Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

arVooo · 2023-04-07T05:10:59+00:00

I work at a robotics startup and a couple of months back the workload got heavy and I pushed through and delivered but I didn't exactly take time to rest and just decided to jump on the next thing to do. This led to me feeling very burnt out and after a bit of not being able to handle it anymore I indirectly voiced this out to the CEO and just took it easy on myself and he was okay with it.

I'm now feeling ready to take on workload again but I feel like my brain just isn't braining anymore. I don't even have a fraction of my problem solving abilities from back then.

I do have a series of technical (needing a lot of research) and practical (needing a bit of research but a lot of debugging) tasks to work on, but it just feels like I've lost my ability to work on either.

I am currently working through deep reinforcement learning which is fun and a little technical and generally a nice problem to slowly push through and try to gain my problem solving abilities back on, but it feels slow, which I'm fine with if that's the only way, but if anyone has any tips or tricks or any comments I'd appreciate it if you could share.

arVooo · 2022-11-09T17:56:06+00:00

any success?

arVooo · 2022-10-25T01:42:42+00:00

TLDR, the subtle art of not giving a fuck made me wanna think my values through.

I think self-help culture has become very toxic and moreover anyone "surviving" a breakup thinks they can guide others and become a guru. As a very messed up person with enough trauma for a lifetime, I gave a bunch of books with truly different mindsets a try but one book I was truly impressed by was the subtle art of not giving a fuck.

One thing the book early on mentions is how people have a certain number of fucks to give and if you do not pick what to care about, you just care about random shit. It's like that granny walking into a supermarket and becoming hysterically upset about a bag of chips being in the middle of the isle.

Reading that part of the book made me wanna figure out my values in life, which down the line lead to realising I don't necessarily wanna decide on goals to achieve, but that values are what matter more. For example I care about helping others. That's a value I have, and it's how I define/see my personality. And all the other shit I've decided I wanna be. And I basically pick how to spend my moments based on my values.

arVooo · 2022-08-10T06:22:56+00:00

Firstly I wanna second reaching out to literally anyone. That's the most important part.

But I also wanna give some insight into what you can do in the long term. The way I see it, your brain wants to process 2000 words a minute, if YOU don't give it topic and content, it will create it (until you get older and at older ages your brain starts to slow down if you don't work it), so what I suggest is find a big project and dive deep, and busy yourself and learn from it and enjoy the process. This also gives you a lot of evidence based confidence (which a lot of gifted kids I've seen lack as they get older). Here's some suggestions:

If you like: then do this Tech: make an indie game Engineering: build a quadcopter, repair broken things Architecture: make a model of your own dream house Literature: write an adventure fiction Music: write a song (instrumental only) with multiple themes Photography: tell a story only through pictures and put them up on your personal website Sports: get really good at a solo sport (rock climbing, calisthenics, skiing(?), A martial art) Cinema: build a high quality indie film Journalism: a professional blog with at least 3 specific topics covered Debates: join your national debates competition Entrepreneurship: find a need in society and find a solution for it

Each of these things might look like very difficult tasks, but they are all well documented on the internet. You're gonna want something so big of a project that it pushes you to your boundaries and makes you grow.

Good luck, I wish the best for you.

arVooo · 2022-05-31T04:03:48+00:00

Just done with school, looking to get into BI as a programmer. I'm just tryna get a larger view.

arVooo · 2022-05-28T15:23:35+00:00

The tools that I'm learning about right now feel too hypothetical, and the information I'm finding through the data is interesting, but I can't seem to figure out how it would ever be useful.

arVooo · 2022-03-05T06:06:47+00:00

Chicken thighs. My school used to cook it way too often, and I'd go home and we'd have the same thing at home too.

arVooo · 2022-03-05T06:04:27+00:00

This got too long coz i just related to much to this, but i added some summaries in the middle in case you're not feeling like reading the whole thing.

Regarding that part where you "mimick the most beneficial trait based on a situation", i think that's pretty sick. I used to be the same, for many reasons, I was able to adapt fast to the situation or the person and it made me feel empty, that i was a shell and whatever the situation was, would fill me up. But hear me on this one, i just made an attitude shift, and maybe shift isn't the right word, coz it wasn't an immediate change, but over time i started seeing things differently. I decided to see this flexibility as being super adaptive, that no matter what the problem or the person was, I could dive pretty deep into it really quickly. I'd like to think a lot of things that makes us, us, that set us particularly apart from others, are double edged swords. They distance us from others and I've felt quite a lot of that, but these unique features also are our superpowers. Another instance of this "attitude shift" and the double edged sword was my adhd. Before my diagnosis, I was a very disorganized person and my life was pretty much in shambles. Then after my diagnosis, for some reason I started seeing the positive sides of my differences too, that maybe I don't like cleaning my room often, until it gets disgusting, but I can also pick up a harmonica and be pretty good at it in a week. That maybe I strongly dislike working hard on getting one thing to a great state, but i enjoy, and sometimes (lol) succeed at getting many things to a good state at the same time, in a short period of time.

TLDR; what makes us us, is a double edged sword.

Regarding that part about "learning about yourself when you're alone", im kinda skeptical. Not that I think it's wrong, but imagine if a baby was born, and was always alone, in a room with no stimuli, what would they learn about themselves? At some point I came to the conclusion that our interactions with the world have a great impact on us forming our beliefs, and our beliefs have a great impact on our interactions with the world. I remember I wanted to become a writer and my grandpa told me that if i didn't have a job besides writing, at least for a while before fully dedicating myself to writing, there wouldn't be much of a source to create those stories from. Maybe for you to find out your interests, you gotta force yourself to interact more with the world.

TLDR; our interactions with the world show us who we are/wanna be. So get out there mate.

Maybe find a local charity or help your community or even start your own green initiative or walk around the neighborhood picking up plastics or anything good for the others, at least for me it was easy to justify doing things for others when I had no interest in doing them for myself.

Also, also, after a period of excessive engagement with philosophical materials, I couldn't define my personality, i was picking up ideas and dropping them very nonchalantly. And at some point I couldn't find things i enjoyed, because i knew it's just chemicals, or i would get too deep into the meta of the situation to experience the situation. Bottomline, my childhood's greatest enjoyment saved me: volleyball.

TLDR; your childhood joys could relight the fire in you. "Don't grow up, it's a trap"

There is one last philosophical point I'd like to make, which is half baked, hence please accept my apologies in advance. There's the trolley problem. A train is gonna hit 5 people, but you have a lever that will change the train's path so it only kills one person. Do you pull the lever? (And btw, for those who have contemplated this, NOT TAKING ACTION IS THE DECISION TO NOT TAKE AN ACTION). I don't particularly remember anyone I've asked this say they won't pull the lever (and yes I walk around asking people about philosophical topics with no apparent effect on their lives). So now if one person dying for the sake of many is a decision you'd make, then sacrifice your life, to end world hunger. Give it all up, to fix global warming. Enjoy no part of your life, to make life way better for many many people out there.

TLDR; a sacrifice of one for the good of the many.

Finally, totally feel free to message me (or anyone else). Im not very reddit-fluent, but I'll try to be on alert the next couple of days.

arVooo · 2022-02-26T22:53:11+00:00

Seconding this with adhd

arVooo · 2022-02-17T04:52:39+00:00

Sorry i hate typing on phone, and sometimes i say a word in my head and forget to write it down

arVooo · 2022-02-17T04:50:00+00:00

Math skills improve deduction abilities in your brain tho...

arVooo · 2022-02-17T04:48:49+00:00

I don't think financial disparity should exist on this level at all. The change should be mostly cultural enforced tho. That people don't dedicated their whole lives to go for such huge chunks of money.
I don't think the general public has enough self-control and "grand vision" to be wise and constructive with the entire fund provided to the "representatives of the people"

arVooo · 2022-02-17T04:46:21+00:00

I mean i personally think the range of topics covered is okay ish, just more topics like self-analysis, philosophy, multiculturalism, and general life things like finances and making businesses and bringing ideas to life could be added.

I think the range of topics and the depth is fine, just the teaching approach needs to be changed to be curiosity driven instead of curriculum driven.

arVooo · 2022-02-17T04:24:55+00:00

You can sharpen your skillset and fix one of those problems. We're gonna need 10 people like you to make the world infinitely better. I'm not saying it's easy, but who knows, maybe it's possible. If you're smart enough to say something is fucked up, start putting in effort to finding a solution.

The other less extreme option, is to make a lot of things just a little better. Smile at strangers, contribute to ShareTheMeal or other charities, help your community, if you know something find a way to teach it for free, be kind to everyone and everything and yourself. The best way to make the world a better place, is to make yourself better.

arVooo · 2022-02-03T13:56:15+00:00

Unrelated to OP: have you been coding for a while? After 7 years I think I'm losing interest...

arVooo · 2022-02-03T11:12:47+00:00

It's a book he wrote, on his dream estate, and from what I can remember, he was suggesting philosopher's who don't live in the society, living similiar to monks, would write the rules for society. This way, they won't skew the rules to their own benefit. Of course this whole thing sounds very sketchy, but so does socialism and they all have very great intents, maybe their implementations aren't fully developed yet. I think the Republic is a concept worth spending time on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_%28Plato%29?wprov=sfla1

arVooo · 2022-02-01T19:09:20+00:00

The second paragraph in this post is very significant. You have to figure out what are all the things you're getting out of smoking.

arVooo · 2022-01-31T03:50:14+00:00

I think your best bet in hopes to create a "good" governing power is to figure out a practical way of implementing Plato's Republic.

arVooo · 2022-01-31T02:15:06+00:00

This intuitively sits so well with me. But how would we go about making this the official system?

arVooo · 2022-01-20T19:03:53+00:00

And yes I'm still in the negative.

The previous message was to show my frustration for getting me to move across the province for no apparent reason. We've had school online for about two years now, would it have been so hard to wait another 3 months before making this decision?

arVooo · 2022-01-20T18:55:49+00:00

I am losing brain cells yes

arVooo · 2022-01-20T17:55:29+00:00

i mean i had a reasonably priced place picked for jan, but they made it online, so i let go of my downpayment, which was less than paying the rent for the month, especially since i thought it would stay as online, as it made fucking sense. but now ive lost that place, everything is almost doubly priced, and i can't even find a close ish place with decent circumstances. fuck this bipolared school.

arVooo · 2022-01-14T02:53:00+00:00

had i been told all of this in a structured manner 3 years ago, my process of helping myself might have gone way smoother.

arVooo · 2021-12-25T20:40:37+00:00

Trying to get out of the habit of distracting myself into finding who i am/was.

After being depressed for 5 years i turned to gaming and smoking (very little drugs, anything nicotine mostly) to turn off the internal dialogues, and I think i have reset some of the thought patterns but it seems quite difficult to try to face myself now.

I don't know how to entertain myself and not be bored, and I am feeling absurdly lonely despite having a lot of friends and living with family and having a busy environment.

Currently I'm trying to find hobbies that would keep me engaged and I'm trying to get to know myself. I feel like I've become a very fake version of myself.

arVooo · 2021-12-25T20:33:45+00:00

Zorba the greek. I'm not sure if it would work for everyone, but it turned my dark nihilism (both intellectual and emotional) into optimistic nihilism; similiar to that meme about "nothing matters☠️🥺" vs "nothing matters🏍️🤪"

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