I've had to do lots of physical therapy for the problems developed from sitting in a chair at the computer. The kneeling chair has been a huge improvement.
I miss working in an environment like this. I was actually surprised to find so much negative feedback in the comments.
I think a detail getting glossed over is that the tone needs to be calibrated to the relationships between team members. If team members joke around with each other, send silly gifs, get lunch or coffee together, and are generally on good terms with one another...then it's known that you don't take PR comments personally, they're just feedback. And the more critical the feedback, the better developer you become.
I hit a challenge that had me stumped, and I had to ask a coworker for help. It turned out to be legitimately difficult. Now we were both stumped.
We got some coffee, doubled down, and paired for a while. Eventually, a moment of brilliance was struck from our combined brainpower. Commits were made, tests passed, QA signed off, and a deployment pushed. High fives and Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" ensued.
I got a job in Santa Monica, while living in Long Beach. Commute was painful at 45-60 min, and I only had to be at work by 10:30.
I moved into a 1BR for $1500 in nearby Culver City, which cut my commute down to 20-25 minutes. Not so bad. I'm across the street from a little downtown area with bars, restaurants, a movie theatre, 3 yoga studios, and a grocery store. Fairly walkable.
The job market is pretty hot. The problem in my job search was lining up interviews to get as many offers as possible at once so I could have my pick of the litter.
Heh, there's a lot to cover. First of all, just go to physical therapy if you have any pain. Even if you know the rehab exercises, doing them with perfect form will be very challenging.
* Muscles typically work in agonist/antagonist pairs. You bend your arm at the elbow, the bicep contracts, and the triceps lengthen. Straighten your arm and your triceps contract while your bicep lengthens.
* When 1 muscle in a pair is overly active, it will shorten and become tight while its antagonist muscle lengthens and becomes weak. This is imbalance. The weaker, lengthened muscle will often develop painful trigger points in protest. This is referred pain.
* To restore balance, you need to strengthen and learn to activate the lengthened muscle while relaxing (inhibiting) the tight muscle.
* Foam roll and stretch the tight muscles, strengthen the weak muscles
* Need to develop: scapular stability, scapular retraction, and scapular depression
* Need to inhibit: scapular elevation
* Maintain neutral chin tuck in pretty much all movements.
* ITYW exercises: when doing Ts, focus on squeezing at your mid traps (mid back), with neutral scapular elevation. During Ws, focus on scapular retraction and depression at the same time.
* Wall slides or wall angels
* Band pull-aparts
* Deadlifts
* Farmer carries
* External shoulder rotations
* Face pulls, finishing with external rotation at shoulder
* Rows
* Reverse flyes (palms down for posterior delts, thumbs pointing up for more mid trapezius and other back muscles)
Before doing a heavy lift (like rows), you might do an activation exercise beforehand (Ts and Ws) to focus on activating the muscles you want to work (mid and lower trapezius).
Similarly, if you want to workout your (tight) chest, you ought to do activation work for you back (ITYWs, wall angels) to ensure that your agonist/antagonist pairs "remember" each other and your chest doesn't tighten back up too much.
Hopefully that should give you plenty of material to google with. I'd love to go into further detail (there's plenty more to cover) but I mustn't spend too much time writing comments on HN :)
I started working as a programmer when I was 18...at 23, I had my first visit to physical therapy, for emacs pinky and elbow tendonitis.
At 25 I went back to physical therapy, this time for chronic pain in my upper back. Therapy unraveled a whole slew of postural and motor pattern issues, and I've been at it for nearly 2 years now. Additionally, for the past 1.5 years I added workouts with a personal trainer specialized in corrective work.
I've learned a ton. Sitting and using your hands with shoulders internally rotated (typing, writing, etc.) for the majority of your time (from 1st grade through adulthood as a desk worker) is so terrible for you. The good news is that it's possible to completely reverse and become pain-free. The bad news is that it might take a huge amount of effort—but personally, I really enjoy it.
Ergonomics are critical, as well. I have both a Kinesis Advantage keyboard and a motorized sit-stand desk. Moving around (not just sitting, not just standing) is the key.
For some time now I've been meaning to write up a detailed case study of myself; essentially a how-to on how to become and stay healthy as a desk worker. It's good to read that at least 1 person might be interested in such a thing :P
That's... moderately comforting. I recently started using Mint and it's proving very helpful for tracking my spending and budgets. It's really worrying having to hand over my bank account username and password, though.
I really wish banks could provide a read-only API token instead.
I'm using Zenhub at my current company. I preferred Pivotal Tracker, which we used at my last company. It just feels kind of janky overloading Github's website.
TBH, though, I struggle to find any other meaningful negative differences.