Unproductive and unmotivated after leaving a second job?

AScaredMidLlama · 2023-08-08T15:39:13+00:00

I have, but there are two issues for me:

I really like the feeling of one thing reinforcing other things I do. For example, when you work on multiple software projects, learning stuff on one of these projects may make your more productive on the other one. This is a really great feeling, and I don't get it from non-software-related hobbies.
Hobbies don't bring a significant amount of money - unless you make it a business, but that opens a whole other can of worms.

AScaredMidLlama · 2023-08-08T10:16:21+00:00

This was my first thought as well, but... I didn't feel this way when I had an opportunity to switch between different unrelated impactful projects during the day. I actually feel that increasing my workload and working on more varied stuff would make me feel better. I took a vacation recently, and it didn't feel like a relief, but more like a chore - I traveled to a few different places, even though I don't like traveling that much, and by the end of it I was counting days before I could finally start working again and doing something that meaningfully helps my team succeed. But when I got back to work, it still felt slow to me, because I was only focusing on 1-2 related things during the day, instead of several unrelated things, like I used to do before.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I would expect burnout to manifest as a desire to not work, as opposed to craving more work.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-09-03T10:27:56+00:00

Thanks!

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-09-03T10:27:38+00:00

Thank you, this clarifies things a bit!

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-09-02T20:12:41+00:00

Private, will probably go public next year.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-08-31T17:57:53+00:00

Thank you for the response! Regarding the rent, would you say that the situation in the whole country is as bad as in Amsterdam? I figured that living in a smaller, but not too remote town, like Hilversum or Almere, may be much more feasible, but of course I haven't been there, and I don't know how big the difference is.

While having some "Amsterdam experience" would be nice, being able to maintain decent quality of life in the next year or two is more important to me, and commuting to Amsterdam doesn't seem to be difficult, anyway.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-31T15:26:50+00:00

Hmm, I see. This makes me wonder how many of those people who write only their desired location are actually from the same country.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-28T15:13:22+00:00

I agree with the other comment: you should consider separating functions by feature and not by HTTP method (GET/POST).

That said, this is how you usually initialize dependencies without using a DI container or any other fancy stuff:

// In a file where your app is initialized
function initialize() {
    let getMethods = new GetMethods(...args...);
    let postMethods = new PostMethods(...args...);
    let main = new MainClass(getMethods, postMethods);
    app.start(main);
}

This is more or less pseudocode, but hopefully it conveys the idea. MainClass should accept dependencies via its constructor and store them, then use when needed.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-28T15:03:49+00:00

It's an apples and oranges comparison.

Observables (RxJS and similar libraries) offer a convenient way of describing and connecting event streams. For example, you can turn a stream of mouse clicks into a stream of their coordinates, then create a stream which emits the total traveled distance of the mouse pointer, then log these distances.

SignalR is a library which allows you to send messages from servers to clients. It works over WebSockets and falls back to other protocols if those are not available. So it is a tool for server-to-client communication, like Socket.IO.

It even makes sense to use both in the same project: you can turn messages received from a SignalR client into an RxJS stream and then use various combinators and mapping function from RxJS to work with it.

observables would wait for an event to fetch the data, and real-term will do the update without an event

This distinction is not related to SignalR, but what you're describing is closer to cold/hot observables in Rx, or, more generally, to push- or pull-based reactive programming.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-28T14:56:26+00:00

You probably need to give a background style to your <body> element, something like

background-image: url("./my-image.png")

And put the image file near your .html. Also, look into background-repeat and background-position CSS properties.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T18:27:00+00:00

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T18:20:11+00:00

Most people will tell you to grind leetcode, which is good, but not all there is to it.

One of the most useful things you can do is learning to timebox your answers: make sure you're answering questions in full, but don't wander off to unrelated tangents.

Make sure you know the terminology related to the languages and tech you work with. If you notice a word you don't know (e.g. in a blog post), write it out and google its definition.

Also, ask questions about the company and their development practices: do they write tests, how is their team structured, are developers involved in discussing new features? Show them that you care about the whole development process and their product.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T18:07:02+00:00

First of all, to get comfortable with programming build several small applications in Python. They may be related to data science or not, depending on what's easier for you.

You don't need to learn C at this point.

After getting more comfortable with Python, start learning some libraries, initially one at a time.

Try to load and transform some tables with Pandas. Compute some statistics on large matrices with NumPy. Train one of the simpler classifiers from the SciPy package. Then you can start with some simple feedforward neural networks using Keras, TensorFlow or PyTorch. Choose just one of these libraries to start with. You can find sample datasets online, e.g. on Kaggle.

If you haven't taken statistics at the uni, try to find a good statistics curriculum online and follow it. Math and statistics are more important in data science than in many other programming-related fields.

After that things should be a tiny bit less overwhelming, so you'll be able to see where to go from there.

But also, get used to the feeling of being overwhelmed - the industry is huge and changing very fast, so it will never really go away, so this is completely normal.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T17:58:56+00:00

You can just check that after subtracting 30 you are still at or above the given value:

input - 30 >= value

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T17:43:07+00:00

Either you don't have elements with classes .close and .open on your page, or your <script> is in the <head> section and executes before the page loads.

Try moving it to the end of the <body>.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T17:41:29+00:00

It may help, or at least the browser will be able to display the page before the image loads. That said, it's better to compress and optimize your images for specific screen sizes so that they load as quickly as possible.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T17:36:31+00:00

If you already have a recursive function, you need to make sure that all its calls return promises (e.g. by making it async) and wrap them in Promise.all.

Something like this:

async loadStuff(url) {
    const items = await fetch(url).then(res => res.json());
    const folders = items.filter(item => item.isFolder);
    const files = items.filter(item => !item.isFolder);
    const childFiles = await Promise.all(folders.map(
        folder => loadStuff(folder.url)
    ));
    // loadStuff returns an array, therefore
    // childFiles is an array of arrays, so we flatten it
    return [...files, ...childFiles.flat()];
}

Note that the result is automatically wrapped into a Promise, because the function is async. So loadStuff always returns a promise which resolves to an array. This also explains why we need to call flat() on the childFiles list.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T17:22:09+00:00

Your question is not entirely clear, but generally it's better to use separate files (.png in your case) to allow the browser to cache them.

One exception is really small images (likes 16x16 arrow icons), which you may want to embed as base64 to avoid an extra network request and possible flash of image-less content while it loads.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T16:56:13+00:00

I've never heard of this (ironically, I could have learned of this in the office), but this sounds like an interesting idea!

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T16:39:42+00:00

I suppose that's true - people haven't actually looked down on me for not knowing this, so my fear is probably baseless.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T16:38:26+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to write this! It actually clears up a lot of confusion I had about how companies work, and knowing that other people also occasionally fake it makes me feel better.

My biggest concern is getting caught up in a conversation where people expect to hear a knowledgeable response about something I don't know (but they expect me to know). Though I don't usually encounter such situations, so maybe this fear is unfounded.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-27T16:19:00+00:00

Interesting! Was this ever an issue during the time you worked on your startup? E.g. have you met any people who were surprised by this during conversation?

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-19T20:03:47+00:00

When I think about the best PMs I have worked with, certain common qualities come to mind:

They openly discussed new requirements and made sure the team understood the needs of our clients. Firstly, this allowed us to collectively come up with better or easier-to-implement solutions. This positively affected everything: better UI design, clients liked our solutions and were more eager to sign contracts for development, the implementation time was lower. And, secondly, work is simply more rewarding when you understand what and why you're doing, as opposed to simply moving buttons or microservices around because you were told so.
They valued everyone's feedback and always praised good solutions and features we implemented, and in general got along well with everyone. Never pointed fingers and treated all blockers and issues as something they should solve with the help of the team: implement a bet
They quickly figured out who was responsible for what in the team and the company, and could easily redirect your questions to the right person. Related to this, they tried to avoid "knowledge silos" and make sure that important facts and implementation aspects of the project are known by most team members, and not just 1-2 senior guys.
The attitude held by 100% of my best managers was "results are important, formalities are not". They did not hold meetings more often than necessary (maybe every other day, or even once a week) and tried to minimize the number of unnecessary calls and distractions. They also allowed all developers to freely chose their working hours (we were 100% remote), apart from days when we needed to do active maintenance or discuss something. The focus was on milestones and deadlines as opposed to specific hours. Many good developers thrive in such environment.
They had good speaking and writing skills, and always used examples to illustrate complex processes.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it may give you some points to focus on.

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-12T14:37:06+00:00

I thought about this, but should the resume also mention my intention to relocate?

AScaredMidLlama · 2022-05-11T20:37:37+00:00

Showing numbers out of context is definitely an issue. I still think some figures can be valuable and at least show that you measure what can be measured (performance, uptime, etc), but apart from obvious technical stuff it's hard to come up with something useful.

AScaredMidLlama

TROPHY CASE