heavy you lifted/how fast you were running). Eventually, with a stronger willpower-muscle, you'll be able to choose the fruit salad over the cake, even when you've just spent your 7.5 hours a day coding.

I've not found pomodoro to work for me as an easily-distracted person, it's better when you're prioritising work tasks (e.g. 25 code vs 5 email) and even then, 25 mins is too short for good programming "flow".

This is a hard problem, everyone has trouble with it. Good luck!

[1] http://seriouspony.com/blog/2013/7/24/your-app-makes-me-fat (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6124462 )

[2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindfulness-practical-guide-finding-frantic/dp/074995308X (US edition:…

Great, so instead of spending willpower on something useful, you spend it on avoiding temptations of Candy Crush.

http://seriouspony.com/blog/2013/7/24/your-app-makes-me-fat

The fact that people are playing it regardless of whether they are paying or not helps king.com make profit to demolish games like Banner Saga (note: this is a game I backed).

You might wonder how - but it's rather simple. Even if you pay zilch to play and you get to level 153, your friend brother, mom, sister, father or acquaintance will see this and try it out, and perhaps get hooked (if it's someone that would pay money to 'compete' in levels with you, even better).

It's a numbers game. Games like that depend on few gamers that spend in the thousands (aka 'whales'), and to get to them they need to wade through a sea of people that spend 0$ but are connected to the so called 'whales' .

So yes, thanks again for helping King.com ruin The Banner Saga for me...

Here's my list:

https://www.manager-tools.com/podcasts podcast about management

https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/ great engineering leadership slack. you can ask questions and learn all kinds of stuff

https://ctolunches.com/ groups of engineering leaders meet for lunch, also a great email list

https://bookshop.org/p/books/high-output-management-andrew-s-grove/6730629 classing on management

https://itrevolution.com/product/the-phoenix-project/ classic on software throughput, plus a fun read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great great business book on what makes a longlasting business

http://seriouspony.com/badass-users-the-book always be thinking of how to make your users great. short

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mythical-man-month-the/0201835959/ lessons from the 1960s and 1970s about software development and are still relevant today

Kathy Sierra suggests that the fact that she was listened to by many people was what triggered the hatred for her:

http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point/

"I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed."

Read the whole thing, it's heartbreaking and eyeopening. It also involves some of the same people that attacked the author of the current post.

So whatever these two woman did to "incite" this harassment was shared by at least two kinda-succesful woman in tech.