Over the last 18 months I have been working to get that back. I remind myself at the end of the day that what I did was productive and useful and so far that has worked well.
I realized that it is really easy to fall into the "but what if..." trap but doing so is not spending enough time in the present moment.
I read CODE before reading The Elements of Computing Systems. I felt like the former provides details that you actually implement in the latter. Highly recommend both and in that order.
A lot of great comments here and I generally agree. One thing I think we all need to consider essential is ethics. As software continues to eat the world, programmers are being used for unethical endeavors and I think all too often we don't notice it.
I'm not suggesting every programmer who works for the likes of Facebook, Exxon, and Comcast quit their jobs. (though, if they did, wouldn't that turn some influential heads in the right direction?) Simply push back when asked to work on something that you feel might cause harm.
My Vizio that I’ve had for years recently popped up an “opt in” that asked me to allow them to track my usage. Except it wasn’t opt in at all. I couldn’t use any of their services if I didn’t agree to let them track me.
So I promptly did a factory reset and now we use the AppleTV exclusively with that TV.
It is not only the last Vizio product I’ll ever own but I’ll go out of my way to find a dumb tv the next time I need one, if such a thing exists by then.
That's impressive. Can you provide more info such as how old he is, did he have any kind of programming experience prior, and how did you go about teaching him?