Full-stack developer with 20 years professional experience building for the web, 11 years of experience with Ruby on Rails.
My specialty: helping media companies tackle the tough problems around processing, managing, publishing, and hosting tens of millions of images at scale.
Languages/Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (including jQuery, React), PHP, SQL, Git, numerous AWS services, numerous web servers, linux.
Full-stack developer with 20 years professional experience building for the web, 11 years of experience with Ruby on Rails.
My specialty: helping media companies tackle the tough problems around processing, managing, publishing, and hosting tens of millions of images at scale.
Languages/Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (including jQuery, React), PHP, SQL, Git, numerous AWS services, numerous web servers, linux.
My husband and I have teamed up to teach our daughter (11) how to program, and while it may put us in the "bad parent" category in some people's eyes, learning to program is not optional. Fortunately, she seems to be interested and enjoying herself.
There are a whole host of valuable skills that learning to program teaches you; critical thinking and analytical skills, problem solving and planning, organizational skills, collaborative skills, reading comprehension and writing skills (documentation).
These are all extremely important skills to have and they all seem to be severely lacking from her public school education, where the emphasis is on teaching to the test and following a less than ideal Common Core curriculum. Going to school isn't actually teaching her how to think to any serious degree.
It's teaching her how to intuit answers to standardized questions, certainly a useful skill to possess, but she also needs to be tackling problems too big to just "do" so that she can understand the thought processes and develop the methods to do complex thinking.
Actually being fluent in a programming language and writing a piece of software is something that I see as a sort of side effect; useful, certainly, but not the main goal.
Are there other ways to foster this sort of "big picture' thinking? Sure, but programming is what we know, so it's the vehicle we will use to teach her the skills we feel she needs to have, but isn't getting.
We took the kid out trick or treating and stopped for dinner on the way home. Then I again consoled said kid over the recent loss of her fish, when she came home to an empty tank and got sad (she was rather attached to that fish, "He was such a good listener."). Now I'm killing time waiting for a friend to get online so we can discuss some work stuff before going to bed.
Being legally blind, myself, I found a way to use my iPhone to help with my distance vision a while back. -- I point it at the thing I'm trying to see, zoom in, take a picture, hold said picture close to my face, and zoom in on the photo to see the thing I was after. This sometimes gets blurry, but is often still an improvement.
This was not at all what I was expecting from the title. I thought I was going to read an article about the importance of taking one day a week to not write any code. I'm sure that between startups, work, side projects, etc. some of us are coding every day on something or other.
As someone who often works alone, one of the best things I've done is to find someone else to share code, problems, and ideas with on a regular basis, even though we're not working on the same projects. It's helped me grow as a developer, has improved my mood, and has also just been an enjoyable.
But I still really do think it is important to make sure there's one day a week where you don't touch anything related to work or code.
I've been developing a concept called "irresponsible coding," which is basically the idea that you need 'good engineering' time as well as some form of 'irresponsible, exploratory coding.' I've given a few talks on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlyQOLRiEPs
I think that we've often lost a lot of the wonder and whimsy in software. Code is like magic! But you don't get that when BDDing a new feature so you can check it off in Pivotal.
I agree that not coding every single day is a really fantastic idea as well.
I personally think that's the best part about 20% time. You can do things where it's OK for them to not work. This means you can try things you don't know how to do, and bring them in to your main projects once you are already comfortable with them.
I like the idea of a "day off" being either a real day off, or just a day where you code irresponsibly, whichever will be more rejuvenating. Thanks for the terminology!
I think you're 100% right. It's impossible (for me anyways) to be productive 7 days a week for a lot of weeks in a row. I started recently taking Sundays off from working altogether and spent the day only doing stuff like going to church, relaxing with friends, reading, exercising, and maybe a couple other things. I think it has helped me in lots of ways, from being more efficient and effective at work the other days to also enjoying the work more.
Reddit discourages people who don't participate in the community from just posting links, to prevent spam. The more active you are, the more frequently you can submit things.
And a lot of people won't click links from new accounts, under the (usually correct) assumption that they're just spam.
There is a particular dislike for blog spam.
You can certainly become a new member of Reddit. It just takes some work at actually being a member, and not just self-promoting.
I cannot understand why it would slow you down, why do you think it might?
For me, I found the changing color to be too distracting. My eye was constantly being drawn away from the text I was reading to another color on a line below or above.
It may be worth noting that I only have one eye, and it's not a very good one - 20/100 visual acuity with about a 15deg. visual field.
Amazing, it had the exact polar opposite effect for my eyes. I often have trouble keeping my place in black and white text. I find it like trying to focus on a single conversation in a pub but I end up hearing everyone at once.
If you don't mind me postulating, I wonder whether this difference is something intrinsic to the focussing effect of binocular vision, or if your field of view has maybe trained your brain to be more urgently perceptive to peripheral vision?
then again, maybe its just colour perception.. or different strokes (and thanks, I just learnt about binocular summation.. fascinating)
I slowed down considerably as well. I found myself rereading the same lines over and over for no apparent reason. After a very short time I started to get a mild headache as well. Of course, that could also be the fact that it's getting late but I usually read for 30 minutes before going to bed.
I noticed a family in an airport a while ago --- the parents and the two children were all engrossed into their own mobile phones. I felt very sad and have since then trying to reduce my mobile phone consumption
You would have seen my family doing this a couple of weeks ago (well, except we have one kid). We were stuck there for 12hrs, and we were playing a game together, on our respective phones.
I get the sentiment, though, and I feel the same way about photography, which is why I don't often take pictures when we're doing family activities--I don't want to stop having fun with my family long enough to take them.
Remote: Yes (preferred)
Willing to relocate: Not at this time
Resume: https://kellishaver.com/resume.html
Email: kelli@kellishaver.com
Full-stack developer with 20 years professional experience building for the web, 11 years of experience with Ruby on Rails.
My specialty: helping media companies tackle the tough problems around processing, managing, publishing, and hosting tens of millions of images at scale.
Languages/Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (including jQuery, React), PHP, SQL, Git, numerous AWS services, numerous web servers, linux.