I was never that good at writing but just putting some effort and caring about what you write down makes a huge difference. After you write an email or a document, read through the whole thing and edit. Is it obvious what I want to happen? Do I sound like a dick?
The biggest improvement for me was to give more concrete answers. Like when someone asks you for a meeting, don't just say "yeah any time's fine", actually give a few dates and times that work for you. It also cuts down on the annoying back and forth of scheduling via email.
After my friend showed me QBASIC in elementary school, I fired it up at home and made a new file called Football (I had been playing that on the NES). Then I tried to run it.
I probably spent months playing with just the graphics programming tutorials. Copy-paste some of the tutorial code and slowly start changing things. I didn't speak English very well but somehow those tutorials were still helpful.
I'm also not sure why would they want to become GroupOn? I haven't heard about anyone using that service for years. Yelp still offers a useful service for finding good restaurants that I use weekly.
Philosophy is a cumulative field just like programming. If you're only involved with the most modern framework, there is a lot of magic happening underneath the surface. Most of the value to me seems to be in understanding an idea and then reading and understanding someone refute it later. That's basically my whole experience in reading philosophy "chronologically".
Having experienced so many platforms with 0% thought put into how does this work on more than one platform certainly gives me a huge appreciation of stacks that are built multiplatform from the start. I don't see myself jumping deep into any tightly-coupled-to-one-machine tools anymore for example.
>I spent years flailing within technology. I learned the wrong things, dove deep into the wrong technology (Java Swing :|) and made obvious mistakes. In retrospect, I would have paid to work for a capable mentor when I started who could have validated my work and guided my efforts.
I think this is inevitable. We're lucky to be living during a time that has been extremely fruitful and revolutionary in programming languages and technologies. I spent many years on Flash and Silverlight but I don't regret it. Most of those skills transfer to other domains easily.
> Mentor-
Yes. Even after 10 years in the industry I feel like I'd love to have someone to poke me in the right direction every now and then.
In a way a romantic relationship is easier since it's so explicit. The expectations are usually clearer. I'm in my 30's and find making new friends immensely difficult. Everyone is busy with their lives and already have settled into a groove.
> Coders are often under a mistaken impression that interviewers care about your answer. They don't.
Huge asterisk that as long as you arrive to the correct solution with minimal help. I've had plenty of algo/ds interviews and it seems like needing help to see the trick in the question pretty much means you're out.
Reddit is also just too big. It's only a matter of time before a great subreddit reaches /all/ a few too many times and becomes a meme factory/circlejerk/battleground instead of something interesting. Then the mods start cracking down to try to keep the original subreddit spirit but it's too late by then.