robdoherty2

Graduated with a BS in Mechanical Eng in '96.

Like a number of other commenters mentioned, folks like me who were in STEM majors all had to learn how to code in some form or another, though I don't think I ever took any classes as such. A popular joke then: "what do mechanical engineers do when they graduate?" "they learn to code and become programmers"

In my case, I had a part-time job in a lab writing programs in C++ to get various lab instruments to be remote controllable from a terminal and had to learn on the job how to do it. One of the professors in the lab gave me a copy of "Numerical Recipes in C" to help me with the C++ code I was writing. It didn't help at all!

I was also part of the generation that learned basic programming on a TRS-80 (aka "trash-80") in BASIC, then in HS some Pascal and FORTRAN in an informal computer club. My family never owned a home computer, but the school had a bunch of windowsOS machines curious students could play with.

Looking back now, it seems like I was really primed to be part of one of the first waves of professional programmers, and indeed a number of my friends did go that route. But by the time I graduated from university, I kind of hated coding! Recall that in the 90s there was no stack overflow, no google, no way to see how others might have solved the problem. If you couldn't figure out how to get something to work, you had to just grind away at it no matter how long it took.

At the time, I honestly thought whatever future there might be for professional programming I sure didn't want to be a part of it. And I also didn't think it would take over the world like it did. I left uni and I spent a number of years traveling abroad and teaching ESL before dusting off my coding skills and getting a series of coding jobs in various industries.

I am extraordinarily grateful that I learned "the hard way" how to code, but more than once I wish I had gotten my degree in CS instead of ME.

love the "Expanse" themes!

Great post idea!

These days I compose electronic, ambient space music with synths, modular and otherwise, and sometimes acoustic bass and field recordings. In a previous life stage I played bass in jazz ensembles in and around Boston.

https://soundcloud.com/user-944725336/sets/introducing-patie...

https://patientfrog.bandcamp.com/

link to "Discovering New Strong Gravitational Lenses in the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.04730.pdf

I experienced this when I lived abroad. I moved to a new country for work and didn't know anyone or speak the language well at that point. This was before the internet enabled instant communication around the world, and my new timezone was on the opposite side of the planet from my home country, so I couldn't make phone calls to family without making a plan.

In any case, for the first month or so before I started my job, I was totally alone in my apartment and didn't have any conversations in my native language (English) the whole time. I began to have imaginary conversations with loved ones, both in dreams and in waking life, very much like the kind you describe.

I am one who has always been introverted and ok being alone, but this was an extremely disorienting experience. I coped by keeping a journal. The upside was that I eventually developed an ability to not feel lonely even while alone for long periods.

It is absolutely true that adults can begin to learn piano (or any musical instrument) and reap rich rewards. And as you say the key is to set the right expectations and enjoy the sound, enjoy the process.

However, I don't agree that affordable to even high-end digital pianos will be able to approximate real acoustic pianos within 10 years in two primary areas: dynamics (being able to produce the full range of sounds from pianissimo to fortissimo) and haptic feedback (the subtle vibrations felt by the fingers and body when playing a real piano). Digital piano keybeds are getting better and better in these areas, but are just not close yet to a real piano sound and feel IMHO.

If anyone knows of any models of keyboards that prove me wrong, please share!

hey braindongle,

what is your soundcloud handle? I'd like to check out your work and add to those 8k listens! :)

(incidentally, I am patientfrog on soundcloud)

One of the reasons I got so much enjoyment from this book is that Swafford himself was a composer and described the works in great detail accordingly. The numerous anecdotes about Beethoven's life were fascinating of course too.

Does anyone know of similar biographies of other famous composers? Ones that tell stories of the composer's lives as well as give detailed analyses of their works?

I never answer calls from numbers not in my contacts unless I know it is a pre-scheduled call. I also keep my phone primarily on silent.

A trick someone taught me to get into a lucid dream state is to 'touch your nose' while in a dream. The action itself is symbolic, so basically any simple command you can remember to do will open up your ability to consciously control your dream.

If you get into the habit of keeping track of your dreams by doing something like keeping a dream journal, sooner or later you'll be able to remember to 'touch your nose' and lucid-dream at will.

I enjoyed experimenting with it for a while several years ago; it can be pretty exhilarating. But ultimately I found I wasn't feeling rested after a night of living a dream life (oddly enough) so I discontinued the practice.

They should have more interviews with people who chose not to go for a PhD, and whether they feel they were successful in spite of (or because of) that choice.

I know of several startups in NYC using Go to great effect; bitly's nsq comes to mind: https://github.com/bitly/nsq

The NY Times open sourced a very cool tool "streamtools" that was built in Go: https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/introducing-strea...

Your question also reminds me of an interesting talk I saw at RICON: https://speakerdeck.com/al3x/nobody-ever-got-fired-for-picki...

At my company we've implemented a Bayesian A/B test in order to minimize the amount of time a test has to run.

http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2013/02/tech-bayesian-instant-...

I don't have the task of managing leads, but I think salesforce is the standard certainly beyond a certain size. Not sure if that is too big for your use case.

A mentor can be helpful to give you direction on where to focus your auto-didactic abilities.

I switched careers into software development several years ago thanks to the mentoring of several individuals.

Going to meetups in your area is one of the first places to look, and taking online or in-person courses are also helpful to find other like-minded people.

One thing to consider is that there need not be a formal "mentor-protege" relationship; you can get a lot of great one-off type advice from all kinds of people you come across.

Data Science - http://www.datatau.com/

A lot of these offices seem to have devs stacked together along the same long tables. The overall aesthetic of these spaces looks great, but I can't help but feel they are more designed/suited for lots of verbal collaboration and not for quiet, solo work, (both of which I'd argue are important).

Can anyone who works at any of these places comment on the atmosphere?

you don't have to; giving 2 weeks notice is a professional courtesy that contributes to you getting a positive reference at some point in the future

Any HN readers of this post have any similar experience?

I know the bright team over at bit.ly made a successful switch from python to go-- anyone else?

The more I hear about go, the more I like it.

They were a big supporter of the SOPA legislation, for one.

Well, most don't. But shared among two or three. :)

Yes, that is how I have always enjoyed the growler as well.

Fascinating read-- thanks for sharing.

> When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.

I wanted to add that PR firms have indeed figured out how to pitch to bloggers, and do so all the time. I am close with several folks who work in PR and pitch to bloggers every day.

Anytime you read a blogger's review of any product, it was because they were sent free samples from the PR firm that represents the product maker. This sometimes backfires when the blogger doesn't like the product and expresses that in the review. But more often than not, the blogger is flattered by the gifts and praise and is happy to give glowing reviews of the new widget.

I don't know how much emphasis there is on college degrees in the UK, but in the US you can definitely get good work in this industry without formal education.

You have to be willing to put in serious effort to get up to speed. For example, you'll need to spend your free time doing MOOCs and side projects until you have a sufficient amount of knowledge + experience to be attractive to potential employers. Go to meetups, keep up to date by reading.

Also, at first you'll likely need to take jobs with companies that aren't necessarily "sexy," but you can hone your skills and continue with those side projects.

Before long, you'll notice that you can get interviews at better and better companies (better=according to your preferences).

tl;dr: skip school, work on your portfolio at your own pace

Without getting into an anti-higher-ed rant, the cost of going to school (tuition + opportunity cost of not-working) is not offset by the benefit of knowledge + credentials.

You could also try to find work at a smaller company/start-up where you might take a relatively junior role that would enable you to get some professional experience doing "Information Technology Decision Science" (not quite sure what that means, by the way). In any case, employers place more value on real experience vs school in most cases.

Saying someone is "not a cultural fit" is a polite way to say that the person is difficult or impossible to work with.

In the workforce nowadays, you are almost never going to get direct feedback about what you might be doing wrong: you have to read between the lines.

If you have been told by several companies that you are not a cultural fit (and then let go), then you might consider what aspects of your behavior are causing friction.

Think of it this way: due to the high costs of acquiring and training employees, companies hate to let people go, especially new hires. One has to be doing something very wrong to get let go, and employees are usually given many chances to get it together.

Another trick that recruiters use:

Ask you where else you have interviewed, and even get names/contact info from you if they can. Then they call that place and tell them that they have a stack of resumes of way more qualified people than you.

You may never hear back from that place for two reasons: 1) they think you sold them out to a recruiter, 2) they believe the recruiter and start interviewing new people.

Bottom line is that recruiters will sell you out any chance that they can get. As much as they may seem like your friend, you are not their client, you are the product they are selling.

You have a number of options, not specific to django, depending on how complicated your setup is and how much manual work you want to do-- and you want to automate as much as possible. Going from least automated to most- 1) ssh into your server, pull from the repo and restart whatever processes need restarting that feed your app. Ideally you have symlinks or pointers to your git repo folders so you don't have any file copying to do 2) write a deploy script using fabric (http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.4.3/tutorial.html) that does what you did manually in #1 3) use a tool like puppet, chef, or even salt (python-based)

Ultimately, you need to be doing #3, but it helps to go through #1 and #2 to get a sense for how awesome deployment management tools are.

A couple things to keep in mind: - server authentication with git: you'll want to use public key-based methods to pull from git so you don't have to deal with entering passwords - dev vs prod environment settings: you'll want to have a smooth way to transition config settings between your dev and prod environments so you aren't editing files everytime you deploy.

These are just a few tips-- the overall guiding principle is to automate everything. Anytime you find yourself doing a task more than twice, write a script to do it.

There are quite a few neighborhoods in NY that have a great sense of community, albeit mostly in the boroughs

Very interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

Anyone have advice about salaries/commisions for salespeople in startups? Will candidates expect to earn less relative to larger, more established companies?