I developed an RSI a few years ago, and I had to leave my job. It was devastating to lose both my career and my passion to an injury.
Since then, I've been working with a friend on a new voice coding app called Serenade [1] that aims to enable anyone to program by voice. With Serenade, you can speak natural English voice commands like "delete second function" and "add class person". Not only can this be faster than typing, but it also means you don't have to memorize the syntax details of every language or a bunch of editor keyboard shortcuts.
We found that cloud speech APIs and programs like Dragon weren't accurate enough for common programming words, so we built a custom speech engine (based on Kaldi [2]) that's designed specifically for coding. The app is still early, but we think the future of programming is working with these higher-level inputs rather than typing out code entirely by hand.
We're looking for people to give feedback, so if anyone is interested in giving it a try, you can download Serenade at [3] or email me at matt@serenade.ai.
I have this issue too, I think it also has to do a bit with cultural background sometimes.
I grew up in a hispanic family in a majority hispanic community, where my everyday conversation with people was people talking over each other. It was common to start making your point while the other person was still finishing theirs.
The difference is, because everyone did it, we would just keep talking, even if we were cut off, and finish our thought. The other person would hear it, while still talking, and the conversation continues naturally. If you were in a group, you had to go louder than the currently speaking person in order to "grab the baton" and get your word in (something I was often too quiet for).
This was my normal throughout childhood.
It was a culture shock when I went to college and eventually someone called me out for cutting people off all the time. It was then that I realized that now, when I cut someone off, they actually stopped talking.
I still struggle with this, because I reflexively expect people to not let me stop them.
Last defcon someone did a really interesting presentation on how to investigate the government or government officials. Talked about how to get a FOIA request responded to, where to look for information.
What really stuck with me though was a slide they offered towards the beginning. I don't have it memorized, but it was demonstrating a sort of "pyramid of public outrage" for certain actions. Sex with children was at the top as most likely to generate outrage, hypocrisy was at the bottom, and somewhere near the bottom was misappropriation of government funds.
The horseman serves the horse,
The neatherd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'T is the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
There are two laws discrete,
Not reconciled,--
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.
-- excerpt from "Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing" by Ralph Waldo Emerson
I take propranolol with ADHD medication to help negate some of the anxiety/raised heart rate effects.
I'm not sure if I've noticed a difference with anxiety while on it, other than the mitigation of anxiety from ADHD medication.
I guess I should try taking it alone.
That being said, a large part of my psychological issues are due to anxiety, but I haven't seen any treatments that have been compelling enough for me to try (SSRI's/benzos mainly).
I do exercise, try to be good about sleep, try to force myself to get out with friends or family every other week or so.
Additionally, I've noticed meditation to be a large help for me with anxiety. It took me a while to where I really notice the difference, but I've reached a point where I can say I notice if I've meditated the night before or not.
(I'm not advocating for or against any medication, individual situations vary, and people should consider treatment in the context of their situation with their doctor)
- z (Linux): https://github.com/rupa/z builds a database of every folder I ever go to on the command-line and uses fuzzy search to open the most likely folder when I give z any string argument. It's been such a huge improvement for my CLI workflow. I no longer need to traverse entire directories if I've been there before. I just need to enter the shortest possible part of the path that'll take me to my destination, often just a couple of characters.
- chocolatey (Windows): https://chocolatey.org/ Package manager for Windows which means I only rarely need to manually download and install programs anymore. I can even tell it to update all installed programs, which is a decent time saver.
I love this! I commented on this article about my own experience starting a "watch business" when it was originally posted about a year ago and it seemed to get a decent amount of votes and attention so I figure I'll re-post it below:
So a few years back I started a watch company in a similar way.
I think I was actually one of the first to do it, since when I started I couldn't find many competitors. I tried a million kinds of promotions, from "free, you just pay for shipping" to offering people discounts and referral codes.
I actually created my own watch designs (well, modifications of the face, case, and strap with the same Chinese movement.) Some of my improvements started to be used by the manufacturers.
I'm not at all invested in it anymore: I left the business after selling a substantial, but not massive number of watches and finding that it wasn't terribly profitable if you included the cost of advertising, shipping, and (most importantly) my own time.
My own "watch company" was more real in a few ways: watches that I did in fact design myself, shipped from my address in the US, and the quality of the watches was actually quite good. To this day I wear a watch from my company and it has held up to an incredible amount of abuse. I say this as someone who (used to) collect watches. I also was upfront about the cost of shipping and the watch itself - I might have, for example, a banner that says "Free 3-Day US Shipping" and then the price of the watch would be clearly labeled as $20, so people would know that they would only be paying a total of $20 for the watch. The prices varied a lot over time, from $10 to $40 per watch, but surprisingly my profit was never huge even though I only spent about $3 on the watch itself and $7 on shipping.
If anyone's curious about the whole thing (and lives in the Netherlands) I still have hundreds of these watches and I'd be happy to sit down over a coffee, tell my stories from the business and show the watches. (My email's in my profile.)
----
A few comments I'd like to add now, in 2018:
1) the watches (mine & that of other "companies") are of a surprisingly high quality in many cases. Not always, but often. For example, my watch has survived everything from bilge fluids to boiling water and it's the same cheap one I sold. Definitely far more durable than a comparable mechanical watch. I can see myself still using this thing 10+ years down the line. Furthermore, it actually does look classy and I get compliments on it. Most of the time, if you buy a cheap $3 Chinese alternative to something that's normally 10-1000x the price, it is neither beautiful nor durable.
2) The unexpectedly high quality of the watches is what fueled the explosion of sites IMO. You don't see "free earbuds", "free clock", or "free keyboard" sites, despite the fact that all 3 of these things are available for under $5 shipped from China. What I think happened is that people bought a watch on a whim, then it arrived and they realized "wow, this feels like a premium product!" Which it did! I was blown away when I first saw the quality level and instantly thought I should start a business. I suspect hundreds of other people had this same "eureka!" moment. When you get a $5 Aliexpress keyboard, it feels and looks like it cost $5 to make, and it excites nobody. Furthermore, Amazon makes a $13 keyboard with great reviews, and being Amazon it ships with Prime instead of "30-to-infinity day slow-boat-from-China shipping." Meanwhile, these watches felt like they cost at least $20 to make, and the only competitors for classy analog watches would be $50-100 or so, but they cost $3 (drop)shipped!
3) I highly doubt anyone made much money. When I started, dropshipping was not a thing the manufacturers offered (probably the reason why I was one of the first.) When manufacturers started offering dropshipping, these "businesses" exploded because you could suddenly run them entirely behind a laptop. The problem, of course, was that the number of such "companies" exploded, all competing for the same customers, Facebook ads, Google results, "underground marketing" spots, etc etc. That led to people getting a bit suspicious. If you saw one ad for a cool watch, maybe you were interested, but if you saw 20 in a week, all suspiciously similar, you'd think something's up.
I moved directly from Python to OCaml and I have to say, I’ve never been happier. Special shout outs to Jane Street, as their open source software is really solid and a pleasure to use. The community is small but really smart. Overall I think F# and OCaml really nailed the programming language design sweet spot of powerful and practical.
I remember Paul Graham gave a keynote at one of the Pycons some years ago. It was about interesting ideas that you might want to work on in the future.
One idea was to build a search engine that returns unpersonalized results. He talked about how Google will be moving into a "it's true, if it's true for you" kind of world. His idea was that it will open new opportunities. I think DuckDuckGo is one example, and they've grown and are doing pretty well. I think a lot of it comes as a reaction to Google, Facebook and other such things.
"It's true, if it's true for you" is also a great phrase worth remembering. It describes so much about the current world and where things are headed, and why some things seemed to have gone off rails.
That was an enjoyable read! I have also tried qutting my job as a developer, tried making money by working for myself (and focusing on developing features instead of actually making money, same as you), then returning to a "proper job" as an engineer. There were many recognizable moments in the blog post.
I once took a course in entrepreneurship, as a distraction from computer science, and the bottom line is that to make money you should first try to find someone willing to hand you their money, and then put the effort into making the product or service. But, as a developer, it's soul-wrenching and just feels wrong to try to sell something before something proper has even been made. But I've seen it work many times, you just need sales people that are not afraid of making up products while they go, with both the profit and stress that follows.
I'm glad you found a good opportunity with an accelerator, good luck with the next adventure!
Like most marketplaces, they are only interested in making themselves profitable. Always remember that.
Working at freelancer.com or similar sites is saying:
"I should spend a large portion of my life to become an expert in my craft, and then I should agree to have my privacy stripped away from me while I race to the bottom and undercut my competition because I will actively place myself into situations where I have the highest competition to ensure I receive the lowest rates. Lastly, I will bust my butt and bend the world to satisfy clients who take advantage of me."
I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on.
That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.
The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist".
How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!"
When I was growing up, I moved around a ton because of my Dad's career. Between a bad stutter and the stigma of always being the new kid, making friends was never easy. But, I learned some amazing things about networking. Odd, isn't it, how some of the worst things that happen to us as kids turn out to be some of our greatest gifts as adults??
Here are some of the best things that I learned.
1.) Don't approach people who are standing alone; approach groups of two. Whenever you approach a group of two, there is a very good chance that at least one of the two want out of the conversation.
2.) Learn to smile whenever you see someone.
3.) If you smile at the same person twice, it is time to introduce yourself.
4.) You don't matter. Ask lots of questions and put the focus on the person who you are talking to.
5.) Proximity is very important. If you want to make friends in a hurry, learn to situate yourself in a place with a steady stream of people. Standing at a buffet table is a cliche because it works.
That's because spreadsheets are an excellent tool for prototyping, and developers have shitty tools for building robust products from a prototype.
If developers had a quick way to create properly engineered applications from a working workflow involving a spreadsheet, it would be easy to define most company processes on Excel or Google Docs and turn them into solid software.
But building an application that is functionally equal to the spreadsheet, just with robust engineering practices, typically involves several-months-long projects with many developers and managers, which is expensive.
There's a documentary called Workingman's Death about the worst jobs in the world: not in an amusing Mike Rowe way, but jobs that are backbreaking, pay a pittance and regularly kill in horrible ways. And there's no commentary, no soundtrack, just unstaged video footage, ambient sounds, and people talking about their jobs and why they do it.
The other episodes are worth watching too, particularly the Indonesian sulphur mine and the Nigerian butchery. The first of these is also a tourist attraction, and they film tourists doing it for kicks while the workers talk about seeing their friends make a single misstep, fall into a sulphur pit and boil to death in front of their eyes.
AddStructure is an NLP company, building the future of voice-driven commerce for some of the world's largest retailers. We pride ourselves in providing a great work/life balance, and if you're interested in the future of natural language technology, you'll love the problems we're solving. You can be onsite or remote but must be located in the domestic United States (no visa sponsorship available).
If interested, please email jobs@addstructure.com.
Currently seeking:
* UI/UX designer - creatives needed to help design the future of hybrid voice/visual interfaces
* Senior full-stack developer - significant experience with any of: Node, Java, C#, AWS, Postgresql
Have you read One Up on Wall Street, by Peter Lynch? He talks about using your feelings about a company's products as a component of investment decision-making. You may find it interesting.
Great perspective and I wholly agree, especially as a consistently oddball way of looking at the world. I've been fortunate to have a ridiculously large capacity for, uh, knowledge? Facts? Trivia? Stories? I'm an explorer and I like to break things because it's like crossing fences to find new worlds. What's back here?!
It's like my life is a never ending quest to fill a bucket that can never be full - but it's an enjoyable one!
The skill of breaking things down is also what I believe made me very successful as an "Proposal Coordinator" because an RFP is a big, intimidating, multi-section Hydra of tasks. Looks scary!
Then, piece by piece, the threads can be tugged at, finding which parts need what, who, when, why, and working backwards from a Deadline, it's a quite gratifying process.
Correlative: I frequently assert that Creativity can not be taught, because it is inherently Disobedient. It can be Nurtured, or Channeled, but it's not well-suited for rigorous, lock-step cultures.
Hi! I had serious problems from becoming gradually more sedentary through a desk job and less laborious lifestyle. I didn't have the same type of pain you describe, but I had some issues particular to my shape and proportions.
My life (as far as comfort, basic strength in daily movement, eliminating chronic back pain) was literally changed by Eric Goodman's Foundation Training. I simply cannot recommend it enough. Use the free stuff on YouTube for a while and see if it helps. If so, the DVDs have plenty of extra value.
I am not affiliated with Goodman or his company in any way.
This is kind of interesting as this weekend I randomly came across the history of &. It was once taught as the 27th letter of the alphabet and was read as "and". To make it clearer when reciting the alphabet, students were taught to say "X, Y, Z and per se and" for X, Y, Z, &. (per se in this case meaning by itself). Eventually "and per se and" became ampersand. :)
While I've personally incorporated an LLC for dealing with institutions that don't like doing business with individuals, I'm starting to think that anyone starting a new business should seriously consider making it a Public-benefit Corporation. It lets you define alternative motives for the company besides pure profit, essentially writing the flowery "mission statements" that most companies espouse right into the company charter.
It's much harder for an activist investor to demand more profits RIGHT NOW if you can point to your charter and say that you're focusing on your corporation's stated goals - maybe in Medium's case, that could be something like 'supporting quality citizen journalism throughout the world.'
I guess that might make your startup less appealing to VC initially, but I'm sure SV will happily put its money where its idealistic mouth is, right?
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics strikes again.
"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster." https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
Modafinil is on my list, I'm considering switching to it early next year to possibly replace adderall. If anybody is in a similar boat to me and is curious what my experience will be on it compared to adderall, I'll be publishing an extensive analysis on my blog, which is accessible through my user profile on this site.
Company: We are a small group of driven, ambitious individuals committed to changing the landscape of education. We work hard, eat well, and have lots of fun. We work at BenchPrep because we love it (plus benefits, competitive salary, perks etc).
We are looking for talented and motivated professionals who
are excited about the chance to leverage technology in order to impact the lives of millions of students. Our clients include ACT®, HRCI, Hobsons and many other educational companies.
Check out job description
AddStructure is a text analytics company developing cutting edge search and recommendation applications for some of the world's largest retailers. We pride ourselves in offering a great work/life balance, and if you're interested in the future of natural language technology, you'll love the problems we're solving. You can be onsite or remote but must be located in the domestic United States. If interested, please email jobs@addstructure.com.
Rails Machine | Site Reliability Engineer | Full-Time | Remote | Hiring Junior to Senior Levels
http://railsmachine.com
As a Site Reliability Engineer at Rails Machine, your primary goals will be to ensure our customer’s applications are available, fast, and secure. Our customers need the best service, support, and products, and we need you to help us deliver.
We offer two main products: managed infrastructure and managed operations. Through managed infrastructure, we provide automation, infrastructure, and scalability in our own data center on our own hardware. We provide both bare-metal and virtualized hosting options for our customers, and you’ll work directly with them to ensure their goals are met through automation, analysis, and hardware. And via managed operations, we provide custom, consulting-based solutions on top of any cloud vendor, as best meets the customer’s needs.
We give our customers the ability to reach out to us like they would an internal DevOps team!
You’ll work with virtualization and container technologies, and setup and automate high availability data clusters (MySQL Galera, PostgreSQL replication, Redis failover, ElasticSearch clustering, Memcached, MongoDB etc.). You'll manage application instances built with Ruby-on-Rails and Elixir/Phoenix (to name a few) and layer on top of those management, orchestration, monitoring, and alerting for fleets of instances. If you’ve ever wanted to work at a scale that few companies do, you’ll find the right challenge here at Rails Machine!
Responsibilities:
* Manage availability and performance problems for customers; automate resolution to prevent reoccurrence
* Pair with other SREs and Systems Administrators, mentor junior staff
* Releases and maintain open-source software and projects
* Author blog posts and participate in the community by going to meetups, conferences, etc. as a Rails Machine representative
* Creates and maintain system architecture, design, and implementation
Minimum Qualifications :
* Proficient in Ruby with additional experience in C/C++, Python, Elixir, Java, or JavaScript preferred
* Experience with config management or automation framework, like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Capistrano
* Experience maintaining production infrastructure on a Linux environment
* Intermediate Ubuntu system administration skills
* Strong DevOps experience and customer service skills
* Self Motivated and Diligent.
* Ability to participate in on-call/pager rotation
Interested? Tell us what you'll bring to the team by emailing us at hiring@railsmachine.com !
Since then, I've been working with a friend on a new voice coding app called Serenade [1] that aims to enable anyone to program by voice. With Serenade, you can speak natural English voice commands like "delete second function" and "add class person". Not only can this be faster than typing, but it also means you don't have to memorize the syntax details of every language or a bunch of editor keyboard shortcuts.
We found that cloud speech APIs and programs like Dragon weren't accurate enough for common programming words, so we built a custom speech engine (based on Kaldi [2]) that's designed specifically for coding. The app is still early, but we think the future of programming is working with these higher-level inputs rather than typing out code entirely by hand.
We're looking for people to give feedback, so if anyone is interested in giving it a try, you can download Serenade at [3] or email me at matt@serenade.ai.
[1] https://serenade.ai
[2] http://kaldi-asr.org
[3] https://serenade.ai/download