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The problem is smaller than you think. You need time.

Dunno if that helps, but I've been programming since 8 years old. When I did college there was definitely a considerable amount of people that I might consider that... they didn't know how to code or to properly solve problems, but that's because they didn't improve their problem solving skills.

If you have no monetary or legal obligations, just stay at your parents place, sit down, create a SPOJ account and go problem by problem until you are confident. If I had quit 2 years off my career to study problem solving now that I am 30, it would rarely make me lose anything, much less in a 30 years of work timeframe.

Go get rid of that anxiety I think you can only solve it by being more confident, and to be confident you need time. It is much easier to be a good guitar player if you start as a kid, but I bet that anybody that dedicate a few years will be able to perform well, peogramming is the same.


Best advice ever.

I come from a relationship with my family like the one you described. Now my mother is dead, my father married another woman and all the advice and control they gave me is gone and they barely remember these expectations which some of them I fulfilled but actually at some point I left my home and worked in another city without having money to pay even my lunch. That made me make a lot of money, move from a third world country and meet the love of my life. I didn't have diabetes so maybe for you it might be different, but unless you take control of your life and start to have frequently moments which you are 100% responsible for, you will never truly live.

I always felt weak and had my fair amount of health imperfections, but I once thought that if I'm a bird with an undeveloped wing and I need to do my first flight, I would rather crash my face to the ground and die than to live a shitty life being abused by everybody.

Maybe you can fix your disadvantage with your brain and become a bird that makes other birds fly for yourself.

Also take out this disadvantage mindset. You should make your strong points stronger. You have gone through some crazy shit that those perfect rich white males probably never went. So at least at something you can excell.

Please also take my opinion with a grain of salt, you know your life better than me. Cheers


Exactly, you might want to be the consultant


I might, but there's two parts to that: #1 having a security mindset and security knowledge and #2 successfully branding yourself as a trustworthy security consultant.

I'm honestly not all that sure how you become the guy who an executive who knows nothing about security feels comfortable hiring. I'm also fairly sure that being good at #2 is somewhat orthogonal to being good at #1.


go to conferences, develop your charisma, get older, know people


Tell them that it's just a currency, but unlike a normal currency where the government has control, nobody has control.

Then there's a big sheet of paper where the transactions with their amounts are written and shared with everybody, that way everybody knows how much each of them has. So when they receive money, they know that whoever sent them has money.

Then just raise up the simple problem of you copying that last transaction and transferring money to somebody else before everybody knows that you did the first. You can just say that there is a system that waits until that other transaction is processed and be done with it. It makes no sense to actually explain in more depth even to a savvy user...

even if you do explain, it will be like when they try to explain poverty in the third world to Americans... they can even see the picture, but they won't understand because they've never lived it.

In the end, all you do is to think that you managed to explain something but the other party didn't really understand you


I go to work, nothing special as most of the remote worker in (subdeveloped country with great weather). Actually in nothern Europe, where most of the days are just gray and I don't get enough sunlight.

I have a wife and a dog whose I share my life with, we play games in the sofa and eat together, maybe once a year we travel to explore new places. Sometimes routine is hard, but I can always count on them snd vice-versa.


Hello, I was in a similar situation 10 years ago. Wanna talk with me? thiago@thiami.com


Become vegetarian


Even swapping 1 meat meal per week for 1 vegan meal can make a difference if everyone did that.

In my experience cooking for meat loving friends, there are lots of vegan dishes they like. Switching 1 meal a week does not really impact their “meat menu” pallet. Don’t try to replicate meat. Enjoy vegan cuisine for what it is.

FYI I eat meat but I enjoy a lot of vegan meals. I don’t like vegan “tastes like meat” dishes though.


This. If you want a direct, measurable impact/reduction in impact, go veggie.


I think the idea of going 100% or subscribing to label scares off a lot of people. Just reducing meat consumption has an impact. See my comment above.


- Make me a German(great read, even if you aren't into germany, nice read/comedy).

Still reading "Meditations" from Marcus Aurelius, definitely a must read. You can easily see why he was an imperator and can probably guess how much far a human can get even in today's society with the mindset he provided in the book. Maybe it's a good idea to finish this up this xmas.

It was a very poor year in reading for me, but compensated by the fact I've moved to Germany.


I guess Uber isn't good in every city and location. Maybe a good idea would be to research about the cheapest way you go back home after having a great night before you get drunk.


No. This is not an advantage.

Any average developer can probably write something in Ruby/Rails at least 2x faster(in developing time) than the best clojurist alive if the startup in question is a web app / mobile app. And this matters for a startup, time to market.

If the startup has a very complex business domain, needs some deep data science to be done, machine learning or some sort of thing, it might be a good indicative that they use clojure, but there's like 10.000 things that you should care before if they use clojure.

There's a lot of companies that are about raising money, picking a weird stack, hiring a bunch of hipsters and then running out of money and closing operation. I know people who are programmers that know that the company product sucks and just stick to the company because of the tech stack. As non-founding engineers don't get that much stock options it seems a good idea to work for a company with some fun stack that pays well enough even though you think the product is shit.

As you aren't a programmer, you should look for companies where you see that the business makes sense. Tech tools rarely end up as a big market advantage.

What makes all the difference is having great managers, board, C-level, culture... and of course, a decent business model. With a competent team, good business model the team will apply a tech stack that is good enough to solve the situations at hand a move the company forward. And this won't evolve just one programming language, just as you can't create a big company just doing advertising, or just having only finance people. You need all kind of skillsets and this also applies to tech.

Clojure? Last concern.


> Any average developer can probably write something in Ruby/Rails at least 2x faster(in developing time) than the best clojurist alive if the startup in question is a web app / mobile app. And this matters for a startup, time to market.

Bahaha that's so false. Sorry I'm not laughing at you, just that it's not true.


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