learninglisp

Here's my new theory:

I wouldn't necessarily be happy getting a high-powered hard-core ultra-geek development job. I don't want to have to move to the Big City (tm) and ignore my family.

Going "deep" would be fun... but strategically, going "wide" would be just as good.

As a developer, I'm irritated with my dependence on cranky and unsympathetic sysadmin types. The Unix Admin Cert here:

http://www.oreillyschool.com/certificates/

... would let me pin down a side of the business I'm less comfortable with... give me a cheap platform to run my own apps on... give me the skills to try a Unix solution when I want to try that as a Guerilla solution... and... maybe open the door to a different sort of job in a location that would be a better fit for me. Maybe.

So... not a better hat... just more hats.... "IT Guys" are always generalists anyway. Why try to be something I'm not when I have a perfectly good career (even if it's a little dull.)

I defined it as "mostly coding database apps, doing tech support, and some sysadmin type duties."

That means coding the hell out of SQL... and then taking that SQL and dressing it up in ways that users can benefit from it without bothering me. Which means coming up with little cutsey applications that dish up a variety of "stupid spreadsheet tricks". I code these sorts of apps start to finish by myself, deploy them, and design them to require a minimal amount of maintenance. The language/system used is whatever is currently in use in the business environment-- except maybe something newer/better if the situation justifies it.

As a system administrator, I write perl scripts and put them up on the server to run on a schedule. I write little perl scripts for users to create new system commands for anything they ask me to do more than once. I know where to look to see if people can do their jobs or not... and I know the 5 most common things that need to be done when things don't work. Mostly this is starting and stopping services and/or killing bad processes.

I solve math problems. I'm the only person in the factory that will admit to knowing Trigonometry-- and as we're in manufacturing that actually comes up occasionally.

I talk with users to find out that they need. I actually care about them sometimes. I work with CPA's to find the missing eleven cents. I am sort of tangential to a lot of activity. If I don't fix something, I know who the go-to-person is. I often have to be the go-to-person anyway if the other guy is out sick.

90% of my job is actually social. I talk to people and use basic deductive reasoning to pin down what should be done. Then, when I don't know everything to do it, I coordinate with the people that do to make sure everything works out. I say 90% because I don't actually have to think much about the SQL, Perl, Blub, etc code anymore. The hard part is figuring out what people need as opposed to what they think they need.

I don't consider this to be "real" computer work. I'm just the "IT Guy". I don't believe I have to credentials to do "real" computer work. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't feel that there's much interesting stuff to learn in these particular trenches. I'm not sure that people in more interesting trenches would actually give a #$%*(#@ about what I know and do.

Hence the interest in maybe a certificate that amounts to half a Master's Degree.

Oh... and that's a Software Engineering certificate that can turn into a Master's if you decide to later.

(Baby steps to the class... baby steps to the bank... baby steps to the bank...)

That's exactly what I'm thinking.

I'm looking at this one:

http://www.cs.illinois.edu/online/programs.php

I don't know if my work experience will make up for having no compsci bachelors courses on my transcript.

The prices are crazy steep, though! Wah! It's online, though.... A friend of mine says that this program has a really good name, though... not that the entrepreneurs here would care about that. ;)

I don't think it was verbose criticisms. I was focusing more actually on an architecture for increasing the level of abstraction.

I think he said that it is okay to reinvent the wheel if the 'wheel' happens to be central to your business/service.

I think.

Nice Feynman quote in there, though.

I like Perl hackers.

They do stuff... cool stuff... even lispy stuff... but they remain practical and relatively humble. The TMTOWTDI philosophy seems to have hardwired a certain degree of open mindedness in them-- they just don't appear to be as arrogant or argumentitive in the usual internet wars. Just an impression, YMMV, etc....

In some domains, big failures are better than small failures: you learn more.

my gosh... that's where my best project is...

a total skunkworks that achieved viral adoption in my side of the company...

I want to read a zomplet run of Zot!

Shoot... the entire run of Comico books would be great.

(I miss the black and white independent comics fad of the 80's. Adolescent Radioactive Blackbelt Hamsters? Anybody?)

There's a certain type of female that is completely addicted to the sort of raw intimacy and lavish attention that this type of person will deliver during the early stages of the relationship. They will overlook all kinds of problem signals if they are getting what they need in their inner core.

As another person said, this type of woman will have serious issues. That won't change the fact that you're getting laid.

Let me expand out that opening line for you.

The post explores a perspective for the express purpose of generating and connecting ideas and experiences. Other established interpretations are possible, but we will temporily set them aside so that we can hash out what is (potentially) a new idea.

Why is that so hard for some people to get? It's like you're unable to grasp how mathematics and science is done. You take a premise or form a hypothesis... then you see what you can build on it. 9 times out of 10 it doesn't go anywhere... but the time for rigor is later, not at the beginning.

It's as if the phrase "for the sake of discussion" is completely beyond your mental capacity or something....

It seemed like such a promising train of thought before it finally tanked. Argh.

There's a thesis in here somewhere....

Later. I'm working on a set of strategies that will allow me to be clear about my needs and limitations with people so I can be more productive to the people that matter to me and/or pay me money.

Hey, it's the holistic answer to the "how to". What, should I have broken it down into 12 steps?

To sum it up: let him solve problems his own way. Let him develop tools/abstractions that help him hide the sort of details and menial tasks that sap his strength. Force him to get up and go exercise or relax. Don't hold a nebulous infinishable to-do list over his head to guilt trip him-- he will come down off of his creative high and beat himself up for being irresonsible and may even shut down emotionally. Allow him to relate to people one at a time-- a hike with only one of the children, dates and activities without a big crowd. Don't take it personally when he absolutely dreads doing activities you think are "fun". Go stand by his desk until he gets that nagging little task done. Tell him things like, "if you don't get anything else done today, please look into x; it's really important to me." And no, he doesn't need all of a June Cleaver, a secretary, and a personal accountant-- he does need someone to play the part of a "coach", though. And someone that can organize some of the pesky details into something he can act on can be critical to this guy getting anything done.

Another one for the "you are sick" perspective?

Looks like two types of stereotypical psych people: the "just be yourself"/"embrace your inner dolphin" crowd and the "wanna prosac?" types.

I'm suspicious of all of you-- especially given the testimonies from guys like me that took your advice and are now numb non-creating slobs.

Trying to assimilate all of the data... trying not to jump to premature conclusions.... Trying to be clear without being overly romantic or pessimistic....

I want a Jean Piaget to work out the experiments and pin down this further....

The first post on the topic was mostly negative-- with good reason.

If us slacker/failure/mad-genius types want to hold on to the fiction that there's a place for us somewhere, then please back off and let us fool ourselves about it for a while. Hey... it may inspire us to a turn over a new leaf and adapt to other people's needs a little more. (Until we get distracted by something else and then start blowing everybody off again....)

Yes. This personality type is prone to making sweeping generalizations. I'll put that down as another generalization about him.

This is a very specific personality type that's just rare enough that all of them think they're the only ones. But given the number of "my god, you must be stalking me" responses... there may be enough of these guys out there that this merits investigation. Many of their problems are misdiagnosed as being due to something else. All of them are headed to a mental downswing or an epic failure of some sort and its critical that they understand themselves well enough that they can aid other people in directing/collaborating/steering them effectively.

What is needed is someone to give permission to ignore all the other details and just get one item done. The INTP is a commando problem solver killer... he just needs someone to "cover" for him so he can go in and tackle an objective.

The irony is that it is easy for this sort of person to live only for the day, to not be materialistic, etc. All of the things that are in the Sermon on the Mount, but not practiced by the church at large.

This sort of person truly has meat and drink that other people know nothing about. Just watch out for the focus to shift and for the pendulum to swing the other way....

Heh heh. A collaborator would be better. Someone that could be excited about the right things and maybe steer a little via encouragement and reason. A truly anal micro-manager will simply humiliate the INTP.

The creative urge is a force of nature. Discipline is not antithetical to it... but control is pushing it. "Management" is right out. ;)

This post may give you some additional insights into that weird guy you're depending on to help you change the world with your crazy start-up company idea.

I'd read that a long time ago before writing the post. It's even more scary now that I have some more "data points" in focus and on the table....

But they're not technically programmers. I'm talking about applications that require extensive customizations to be useful. There's a lot of cases where people are having to trick people with the business knowledge into doing the configuration for them because the 'real' programmers can't or won't do the work. _This_ is where we should be looking at applying DSL's.

Yeah... but in my company, there are many cases where job positions have spontaneously materialized that are essentially programming positions, but that we have "con" someone into doing it even though it really is programming. The users are, for all intents and purposes, programmers... but we have to keep them from finding that out!

I don't understand this. There are about 5 to 10 entry level to intermediate level Perl idioms that are just plain useful. (file handles, sed and grep commands, basic regular expressions, etc.) that can do most of what you need to do with typical quick and dirty Perl programs. It doesn't take much to remain fluent with these, though you may need a cheat sheet for keeping @ $ and & straight. (warnings and strict prevent the worst headaches, though.)

My first perl scripts are a complete mess. But my more recent ones are generally one-screen in size more or less... and are a few short (often lispy) subroutines followed by a short imperative program that does something to text stream based on the arguments that were passed in with it.

Decent perl code looks (to me) something half way between Ruby and BASIC. Maybe I'll find out before long, but I just don't see how people can suddenly stop being able to understand their Perl code-- unless they are completely sloppy and cutting all kinds of corners.... :evil:

Blogging has its share of muckrakers and trolls, but for me I'd say that it has opened up a medium in which I can follow a single train of thought over the course of a year even though I might have limited time to focus during any given day or week. I've been able to make minor contributions to a subject area that I had no skill with at the start, and I've made contact with several other like minded individuals that I never would have come across otherwise. Most importantly, if I was completely braindead on a certain point or if I was unaware of something painfully obvious, it was brought to my attention much earlier than it might have been had I continued by trial and error alone. The flames and the ridicule were not that bad, and ultimately blogging provided an arena where I could new try things: it was okay to "fail". There's not that much at stake in being an idiot in a blog post as long as you're willing to admit you were off base and correct stuff later.

An average programmer learns a variety of tools that lead him to a series of epiphanies.

With his eyes open, he no longer can cope with the lame blubiness of his career, but he finds him self pigeonholed by his old job description. He doesn't have the credentials to strike off into a job that would allow for more professional growth. But he had no idea that the many small development choices he'd been making over time would lead to this crisis. Now what?