The Codist

I've been doing it for two years and am barely past the "understand none of the words" phase.

It helps to think of each term as an interesting puzzle. For example, SVD. It's fascinating if you dig into it. Most people don't want to, because it feels like work. For me, it's neat understanding ... whatever it is, ha.

I think it's finding the basis eigenvectors in a higher dimensional space, which basically just means that e.g. the eigenvectors of a cube are the X, Y, Z axes you're used to. If you skew it along the X axis, the Y axis bends a bit, along with the cube.

The eigenvectors form a shape that, when you find the volume of it, is the area of the resulting form. So the determinant of a cube's SVD is the volume of the cube.

In higher dimensional spaces, it's the same thing, except it's called "eigenvectors" (named after Sir Eigen of Eigenmadethisup) because mathematicians have reasons for using complicated language, some of which is valid. But as you see from me muddling through this, the underlying concepts are all small simple pieces that fit together.

Or I was nowhere close to the explanation of SVD. But it was close to something interesting, since it leads to the question of "What's the SVD of a sphere? How about a point cloud?" It was easy to figure out for a cube. Not so easy when it's an arbitrary shape. "And why is it useful?" Because it gives a lot of hints about what that object is. In the optimal case, in StyleGAN for example, the SVD can even be the basis…

The Koutnik links to this article, which inspired his essay.
http://thecodist.com/article/my-biggest-regret-as-a-programmer.

It was very painful to read, because I made exactly the same decision. I was VP/chief developer at a company that withered on the vine after a 10 year roller coaster ride at a software company that I had co-founded. I had two paths: I could have looked for a VP/Director job or I could have continued on as a Developer/Consultant. The money was pretty much the same, so I took the consultant route. The money was pretty much the same and programming was more fun.

All went reasonably well until September 2008. I had just finished a very satisfying consulting gig, but I walked out into a very changed world. The day after was the banking crash. Even earlier a divorce had taken me to the cleaners. But far worse, small interesting companies had no use for older, still up-to-date, still competent developers. I found myself going from Finder to Implementer. Agile development, which had seemed like a boon, turned into a tool to lock everyone into two week death marches controlled by upper management. Technical decisions where made by people who didnt have a clue.

Just as in the linked article, a woman working for me in the 80s took the management route and was a VP in a major SV software company a few years later. Now she is quite well off. Good for her; we are good friends.

Moral? If you are a software developer, dont get old. (I'm still doing…

Unfortunately this person certainly wouldn't fit in at any organisation I ever worked for :

http://thecodist.com/article/how-many-people-does-it-take-to-ship-software

"The more people you have in any project the more communications you need, the more management you need, the slower information is disbursed and problems reported. You have to have more process to ensure that anything will be accomplished. Of course this all costs more money and time and often you have to do less just to get something shipped. It’s easy for everyone responsible for all these people to worry about unknown problems biting them in the ass so every decision becomes very conservative and cautious.This of course makes shipping difficult, expensive and often drags things out for a long time. Add to that memories of previous projects that had the same issues and things get even more cautious and slow."

The main function of management at any medium or large company is to manage people, keep the peace and keep things chugging along. This person makes the huge mistake of wanting to be manager ... to do something other than manage people. Wanting to be a manager to use "the power" for good (ha!, having done both let me tell you this: managers have less power than individual contributors. Yes you have "power" to choose, what you say goes to an extent, but only insofar that you keep making "the right" choices. Think of a manager as a 14 year old going to a party and getting told by his parents that he…

Relevant: http://thecodist.com/article/the_programming_steamroller_waits_for_no_one

“The Programming Steamroller Waits For No One“

Also:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

“Fire and Motion”

The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Facebook. People get worried about React and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for React because they think they have to. Facebook is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. Are you going to support Saga? Flow? React Native? Are you supporting it because your customers need it, or because someone is firing at you and you feel like you have to respond?

Wayyyyy too many :)

A few months back I wrote a Reddit comment listing "just" the high-quality React-related blogs that I read : https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/5t8loz/what_are_your_top_reactreact_native_blogs_that/ .

I read a lot more besides that. To pick out just a few:

- Scott Hanselman: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/

- Robert O'Callahan: http://robert.ocallahan.org/

- Henrik Warne: https://henrikwarne.com/

- Andrew Wulf ("The Codist"): http://thecodist.com/

- Lin Clark: https://code-cartoons.com/ . (Her actual blog hasn't been updated in a while, but she's also posted many in-depth articles to Mozilla organization blogs over the last few months.)

And while I don't think

I use the Outline View in MS Word to organize my bookmarks. I use 4 levels: Heading - Subheading -- Link --- Text. (Note that each level is a separate line in MS Word Outline View.)

An example:

Education
- Assessment
-- http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking-exams-is-actually-a-good-thing.html --- test and test often to focus the learners' minds

Business
- Insights
--http://thecodist.com/article/lessons_from_a_lifetime_of_being_a_programmer
--- find dumb people with lots of money

I find this to be a simple, easy system to organize what I find on the internet.