Month: August 2020

Where Self-Taught Coders Fall Short and How to Avoid It

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While the “learn to code” movement has largely died out from mainstream attention, it’s still alive and well and influencing budding programmers all over. Development jobs offer the sweet prospect of a profitable, creative career which is purely based on merit and can propel anyone from broke to upper middle class in a few years. The scariest part is that it’s mostly true, but you can’t just learn to write code, you need to learn to program.… Read the rest

Launching Your First Product

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Launching Your First ProductI have really mixed feelings about project launches. It’s the culmination of many hours of blood, sweat, and tears, but once the product gets going, there’s still work to be done. Normally you get either one or the other, but what if you’re a startup? You have to learn to do everything and plan for the chaos that is launch.… Read the rest

The Software Development Cycle and How It Burns You Out

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The software development cycle is a pattern of inception and growth, growth and maturation, stagnation and decay, and then the cycle repeats… usually. Like most things, this is the ideal, but not necessarily a guarantee. Real life tends to love to distance from the ideal, so what really happens with this cycle?

The cycle may repeat, but you may not be on the next turn, you might get stuck in the maintenance cycle (which feels like it never ends).… Read the rest

Esoteric Daoism and the Rise of the Three Kingdoms in China

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First, a disclaimer, this is an armchair history piece. I’m going to cite Wikipedia a lot. What I’m citing agrees with what I previously learned in college and the multiple sources I’ve read about the subject if that’s any consolation.

The collapse of the Eastern Han into the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history wasn’t as much an “if” as much as a “when”.… Read the rest