Ugh, regardless of what we say we wish to do on this post, what I'm sure many of us lack is external motivation to do it. One app to help solve that is called Spar, developed by a friend of a friend (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spar!-get-better-at-stuff/id...). You set a goal with your friends, e.g. read a chapter every day, and put 20$ or so in the "pot". Whoever does the best at meeting the goal, gets the pot, and if you slack on your goal you lose the money.
Right, I was just about to reply with a similar response to another post. I went to Virginia Tech, lived in Northern VA for a while, and now I'm here in SF and it's like night and day. I did not believe that being here would be such a huge and significant difference, and yet it is. Influential and successful people in tech are so incredibly accessible here. After only a couple months I got to meet VCs, startup founders, CEOs of successful companies, other highly intelligent people in tech doing amazing things and so on. Most importantly, at least for me, there's a constant external motivation to push yourself, learn, collaborate, get involved, to do more, and I love it :D
In 2012ish as a freshman intern at Microsoft, I asked Will Kennedy (then CVP in Office) how did he feel about people pirating Office apps. He said that they would rather permit people to use illegal versions of Office than have them use their competitor's tools. Essentially he was saying Microsoft would rather people use their products free of charge rather than using other products as it promotes Microsoft image and helps Microsoft dominate the workspace. Promoting VSCode vs Visual studio are not competing efforts - the two tools are solving different problems in different work environments / tech stacks. They're simply trying to branch out to permeate more of the workplace, and it's working. Now that I'm in a startup in SF, I look around and I see some people switching from Sublime to VSCode for our web/backend stack, who would never ever use Visual Studio (100% macs here).
Yeah ultimately what all this is trying to achieve is to make JavaScript have the basic properties and benefits of many other languages. Unlike other languages, JavaScript was developed in 10 days in 1995 and was never intended to be used as heavily as it is today, hence the gargantuan amount of packages and modules to rectify it's shortcomings.
So that's not entirely true depending on how you use the product. We were attempting to use Stripe for a contract-like setup, e.g. person A pays person B, but person B doesn't get paid until some event occurs, and we hold on to the funds until that happens since that expiration of that event isn't guaranteed to be under 10 min.
Hmm digging through our old code looks like we never tried to use Stripe, for reasons unknown to me (maybe their support/requirements were different back then, maybe it didn't work for our product, idk). But yeah, especially after reading this article, handling bitcoin payments and dealing with the exchange rate sounds unfavorable lol :) glad we're not doing that.
I don't know the proportion, but coincidentally enough, I work at a startup that uses Stripe and we used to support bitcoin transactions (and thus refunds). I just asked a friend who's been here longer why we're not supporting bitcoins anymore and his response was "exchange rates were a huge pain" haha so yeah it is indeed convoluted to do refunds with bitcoins, but if we are to attempt to use them as regular currency for goods and services, we can't not support refunds. so we dropped bitcoin support altogether.
Hahahaha as someone who recently made the switch from corporate/tech-giant world to the startup world in the bay area, I can really relate to this article.
Haha fair argument. As someone pointed out - it's very easy to incur technical debt in Perl. It's a dynamic language with virtually non-existant dev tools and lacking open source community. I personally can't wait to go back to a static language for our backend. We're looking at NodeJS (of course...), JVM, and Go. Arguably you can fake typing in NodeJS with TypeScript, Flow, etc, but my team isn't too excited about JS for our backend, I personally have an allergic reaction to Java for backend and I really want a static language, so by process of elimination, Go wins.
Hahaha too true, too true. My lingering loyalty to MS obliges me to defend this though. There were custom shells, dev tools, and compilers for almost every major project combined with Visual Studio and C-family languages (which is an extremely overpowered editor btw - I mean you can even do 3D editing with it, proof: https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Visual-Studio-3D-StarterKit) so, to be honest you didn't really miss Linux/Mac OS X that much.
Right. There's a running joke that building 36 (the main Office building) looks like the mothership (or jail, depending on who you ask) because of this criteria.
Haha I used to be at Microsoft in a building like you described: a combination of open space with offices and break-out areas. They're trying to renovate all their buildings to follow this hybrid approach as they did with building 16 which is just incredibly gorgeous (https://news.microsoft.com/stories/b16/).
Now I'm at a startup in the bay are that adopted the generic open-space/warehouse design and although I'm happy with the move career-wise, I really do miss being able to concentrate...
Right, I completely understand where you're coming from. I'd like to think that there'll be a paradigm shift in consumer wants to steer away from disruptive technology, that consumers will become punitive towards time-sink apps that consequently lower the morale of its users (Facebook, Instagram, etc) despite the initial rush, and instead value apps/services that increase productivity and efficiency. It's really hard to grayscale 'addicting' apps with a negative connotation as Facebook is arguably trying to present more useful information, carefully personalized from user info via its hoard of data scientists, Twitter arguably made the world a better place by distributing news faster, and so on.
I am however really glad that articles like these are coming out, and the general ethic concern of companies targeting human psychological venerabilities becoming more exposed since more educated consumers will drive, through demand, 'better' product (by whichever metric you use).
quick snippet:
'Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher at Google' .. 'is rallying product designers to adopt a “Hippocratic oath” for software that, he explains, would check the practice of “exposing people’s psychological vulnerabilities” and restore “agency” to users. “There needs to be new ratings, new criteria, new design standards, new certification standards,” he says. “There is a way to design based not on addiction.”'