k3fernan

Personal/un-scientific opinion. It's worth trying going on/off alcohol to see the effects on your sleep, mental health, behavior, and honestly finances.

I'm trying no alcohol Jan (like a lot of people) and I've been noticing the effects on my sleep, mental health and the $$$ saved.

Similar to skipping coffee, a week or so every year. It's good to just introspect and question your defaults.

You'll learn something about yourself.

Similar to eating meat, maybe we are better off just eating less of it. Just my two cents.

My advice is to run a real process and track every application. Expect around 100 applications to 25 screens to 10 interview loops to 1 offer. Best case.

I would say directly reaching out to hiring managers and recruiters is your path forward, but they get a lot of inbound, so the odds of a cold outreach getting read is low unless you have an intro.

My co-founder and I divide our days: before lunch, we take meetings, user interviews, feedback sessions, respond to emails, and tickets. Essentially shallow or synchronous work.

After lunch, we go heads down on coding, design, or writing work. Deep or async work.

This system allows us to always have daily feedback on our product but also uninterrupted time to change the product, every day.

You have to time-box the sync/shallow work, enough to get a good loop in but it's okay if certain things get pushed a day or so. You always have to make space for the deep work.

A Canadian living in US, so take this with a grain of salt.

Canada is a great place to immigrate too, I would also explore Montreal, it has more of a research/AI/gaming scene but the cost of living is lower than Toronto. Don't know about the salaries, I would investigate!

Is there any value in having different paternity vs. maternity leave or primary vs. secondary caregiver?

Wouldn't something like X weeks paid for anyone parenting/birthing/adopting. (i.e. a paid family leave) be a simpler design?

You could expand this over time to include caregiving for elderly people etc. And it could support various family types (i.e single parents, adoptions, same-sex couples, surrogates etc.)

Genuinely asking because it seems weird not to have just a simple inclusive policy.

Super interesting to see the pay differences between "programmer" vs "developer" vs "engineer".

With the other titles there is either an inference of management/hierarchy (manager, lead) or just a different or isolated work (tester, analyst).

Do people have very defined definitions of the differences between programmer vs developer vs engineer?

I've just used engineer as the generic title.

The biggest problem I find with long distance relationships, especially across time zones, is the real time nature of it. It's blocking. Especially for two busy people.

I would rather record a small video (rather than video chat), write an actual email (rather than IM back and forth), draw a silly picture (than send smiley faces back and forth). If you could change it from feeling like a status report to a message in a bottle, it really does change the dynamics of a long distance relationship.

Funny enough I recently stopped dating someone because of the distance factor. Maybe Pair could have solved that "problem".

Just a question for CS graduates here, how many Math courses were required to major in CS?

When I was an undergraduate the bare minimum was:

- 2 algebra (number theory + linear algebra)

- 2 calculus (single variable)

- 2 statistics

- 1 logic

- 1 combinatorics (graph theory + enumeration)

There was no "Math for CS" course per say, there was just math you should know. And that was the bare minimum for a BCS, the BMath (CS) had even more. I myself struggled with those courses (mostly the "raw" math courses rather the CS-y ones) but I'm grateful now that I did them. Math and Computer Science are so intrinsically linked.

I really am I loving the rate at which Parse is adding new features. We are currently using it with one of our prototypes but roughly looking at their blog postings, it is around five additions a month. Impressive.