1. Once I felt like I had mastered a language I’d start learning another. The techniques in a new language would teach me things to take back to my primary language. Functional Programming for instance was great at teaching the value of simple functions. Prior to that I’d put everything in Objects which had implicit state leading to sometimes hard to reason about code. Also Objects still have a place for making easy to reason about code.

2. If I saw a new technology I thought would be useful I’d try it on my own before trying to incorporate at work.

3. Downtime at work was used to learn more programming by working on projects that would help make my life easier at work. Bash scripts, improved builds, improved developer tooling

4. In the corporate world. Learn the soft skills, when to talk when to be quiet. How to brag about your work appropriatly to get those raises.

5. Constant learning. Programming changes fast. If I stuck to what I started with my skills would be far out of date and my job selections would be slim.

Asus RoG laptops are so underestimated for productivity. The AMD chips have fantastic battery life and performance.

Recently set up an office on a couple of them, granted it was not this high end of a model but it’s stupid to ignore them for office use.

Also I guarantee she didn’t pick this. This was 100% advised to her by her companies IT group after she repeatedly said her computer was slow. It’ll run all the spyware she downloads with enough cores left over to run excel.

Coming back to code after a year is hard regardless of language. I’ve had C code I came back to after a year that was dead simple language feature wise but hard as hell to follow business wise. I would actually argue more modern features like Union types in typescript has actually made it easier for me. “Oh this function has to handle two cases of objects an object with an id and without an id”

I’ll have to disagree with this. Adding new features is a problem if old things break but otherwise it just makes future programs easier to write.

You should be writing your next set of code with the newest features if they cut down dev time, cut down bugs or make that area more maintainable

I should start by saying I was a middle manager in a large corporation. This may be a different experience in smaller settings.

I think the transition to manager didn’t live up to expectations for me. I knew I would be committing less code and helping clear roadblocks. What I didn’t expect was the bureaucratic catastrophe that is HR and upper management. Often I wasn’t clearing roadblocks as much as insulating my team from terrible knee jerk reactions from above. In example productivity is down let’s bring everyone into the office post Covid. Productivity was not down for my team but going back was the start of it. My top level performers I struggled to hang on to due to HR in acting strict requirements for promotions. Senior needed 7 years and other random rules. That coupled with some not wanting to come in. I remember the most impactful being losing a 4 yr experience programmer who outperformed every senior I had due to those rules.

There were parts I enjoyed. Helping the juniors grow and the surprises I’d get from that. I learned very quickly that a devs initial skill coming in from college or life transitions was not a good way of judging their maximal. I’d have devs come in that I thought no way they’d be a top performer to a few years later being shocked at how good they were and how they flew past their peers. It made the inevitable loss of them more painful. I knew my shooting stars would see better pay and advancement elsewhere.

I really had no problem with the transition from contributing to relying on others. I missed contributing and was good at it but I knew it wasn’t my role. I knew from past experience a manager didn’t know enough about the day to day code to give fine grained suggestions on how to write code.

I was a fast track developer. Was senior in 4 years but involved a few job hops. Many companies require x years to get to senior but for some reason that goes out the window for new hires with talent.

It wasn’t until managing people that it became obvious why I fast tracked and others don’t. There is a huge difference in our industry. I like to use the analogy of sports. You have multiple levels recreational, college, and professional. As you get better you move up but there’s a gate to moving up that some never achieve maybe genetics maybe effort. The difference is it’s all mixed up in programming there’s no divisions you can have a 15 year programmer stuck at rec level and he’s programming with a 3 year college level athlete that’s running absolute circles around him. The productivity gap is huge. If you manage to get a pro level programmer on your team he’ll make the other 3 rec level programmers look like a waste of money. It’s like the elite runners who complete a marathon in around 2 and a half hours and it’ll be another 4 to 6 hours before the slowest finish. That same gap is in the programming world it’s just not as obvious.

So all that said my advice is to find what your skill is. If you seem to be outperforming your elder peers you’ll benefit from aggressively asking for raises and promotions as well as making a job hop every few years if HR stagnates your pay for the dreaded “years of experience” excuse.

You might also eventually get promoted to a point where you find yourself not excelling. This was my experience in management. I became a manager too young or maybe I’m not built for it. After a few years hating management I went back to programming as a consultant because I realized I was on that upper side of the skill differential, I enjoyed coding and now armed with that knowledge of where I am I can ask for even higher amounts of pay exceeding management pay.

You don’t triple your software output by going to the office. You can improve it by getting developers uninterrupted time with a healthy line of workable items ahead of them.

This is probably going to have the opposite effect they desire.

You will be fine without it if it’s indoors.

If you wanted to strengthen the wood and protect it from getting dinged as easily a couple coats of boiled linseed oil will help. Me personally though I’d just leave it alone, I doubt it’ll get enough abuse to warrant the extra time.

Oh totally seen it work myself but I don’t know that it was agile that worked as much as they had a kickass team.

Some teams just jive well. They communicate, they know what each other is doing, and they can plan with minimal waste. And when it’s successful that’s across all roles not just the devs.

In my opinion those teams would have succeeded in waterfall, kanban or their own home brewed strategy as well.

Oh totally seen it work myself but I don’t know that it was agile that worked as much as they had a kickass team.

Some teams just jive well. They communicate, they know what each other is doing, and they can plan with minimal waste. And when it’s successful that’s across all roles not just the devs.

In my opinion those teams would have succeeded in waterfall, kanban or their own home brewed strategy as well.

Interesting you prioritized pointing out on time delivery as opposed to maximum value.

Hits a sore spot, I’ve delivered a lot of useless stuff on time with agile teams. We could have been useless even faster without the meetings.

Say it in standup with management in the room and watch the response

Agile in it’s current implementation with excessive meetings wastes more time than the mistakes it tries to avoid.

A dog is a real tangible thing. Easy to say yes. You’d have to be delusional not to believe it.

God isn’t a person or thing, you can’t touch it, and the evidence is old written and many translated texts. However there is an obvious gap in our understanding of how and why we are here. So is God involved, was there a guiding hand can totally be a question that hasn’t fully resolved itself in my mind.

Not insulted at all. Grew up in Church of Christ and I can tell you that church did not match me. There’s a lot to what didn’t match me but let’s go with the overall close mindedness of it was a problem for a curious mind.

As soon as I was old enough not to go, I didn’t. Atheism for the next two decades until I found something was missing. Explored other churches and found a non-denominational that matches my views as well as doesn’t judge me as a heretic for questioning.

I think it’s unfortunate many of us grow up going to a specific brand of church. What worked for our parents in their situation may not line up either with our personality or the world we live in today.

Not a cop out it’s just not black and white. You seem to really be struggling with the fact someone could be in a state between believing in God and not.

You’d be surprised how many Christians will tell you they struggle with believing from time to time. The ones who will admit it at least. Many do and to many God is different from one to the next.

I won’t argue that religion hasn’t been usurped throughout history in the name of control. I can mostly only speak with any confidence on Christianity. The Bible regardless how holy and true we are told it is has no doubt been tainted by men throughout history.

There’s still plenty of good in religion despite that. And I don’t think it’s wrong to believe there’s more than what we see. What life looks like after death is a mystery. Science points to your body shuts down. Fact. But we can’t say with any certainty that’s it.

From my experience a healthy church encourages my skepticism. It’ll encourage asking tough questions. It helps me to explore what I believe. The reward when doing that exploration seems to vary from one to another. Myself I became more resilient to the day to day troubles around me that were too big. Me yelling in the void of social media doesn’t change much about issues like global warming or people in need. I can reduce my consumption I can repair instead of replace. I can volunteer my time to help kids who’s parents can’t take care of them. The universe as a whole will be a little better for it

Not all need religion, I accept that, some people have all they need to get by and will cruise from now to the grave. But to some of us it is a major force for happiness and healthiness.

The assertion "I believe in God" is true or false. It cannot be anything else.

Right but what is God? There’s a myriad of different answers to that and most religions a God is not a being as much an idea or force.

This is where it not being black and white comes into play. Answering that question with True of False means you believe my god is what you believe God to be. That’s likely not the case.

Nonsense. Belief in a god is a binary proposition.

Life isn’t black and white. Neither is religion, at least not a religion I’d follow. Those who make it black and white are we have hatred and division.

No such thing. Any ideology based and unprovable and unverified claims is a mistake by definition.

Given that religion is the root of past major civilizations which we are built on I’d say we wouldn’t have science without it. Hardly a mistake in my opinion. We might still be beating each other in the head with rocks without religion.

You're mistaken on both counts, I'm afraid. Please see http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI001.html and subsequent pages.

This doesn’t disprove intelligent design. People still argue we are a simulation within science. That’s a form of intelligent design. As is sending a spacecraft that terraforms the beginning of the world and steers throughout history. There are plenty of ways in which a god could have formed us.