It's not really time. Seniority here is more of a quality than it is just something determined purely by time. So "Senior Software Developers" are those with some of the correlated skills in the article.
The article uses phrases like "As a developer become more senior, they become more independent.", which indicates they view seniority as the independent variable.
Yeah, it looks like seniority is the dependent variable. It also looks like it's the monotonically increasing variable. Seems like it should be on the X axis.
This seems like one of the best uses of computers for educational media, one of the ways digital instruction can really shine through compared to physical text which can often require supplemental videos or help from a teacher to elucidate a concept.
Feels very reminiscent to me of 3B1B videos [1] on topics that use visuals to elucidate math topics more clearly as well.
In case anyone is interested in a written version of some of the essential points 3Blue1Brown makes, I recently released my own review notes which try to provide a brief overview of some of the main linear algebra topics as well as applications: https://github.com/photonlines/Intuitive-Overview-of-Linear-...
3Blue1Brown's Essence of linear algebra series is the go to place for learning this material. I've included the link to the series below so people don't get lost in all his other wonderful videos along the way.
I see you used a throwaway because there are so many fans. I might not be as harsh but while I enjoyed the pretty animations they didn't actually help me learn linear algebra. They're still full of jargon written for people who already know the topic.
It seems ironic to me that the HN crowd seems to support these circumvention of Apple's insular app distribution strategy, but on the other hand also supports Apple's clamp down on efforts to stop privacy violating apps.
For my part, I guess I would prefer that Apple at least open up iOS devices to both the app store and allowing users to install non-App Store apps, the Android model. This would probably satisfy both casual and more tech-savvy users. Unfortunately, I don't see Apple doing this any time as they are all about profits, and this strategy has been working very well so far.
I admit that back when Apple created "Gatekeeper" for OS X, er, macOS, I had high hopes this was laying groundwork that would come to iOS later -- that we'd be able to flip a switch in Settings which allowed us to install signed apps from non-Apple storefronts. Yes, this would potentially reduce Apple's profits (and it's hard not to suspect you're correct in guessing that's why it hasn't happened), but it's hard not to think that most developers would still make their apps available in Apple's storefront the way most Android apps are available on the Google Play store. I still feel like this would solve more problems than it creates not just for users and developers, but for Apple, too.
Well as you said yourself, people should be able to side load whatever they want outside of the official store if they are so willing. The general consensus is that their authoritarian approach on the App Store is a positive for consumers and also for Apples brand. So I don't see any hypocrisy here.
You can't run unsigned apps on an iPhone. No, not even your own.
You can't generate a certificate for an iPhone app longer than one week, and even then, the certificate you generate only lets you run code on an iPhone physically connected to the computer where the certificate was generated.
EVERY OTHER way to get a certificate, including for internal development and testing through testflight, requires the app to go through review. Every. Single. One.
It's not simply for putting the app on the app store, it's for running the app at all.
Enterprise certificates were supposed to be a way for a company to avoid shipping their internal tools to Apple, but they turn out to be a way to actually run useful code on an iPhone, even if it's not something Apple wants you to do.
Only if you do not have a paid developer account will the app be uninstalled after 7 days. Otherwise the app can stay installed for as long as your account is paid up.
And the phone does not have to be physically connected for it to run.
This more than anything else Apple does, shows quite clearly that you do not own your iPhone, you are paying Apple to be allowed to use it. So you want to run your own program, with no interest in publishing to the App Store or sharing it with others? Sure thing, just pay us $100 a year...
I mean, I know there have been recent changes in apple's attitude towards enterprise certs, but I've been able to sign internal ad-hoc apps with a developer cert which would last one year (i.e until the provisioning profile expires) with no review.
Granted, you need the unique identifier of the device and it limits you to a certain number per year (100 or 200?), but this still seems different to the situation you are describing.
Fairly sure I did this last year, even. Though admittedly we switched to android at some point, purely because it was too much headache.
> EVERY OTHER way to get a certificate, including for internal development and testing through testflight, requires the app to go through review. Every. Single. One.
Not true.
There is still Ad Hoc distribution, where you can sign the app to run on any device in your developer account (up to 100 iPhones + 100 iPads) and host it for download yourself. The build runs until your developer cert expires (1 year IIRC?)
I believe this is how TestFlight worked before Apple bought them
It seem completely reasonable to believe that there is value in a curated ecosystem and also believe that there should be a mechanism for informed opt-out of that curated eco-system.
For people who use YouTube and would like to remove distractions, I use the simple CSS script below along with the CSS styler extension Stylus to remove distractions and stop me from jumping mindlessly from video to video.
It seems so incredibly generous of this that I caught myself being so cynical as to doubt any ulterior motives at attracting just more companies to YC overall. But it seems to me that these resources and advice are made in earnest, thank you Sam Altman (and Gregory Koberger!) for the contribution of these materials.
It pays to be good seems to be one of the core philosophies.
>So I'm not suggesting you be good in the usual sanctimonious way. I'm suggesting it because it works. It will work not just as a statement of "values," but as a guide to strategy, and even a design spec for software. Don't just not be evil. Be good.
This man Winston Sterzel [0] has been predicting something like this will happen in China, as they have no tolerance for drugs due to the horrors of the opium crisis.
I guess they have no tolerance for drug use in their country. Exporting it makes sense from an economic perspective. I believe US and EU(i.e. with GMO prosucts) is doing the same.
That is: no tolerance for foreigners smuggling drugs to China and contributing to problems of domestic drug addiction. China historically fought wars against the British Empire over this issue, and see it in a context of anti-colonialism.
Exports are one thing, addicts inside China are another. They still remember how Britain used opium addiction to control them. The Communist solution was to kill all the addicts after they took over.
I would recommend for you to read and implement the organization/productivity system from Getting Things Done by David Allen [0]. It discusses essentially your main problems of dividing up your life into projects and timing yourself. The system also includes sections for putting some of your ideas in an 'Incubate', basically putting it off for another day once you get through what you have. Having a running list of all your commitments and projects like the system does I think will help you to analyze your time usage and realistic expectations for your productivity and stuff you want to engage in.
I second this recommendation with a suggestion that has hugely helped me. I have more or less copied the approach to to-do lists described in that book into a Trello board and then – importantly – made it my home page on Chrome.
This accomplishes two things for me:
1) any time I open a new tab, I get a reminder of what needs to be done
2) adding an item or recording an idea to be processed later is just a cmd-t away.
This approach (combined with the Trello mobile app) has made the list so easy to maintain it's almost hard not to use it. YMMV, of course.
I do the same with a personal dashboard that pulls in my "today" Asana tasks as my new tab homepage. Are you using the New Tab Redirect Chrome extension? It seems that you can set a homepage for when you open a browser natively with Chrome but not a new tab.
I think this can be a very good start. Whenever I'm reminded of my tasks deadlines I'd work harder. Would also love to include different color signaling for deadlines...
Hmm,I hadn’t thought of a week/day in Trello. It’s an interesting idea, but having a les productive week seems like it really screws things up by forcing moving back to Maybe and Backlog while you plan out your week. But i see a possible benifit in that.
I wouldn’t do that to my collaborative work board, but for a personal board that seems interesting.
I’m really very surprised that so many people recommend GTD. I absolutely hated the book. It felt like he was trying to sell the book for half of it. The techniques are very outdated and manual. It requires a huge amount of categorization to the point of way too much. I tried it, and really strongly do not recommend it in any way. It’s like Org Mode in emacs. Feels like most people just recommend it because they bought into it so heavily and hive-minded around it. Sorry but I really wanted to balance out the positive comments about GTD.
I agree -- the two things I took from it were to write everything down and to do things immediately that will take less than 2 minutes. Other than that it was overkill for me.
My one caution with this: It's pretty easy to OVER categorize your life and never get anything done either. I had a former co-worker who read GTD and began to impliment it for everything. It felt like he was perpetually planning and never actually doing.
Additionally it became rather humorous to see how the most minute things became 'projects'. Sometimes it's worth just stepping back and observing what you're considering to be 'projects' or 'tasks' and ask if you're over doing it.
To defend GTD slightly, one of the core tenants is if it will take less than 15 minutes or so, do it now (maybe it’s 5 - I stretch it to however long it takes me to do dishes or mop the floor).
I agree completely. This book was recommended to me as “life changing”. I was skeptical given that my experience is that 90% of self help books are a rehash of “How to win Friends and Influence People”.
As I have moved into professional roles with progressively more responsibility, the tools and techniques in this book are what have allowed me to scale myself out in a way that my prior ways of working would not have enabled. Many productivity tips (such as inbox zero) have their roots in this book.
I mean, I kept using it, thinking it was working, but I'd look back and ask myself key questions:
1. How often do I stop looking at my lists, because I felt overwhelmed?
2. How often do I need to spend a large amount of time cleaning up the lists?
3. How often are things getting missed? How often am I doing things not in my GTD lists because I couldn't figure out how to put it in there?
4. How often do I tweak my GTD system to fix the above?
And so on - I realized that while GTD was of some help, it was not really working.
It did have some useful things/ideas, and as such it was not at all a waste. However, it really didn't do a good job of the fact that my lists were huge. I think he recommends looking at your Someday/Maybe in the weekly (or monthly?) review. That list is huge.
Even the TODO list can be large with his system. I don't think he addresses granularity well. Should my TODOs be the mundane small things, or just the big picture project (he leans towards the former). In reality, the potential Next Action on a project could be multiple things, so I would have multiple TODOs (it's not always clear which one I can do first due to external constraints).
His system is mostly priority agnostic. He does address it a little (10000 ft view, etc), but it was very vague.
No clear guidance on how to know if you're trying to do too much. Especially needed with GTD, because as a system, it makes it easy to try to do too much.
I think if someone could write a book with all the stuff GTD is poor at or doesn't address, with solutions, then GTD + that system may actually be great.
It's a good book, but don't beat yourself up if it doesn't work well for you. Try to tweak it to your needs, and if that doesn't work, look for something else.
You're describing success, not failure. The GTD system is generally so good at streamlining work that a novice will react to the new streamlining and the sudden availability of time and mind space by simply filling the space with "more to do". GTD is agnostic about the quantity of work you take on.
If you like using systems to help balance out your selection of work, I would suggest looking into OKRs. The book Measure What Matters is a good start.
I used to use GTD. I still use it for reactive tasks. It is not good at proactive tasks. I use evernote as a GTD repository, but I only act on it occasionally.
Since I retired my tasks are by nature proactive (since they come from me). I tend to organize by long term goals. I start a goal by defining the success criteria for that goal then each long term goal is a "project" in an outline text file. Each morning I look at my long term goals and decide what I want to make progress on today. That turns into a backlog for today.
Since one of my long term goals was to learn swift - I wrote an iphone app to parse the file for items marked "@today" and turn that into a todo list that I can carry with me. Apple made this convenient when they added an icloud file system for the iphone.
I second Getting Things Done. This book is a little engine of productivity. It was responsible for a good chunk of any special productivity I've been perceived to have.
The book is easy to start with as your read it because it ties together skills you already have with creating an air tight system that enables your brain to trust you trust you not to forget anything - lowering your mental and cognitive load so you can focus in the present by taking a unique approach..
It literally lets you collect every random thought that has no relevance to the moment, capture it in a "someday/maybe" pile and put it away for future review. The brain, one emptied is ready to focus.
The new edition is updated for digital life too, which is great, I try to read it every year or two as well to keep sharp, the current read has been a nice refresher.
Currently using the newest 2Do app between Android/MacOS/Windows /iOS. It's really decent inter platform tool. If you're all Mac a lot of people like omnifocus too. I found other apps (things, toodle, rtm) lack the ability to break apart projects into super detail when needed but otherwise are great.
There are a few other books that help build a car around this engine (Mindset, Focal Point, So good they can't ignore you, Deep Work), but a car without an engine isn't a car.
Second reading this book at some point. I think what originally hung me up about it was that it isn't really prescribing an exact system, just a series of general ideas that you can use in whatever system you are using. It can be used with Trello or Asana or Omnifocus or pen and paper. But generally the idea of projects and an inbox and the someday maybe list are great. In short, get things out of your brain taking up cycles and into a system you trust.
I can also recommend GTD, it was definitely an eye opener.
A few takeaways for me:
* There is no (need for) 1 list to rule them all. I'm using Google Inbox, Calendar, Keep, Post-it notes in the house on doors & walls, and a handwritten notebook for my day job.
* Inbox helped me organize a lot better. Snooze is great for getting an empty inbox. It used to have "snooze to someday" to incubate, but unfortunately that's not an option anymore. I still have 50+ items in there that I review a few times a year. I'm sad inbox is getting killed. Gmail has most of the functionality, but the UI is waaaay to busy.
* Keep is nice for simple lists. Grocery shopping has become a lot faster and easier. I will try to order the list so I can pick up everything in one pass. The kids & wife are joining the shopping trip? We can split up, see the list update instantly, and be done in half the time.
* GTD defines 5 phases: collect, process, organize, review, do. I wasn't used to having collect as a separate phase, but a lot of sites make this easy. Inbox has reminders, and a browser extension to save any page, Reddit has a save button, Inoreader has starred items. HN even has a favorite button, but does a very good job of hiding it. Seriously, I have to click on the post/comment age to favorite it?
I agree with this as well. Reading this book really helped me get organized.
Some of the information on it is getting a _little_ bit dated. In particular, it talks a lot about the different 'contexts' you have your tasks to complete, like at home, at work, at a coffee shop, etc. I feel like this holds up a little bit less nowadays, because almost the entirety of all my work can be done if I have my laptop with me.
This book is a great foundation for you to build off of and make your own 'system'.
Contexts should be adjusted to make them personally useful - mine are mostly categories like "work", "home", "community group" so that I can sit down and focus on work tasks without seeing other stuff, and then I can spend a solid hour working on my community stuff, etc. I also have a couple place- contexts: "house" for things like fixing a thing, "9-5" for tasks that have to be done during business hours, and if I have travel etc coming up I might sort some stuff into "offline", like reading a bunch of docs I have downloaded.
I don’t think the idea of contexts is dated at all, it just sounds like it doesn’t apply to your situation specifically because you have special circumstances. Most people don’t have that flexibility. It’s important to understand when things don’t apply only to you vs when they really don’t apply generally (when giving advice).
I find the idea of contexts holds up even more importantly - In fact if you are constantly context switching (social phone at work, etc) it may be something you have to enforce yourself
