The last impactful one on me was Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
Definitely disrupted my perspective on work and the monotonous, sometimes futile, insanity that some of us subject ourselves to in order to make a living.
1. Resume seeing the world. I haven't taken a trip abroad since the tail end of 2019.
2. Cultivate a mutual and meaningful friendship with someone. A non-existent social circle and approaching my fourth decade doesn't make this any easier.
I've had not one but two turbinate resections, each time with a different ENT. From memory, neither had even bothered to really stress some of the risks others have pointed out.
I think my quality of life improved rather substantially after the first I had. To my disappointment, it didn't last. This eventually prompted me to seek out another several years later. Again, some improvement, but this time that time window was even shorter.
I'm now at the point where I've given up and just learned to live with feeling of being completely blocked through one nostril. It's frustrating.
I find the feeling affects me most when sleeping (I've tried CPAP to get restful sleep without much success) and during heavy aerobic exercise (having to constantly blow out mucous build-up as I'm running).
> Notice subtle changes in behavior: the most useful hint here is when someone who used to be very vocal about an issue stops complaining.
This point resonated greatly with my own observations, both of myself and of other colleagues with each development team I've been part of.
I think another challenge is fostering a culture where everybody genuinely cares about the output that's delivered. Not everybody will. Some people are comfortable moving tickets from triage through to a resolved state day in, day out without caring whether this process or the output can be improved.
One of my previous stints was with a small team that was building a cloud-based payroll and HR platform for the Australian market (potentially going abroad as well). It definitely opened my eyes to how complicated award rules can be.
I also remember testing being a challenge, particularly when things like multiple backpays, accruals, or one off adjustments were involved.
There was also an integration API, but I didn't stick around long enough to see it evolve enough for widespread third-party adoption.
It looks like `.git/refs/remotes/origin/HEAD` doesn't exist, which might explain why a fresh clone results in a detached HEAD (i.e. Git should default to being on the branch referenced by this entry).
As for how you can end up in such a state on the remote, I'd actually be interested to know too.
D3 for work, and Russian out of pure (seemingly masochistic) interest.
I'm a native English speaker and Russian would be my fourth language. Perhaps I'm simply approaching the limits of my language ability, but the grammar rules with cases that I've learnt so far are doing my head in. It's very discouraging. I don't intend on becoming completely fluent, and so I'm trying to find shortcuts to be fuzzy about the volume of grammar rules to keep in mind.
I'm also learning Russian at the moment! I'm a native English speaker and am presently dealing with the current global events while cooped up in Siberia.
What have you found difficult? What resources are you using? For me, I tried memorizing the rules for cases, but it was a complete waste of time: it was trivia disconnected from any usage of the language. What is (slowly) working for me is focusing on a single phrase with common words (e.g. в сибири, два пива).
Aside from the obvious resources (a good app/textbook; Anki), I have really learned a lot of the fiddly bits from this YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/russiangrammar
Thank you for sharing your experiences and the YouTube channel recommendation.
I've been alternating between the interactive lessons on http://learnrussian.rt.com/ and "The New Penguin Russian Course". I've been enjoying the former a lot more because there's audio to accompany written content, which helps when I try to enunciate words. There are also tests, which helps me measure retention. The latter book feels more like dry reading to me, but coverage seems very comprehensive.
I haven't been learning for all that long, but the two things that have been regularly catching me out are:
- Knowing which "o" letters in the word are stressed, in order to pronounce it correctly (I default to reading them as "o" when they should instead be "a")
- Looking up new words in sentences is a bit harder because they often occur in conjugated forms (i.e. not only verbs, but nouns too)
Cool! There's an easy tip for "o": If it's in the dictionary as о́ then it's the stressed syllable and you say the "o", otherwise it's "a". Example word: о́вощи, the first "o" is stressed. You should include the accent mark on any flashcards you make, since it can literally change the word you are saying (сто́ит, стои́т).
In my experience, the unstressed "o" as "a" is only mostly true and varies by region. This is especially true for unstressed "o" preceding the stressed vowel.
For example, "молоко" is pronounced differently in different parts of the country. For me, the first "o" sounds more like a "ə" (think bOOk) around Moscow, and more like "a" further east.
So you actually find it difficult? I am a native Russian speaker and have also taken 3 quarters of Russian in college. Compared to English I found the grammar much easier to understand. A word is read exactly how you would sound out each letter (with a few exceptions). Ukrainian grammar is even more simple.
RE: "word is read exactly how you would sound out each letter (with a few exceptions)" nah, you write "короче", but you should say "кароче", write "остовайтесь" but read "аставайтесь" etc. otherwise you'll sound funny. Russian has a lot of exceptions.
I have no difficulty pointing out the exceptions to strict "read-as-written" in Russian, but it is definitely much more consistent than English. The cases are totally foreign to an English speaker, though. I also find the variety of Russian motion verbs to be a hurdle.
Alas, I'm in a similar situation with my current stint and looking for an exit.
The most maddening part for me is to literally sit around helpless and unable to do any development because you need to wait for your IT support ticket to be looked at. Then having to explain to your manager why work is behind schedule.
However, idle time alone doesn't seem like strong enough reason to open discussion on changing IT policies.
> I don't know if I'll ever be able to master any language anymore
Even with just a handful of languages in my toolbox, I feel this way too. A mixture of unease and anxiety.
In addition to syntactic variations, I find that the notion of writing idiomatic code in a given language amounts to more thinking overhead which eats into productivity. I'd need to be programming in the same language over a long period of time for idiomatic code to come more naturally. Can't seem to just instantly switch like some talented folk out there.
I run into the idiomatic, or even "regional dialect", issue all the time. I've had many coworkers look at me like I'm stupid when I ask them how they like to implement a certain, basic algorithm. It's not that I don't know how to get it done, I'm just wondering how they like to structure their code, as I find it more important to match style than impose my own, generally speaking.
If I don't have to match styles, and can just write the code as I feel like it, I can work so much faster.
I don't care so much about writing idiomatic code anymore. For example I tend to write python like javascript. Mostly only use lists and dicts (JSON basically), while ditching the whole OOP/class concepts for the most part. What I prefer is more or less a language-independent style, which makes it easy to port code at least between languages with similar paradigms.
> For example I tend to write python like javascript. Mostly only use lists and dicts (JSON basically), while ditching the whole OOP/class concepts for the most part.
that is exactly how you are supposed to write idiomatic python
I share the sentiment about the amazing scores that many JRPGs come with. They really do help with the immersion.
Of somewhat recent JRPGs, I found NieR:Automata to be a superb masterpiece, both in the musical compositions led by Keichii Okabe and the underlying themes explored within the game itself.
Definitely disrupted my perspective on work and the monotonous, sometimes futile, insanity that some of us subject ourselves to in order to make a living.