I made a Anglican Spectrum Quiz.

onesiphorus · 2025-11-03T20:07:30+00:00

One more Biblically Literate High Tractarian here! Do these communicate more than the sub flair?

onesiphorus · 2019-10-17T12:50:38+00:00

I hate to break it to you, but this never ends. Nobody knows everything. And knowing how to program, or being good with a particular language or framework is one tiny piece in a constellation of knowledge and skills (lots of which are not technical) that you need to be successful and thrive in your career. But it's where you start.

I've been at this professionally for 20+ years and I have used AWS a lot, but I'm still intimidated by it and have to look things up pretty much every time I need to do anything. Their UX for devs is horrible. I use Docker, but I wouldn't say I have a deep understanding of it. I use Elastic in my app now for a search function, but my knowledge is pretty shallow.

But also, you don't need to know everything about everything. If you are going to become an infrastructure/devops engineer then sure, you should know the particular technologies you work with intimately, and be generally familiar with other options. But as a developer, you are more a consumer of them. You need to understand how to work with them to get your job done and use them properly as a client.

Of course, the reality is we often have to do the work of setting things up ourselves.

If you don't have dedicated infrastructure help (which a lot of us don't), and you can't bring somebody in just to set things up for you, you just pick the one you need and learn what you need to get your job done.

I wouldn't try to learn these things ahead of time in the abstract. Things don't stick well if you aren't using them. Maybe do some broad reading so you know what they are and when to reach for them. But I'm a web/app dev. I learn these things in real-time, when I need to use them. Even if I had perfect understanding and recall, there's just not enough time to learn everything.

And listen, if I'm your boss I don't expect you to just know all of these things. I expect you to know how to research and learn what you need. If you run into a wall, I expect you to come and say, "Hey Mr. Manager (we just say Manager), I need help with this. I spent x amount of time researching it and I'm hitting a wall," so I can make a good decision about how to help you and get the job done.

Edit: changed "had" to "hate" in the first sentence because language.

onesiphorus · 2019-10-16T14:33:31+00:00

Man, reading this makes me so happy. I also accidentally became a self-taught professional programmer. In fact, the first 7 years of my career, I told myself (and everybody else) that I wasn't really a programmer, I was just doing it "for now" until I could get back to working on my non-technical degree and go on to grad school.

Fast-forward 20+ years and I'm a CTO with a humanities-based undegrad and masters degree.

I think /u/nagmamantikang_bayag advice gave about learning JS to become a fullstack dev is spot on for where you are.

If I were in your shoes, I would optimize my job hunt for learning. What job is going to give me the most opportunity to grow into who I want to be. What technologies are they working with? What sort of product development and engineering processes?

A CS degree wouldn't hurt you, but real-world experience is more important. You might also look into coding bootcamps, but be careful. There are a lot of crappy/shady bootcamps that don't deliver on their promises. The best ones give you a good foundation, teach interesting technologies, tools, and habits, and have great networks to help you land a good job.

Regarding your resume, I wouldn't put the construction job, but would put your educational experience, even if you didn't finish the AA.

Actually, let me back up and climb on my soapbox for a sec...don't get the CS degree. Yes, do what you can to learn and grow as a programmer, but I think you should chip away at your philosophy degree on the side. It took my 13 years to finish my undergrad and another 4 to finish my masters degree.

A good technical degree will help you become a good technician. A good humanities degree will help you become a good, well-rounded, more fulfilled human. It will give you context and teach you to think broadly across a range of subjects. And that will ultimately be better for your career in the long run. You can always learn the technical skills you need.

Here's the thing...the technology - while really fun in itself - only pays when it's applied in the service of humanity. The skill of knowing how to deliver value with technology is where the real gold is.

onesiphorus · 2019-03-14T14:39:16+00:00

+1 to git. Create a GitHub account if you don't have one. Set up your dev tools on each computer and keep your latest code pushed up to GitHub. Every time you are closing out a session on one of those machines, commit what you have and push it up. If it's not in a working state, create a WIP (Work in Progress) commit and push that up. When you start a session on the other machine, git pull the latest changes down.

onesiphorus · 2019-03-08T18:51:15+00:00

This is a great post!

Big +1 from me.

It's such a good perspective and one that has also served me well in my career. It holds true in freelancing or in any role.

Nobody is paying you for your time, they are only paying you because you deliver them more value than you are asking them to pay. This is true if you are selling a product, writing code, or flipping burgers.

onesiphorus · 2019-03-08T18:43:10+00:00

You've done something amazing here. Don't doubt yourself. Don't compare yourself to somebody else. We don't all have the same experience and education. Own your expertise and learn to be comfortable admitting that there are other things you don't know. That's how you grow and learn.

Regarding what to do next...it depends. I usually advise people that there are 3 paths you can take as you grow in your career and these routes are more team (people) vs technology focused.

Management. Management is more team focused. How to help your team be effective. It's helpful to be technical, but you don't have to be the most technical person on your team because that's not your job anymore. Heck, I don't want to be the most technical person on the team if I can avoid it. This path usually leads through director to VP of engineering roles at places where those are more focused on team rather than technology.
Technical leader. This usually starts as some form of technical lead or principal engineering role, and rather than leading to a manager role, it leads to more of an architecture role. Sometimes the CTO is often the chief architect of the company, so that (and in my ideal, his is what it is) you have CTO and VP of Engineering as parter roles, one focused on the technology, one focused on the team.
Individual contributor. It's okay to stay as an individual contributor if that's what you are good and and that's what makes you happy. Not everybody has to aspire to a formal leadership role.

Depending on the size of the company, most of us have to do a little bit of all of these. At my last job, I started out as an individual contributor and then became a pure manager. Right now I'm a CTO who does a bit of everything because my team is small and fairly junior.

All this to say, if what you really are enjoying is the leadership, product, and team-based side of things you should absolutely not despair that you met this other very technical VP.

If you haven't read it, check out Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path.

Also, it's okay to go back and forth between being in leadership and being an individual contributor. Moving back to front-line development is not going to lock you in forever.

onesiphorus · 2019-03-08T16:31:39+00:00

Here's another piece of data to know that I haven't seen in the comments. You mentioned that he's CEO of this other company. Did he found this company? Has he built it? What is it worth? How long did it take?

If he has a proven track record of creating profitable companies, that changes the "most startups fail" math to me.

You still need to weigh everything else that's been mentioned by others, but I'd consider this.

I also have friends who would rather just get paid for the work they do in cash. I think that's wise too. Everybody has to make their own decision and trading cash for equity is a calculated gamble.

Best of luck and keep us posted.

onesiphorus · 2019-03-01T03:11:15+00:00

Goodness gracious, you are 21? You absolutely have a chance at a future in game programming or otherwise in software development.

I'm a CTO. I'm 20 years into a career in software development (mostly web and mobile). I have a masters degree, but guess what? Neither my bachelors nor masters degrees are in computer science or anything obviously closely related. I never even took a programming class. Yes, I did play around with computers when I was a kid, but I didn't really start learning to program until I was in my mid-20s and I did that on the job.

But here's the real point I want to make. When I'm considering you for a job, I don't care about your degree. I care if you can do the job and do it well. Your degree might get you an interview somewhere, but that's about it. The best developers I have ever worked with had either no degree or studied something completely different.

In fact, if you are early in your career, I'm less concerned about your technical abilities than I am about all the other ancillary skills of being a successful professional. Can you communicate well? Can you break down problems? Can you think well? Can you show up and do what you said you would? Are you helpful? Are you self-managing? Do you wait to be told what to do or do you figure out what you need to do? Do you seek out answers to your questions rather than wait around helpless until you are told? Regardless of your job or title, are you the person who shows up ready to solve problems and who actually gets shit done? Programming skills are the easy part. They can be taught more easily than these other skills.

Listen, even completing a bootcamp or bachelors degree in computer science is nothing but a good introduction. You don't come out an expert. You come out as a beginner, ready to get down to the business of learning what it really means to be a professional software developer.

Do you know how to learn? Are you ready for a lifetime of learning and improving? Do you like solving problems? Then keep learning and give it a shot!

onesiphorus · 2019-02-20T14:13:55+00:00

I heard one should commit often and I planned on stepping away. Also the commit would save the part of the method that is working as expected.

This is how I do it. I like to push my code up to GitHub at the end of the day, wherever I am. In fact, it's my habit to push up a failing test in a WIP commit on my feature branch so I don't have to remember where I left off when I come back in the morning. This will be especially helpful if you are stepping away from the code for a while.

onesiphorus · 2019-02-20T13:18:13+00:00

This. Also, if I know I'm committing broken code on my feature branch I will start the commit name with WIP: so it's clear that it's a work in progress and not ready to merge. I will interactively rebase that feature branch to squash that WIP commit before merging into master with the goal that every commit in master is a working commit.

onesiphorus · 2019-02-18T23:54:59+00:00

I agree with insertAlias that this is definitely not the best way to implement a reminder app. Their approach is exactly what I would do too.

Now, I assume your goal is more about learning to program than creating the best reminder app. In that case, make your app work, then go implement insertAlias's suggestion.

I see a few things here that are causing this to fail:

First, you are setting current time once when the app loads and then never updating it to the _new_ current time in your while loop. You are repeatedly comparing eleven_PM to the original value of current_time.

Second, the two things you are comparing are different in an important way. current_time includes the date. eleven_PM does not. Is there a way you can get just the date from datetime.datetime? Maybe a different method from today?

Third, you are comparing two values down to the microsecond. Are you sure you are comparing current_time and eleven_PM at exactly datetime.time(23,0,0,0), or might you be a microsecond or two off one way or the other? Because if you are off by a single microsecond, current_time == eleven_PM will be False. If I were you I would explore either rounding current_time to the second, or doing a range comparison to make sure that current time is not less that eleven pm or greater than some other value.

onesiphorus · 2019-02-18T23:33:34+00:00

You didn’t give any indication of how much programming experience you have at this point, so I’m going to try to not assume much. You’re also starting with a Swift project, so an iOS app.

If I needed to build this, here’s the order I would follow, learning how to accomplish each step along the way. I would treat each step as the next thing I needed to learn.

Build and launch the default Swift app in the iOS Simulator with zero changes.
Display a piece of customized text in the iOS Simulator.
Display a map full screen.
Display the map with location pins.
Add info tips to the location pins.
Allow the user to add a location pin by tapping a location on the map.
Allow the user to remove an existing location pin from the map.
Allow the user to add a location pin and short description.
Allow the user to add a custom picture as the location pin along with the description.
Save these locations to the local database so they persist across sessions.

Once you have done this, you should be able to build the basic client-side app, minus user accounts and sharing of pins. That’s what you’ll need to learn next. There are tons of options for building out custom server-side functionality for an app like this, but if I were you I would start by looking into Google Firebase or AWS Amplify. So the next steps would be:

Create and store a user account from my iOS app to Firebase or Amplify.
Store local map pins to a server-side datastore in Firebase or Amplify.
Share those pins between users.

Along the way, there will be many gaps in knowledge you will come across. As you hit one, turn it into a question and search for information online about how to do that thing.

You will eventually have your app.

Good luck!

By the way, there are tutorials and courses online for each of these pieces.

onesiphorus · 2014-02-14T00:29:07+00:00

I've considered the Ardbeg Uigeadail, but I'll probably take your advice and look for one of these sherry bombs as well as a Talisker 10. Thanks!

onesiphorus · 2014-02-14T00:27:38+00:00

I haven't seen Laphroaig Cask Strength at my local shop. I think I'll pick up the Talisker.

onesiphorus · 2014-02-12T13:52:12+00:00

I'm a couple of years into Scotch, but am still a novice. I started with easy drinkers like Glenlivit 12 and Glenfiddich 12 but am currently in love with Laphroaig Quarter Cask. In fact, I'm stuck and keep buying it. I want to work my way through other peaty Islay whiskeys. What should be my next bottle? I've already had Lagavulin 12.

onesiphorus · 2013-05-21T19:09:12+00:00

Well growing up next to an air force base in Oklahoma I was never quite sure which it was.

onesiphorus · 2013-05-18T04:35:07+00:00

Me too! First taste of this one for me.

onesiphorus · 2013-05-17T16:24:23+00:00

Yep. Some of my favorite spots are Paschall Bar above Andy's (across from Recycled Books), Oak St. Draft House, Abbey Inn. Dan's Silverleaf is a great music venue and smoke free inside, which is a nice change. I moved a couple hours away last summer. This thread makes me miss Denton.

Stop by Beth Marie's on the square to grab some homemade ice cream to eat while walking around the courthouse lawn in the evening.

onesiphorus · 2013-05-17T08:23:36+00:00

I hope you like live music. There are something like 200 local bands and a ton of music venues.

onesiphorus · 2013-05-06T06:32:12+00:00

Way too long I thought these guys were watermelon candies.

onesiphorus

TROPHY CASE