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How Passion for Programming Can Make us Worse at our Jobs
2018-11-09
“Good programmers are passionate about what they do” is basically a platitude in our industry. 🙄 On the whole, this may be true, but lately I’ve been interested in how our passion for programming might get in the way of us doing well for the companies we work for and may even lead to us being worse at programming specifically. 🤔 Here are some ways I think this passion can make us worse at what we do:…
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Some thoughts on how to teach programming
2018-07-28
I almost gave up on becoming a programmer. I took two years of college-level programming in high school and I didn’t particularly care for it. Although I did fairly well in those classes, at the time, I probably had something like the following thoughts about programming: I’ve given this a fair shake. I’ve taken two years of classes, and I’ve decided that programming is some tedious bullshit 💩. I need to find something else.…
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Hacker vs. Hustler: Reflecting on One Year at UniKey
2017-11-03
Me: I really like my new job. Family: (incredulously) Really? Me: Yeah. The people are smart, passionate, and the company seems promising. Family: (sarcastically) Ok. So you’ll stick around for 6 months then? Two Wednesdays ago marked my 1 year anniversary at UniKey, and as the above dialog suggests, this is pretty weird for me. I’ve never been at a job for a year before, so this 1st ever anniversary in my career has given me the urge to reflect a bit on a couple of questions:…
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Why Ayn Rand's Psychology is Probably Wrong (or trivial)
2015-01-24
**Edit: **Some have pointed out that I’ve misrepresented Ayn Rand’s position in this post. From what I can tell, they are right. Either way, I still think the argument presented here is interesting and accurate as long as we change the conclusion to “Psychological egoism is probably wrong (or trivial)” I’ve met a surprising number of people in my life who believe that no one is capable of altruism. These people believe that everyone always acts to further their own interests.…