+1 to worrying less about what other people think of you. Ironically, this caring less can actually make people like you more (because you seem more confident).
How do you stop caring? I would give nearly anything for this superpower. Even obviously completely insignificant moments that matter to no-one can stick with me for days, and some stay with me for years, bubbling up and causing anxiety or low mood out of nowhere. No amount of rational analysis or forced positive thinking seems to help.
For me it was a combination of having achieved some amount of success (physical, financial, career) and also some humbling failure.
Basically I learned I'm not so bad, and I'm not a great man either. I'm good enough. I don't hurt other people.
I like myself, and when you genuinely like yourself then other people's opinions aren't quite as important. Nearly everyone responds positively when you aren't seeking other's approval (but are still kind).
I suspect this comes with age for a lot of people. Didn't happen for me until my 30s. Losing weight and getting into shape was a huge catalyst, I highly recommend it.
I'm sure some people don't like me. But they keep it to themselves. Even if they didn't, so what? Unless I did something to hurt them, I shouldn't be upset about it.
Great idea! Small feedback: one of the pianos listed for Minneapolis is in Concourse C at the airport. While this is, in fact, an actual piano, you have to go through security to play on it. So I'm not sure if this counts as a public piano?
Actually these are the best public pianos in my opinion - people often search for public pianos when they are traveling and travelers often enter/exit airports. Also the airport pianos are usually the best maintained.
Along those lines: this has happened exactly once in my life but man was it something, getting off a red eye at 6am and noticing a piano in the middle of the food court. Place was a ghost town except for the morning shift relieving the evening shift, a few food vendors setting up and us, the first arrival of the morning.
Guy a few feet ahead of me pauses, sits down, and unleashes a beautiful melody that stops everyone in their tracks.
There's an applause, he calmly gets up, and we all continue on our way.
That particular pianist, Paul Barton has a whole bunch of very nice renditions of various pieces, he lives in Thailand and seems to be a genuinely nice person as well based on the videos of him that I've watched. Two recommendations, the one is Bach's version of the adagio, the other the fugue part of 'Toccata and Fugue'.
And he is also a great painter and there is an awesome video of him painting a portrait of Josh Wright, who is a concert pianist that has lots of educational videos online.
One thing I love about watching Barton is that he has the hands of a mere mortal. So you can see how he accomplishes various reaches and fingerings if you don't have gargantuan piano hands.
Does anyone have advice for learning a rare language, like Icelandic? A lot of the advice in this and other articles assumes you're learning one of the popular languages that everyone wants to learn. While that's certainly a good thing, I think there's a lot of value in picking up these less common languages that give you more of a niche--but obviously that's something that's very hard to get started on.
I recently learned Hungarian in 24 months. It's a relatively rare language with very little in common with other languages. It takes most English speakers 5 years to learn. My advice: start using the language as soon as possible, use it in every context you can, get comfortable sounding like an idiot. You only need 5-10 words to start using a language, and each time you use it, you build your ability a bit more. Immerse yourself if possible, and if not, you can substitute immersion with apps like DuoLingo and connecting with social media accounts in your target language. A lot of the language I've learned, I've learned via Facebook chats. Use machine translation, and start chatting with people 24/7. Over time your reliance on machine translation will become less and less and you'll find yourself understanding things without it. I also like listening to rock in my target language, but if I'm honest, I don't think that taught me much, it just kept me motivated.
I think with something like Icelandic, your best bet is to find a teacher, be it online or in person.
Because Icelandic has a small population of speakers, and less of a global reach compared to languages like French, Mandarin, or English, there will be less easily available resources. It will also be very distinct. I don't believe Icelandic is a part of common language families, like a romance language, or a germanic language.
I think the only way to have a “niche” these days is to triangulate between two uncommon languages, but it will be one hell of a small niche. Like maybe knowing Icelandic and Farsi or something.
And as you said, Iceland is not the best example, since for all intents and purposes it’s an English speaking country.
Can I use supershields for an internal company metric to be displayed on a GitHub enterprise instance? I've tried using shields.io in the past for this and the API endpoint typically must be publicly accessible to make a metric button out of it.
There is a supershields Github app that you can install and then give access to one or more private Github repos. Then when you create Github badges on supershields.io you'll get the option to connect them with your private repo.
I live in Minneapolis too, and while I absolutely agree with you that Minneapolis is still a very safe city, there's no doubt that crime has gone up in the last year--for example, the murder rate in the Twin Cities has definitely gone up: https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2021/12/09/st-paul-h...
I think different companies view this differently. I recently did an interview with a social media company (not Facebook, one of the other ones) where I wrote up a solution to the problem that "just worked" in one go, as did my extensions. After the interview, when I asked for feedback, the interviewer told me that I should have been running and testing my code as we went along. However, I've also heard in mentoring sessions from engineers at other companies that the goal in interviews is to write code that works the first time without having to test along the way.
In general, I prefer the approach of writing out the entire solution at one go, and trusting that bugs will be easy to fix at the end if the code is clean enough to understand what is happening at every step. This is in part because there usually isn't enough time in interviews for running tests at every crux moment. However, I think our current virtual environment may make it easier to test for (and to utilize) these types of programming best practices, since instead of writing code on the whiteboard, candidates and companies can use one of the interview interfaces that allows running code as you write it.
> After the interview, when I asked for feedback, the interviewer told me that I should have been running and testing my code as we went along.
Have they specified that you should be testing your code? If they haven't specified then it is wrong to expect some kind of arbitrary outcome.
People write code in many different ways, some do it very chaotically, some have very organized process.
I try to figure out which of these behaviors are fundamental to writing good code and which are not.
For example, I believe a habit of writing readable code IS fundamental to writing good code. If you don't have a habit of writing readable code, on average your code is going to be worse than if you had.
On the other hand, I believe writing unit tests IS NOT fundamental. Unit tests is one possible way of working with the code, but people were writing reliable code before unit testing became popular. Unit testing takes time and effort that can be allocated differently.
And so I try to look (I can't call it measuring because it is subjective) only at the behaviors that I believe are fundamental and dismiss others.
In the end, if you are smart person that can program well, you will be able to learn those other behaviors. But if you are not smart or you lack certain fundamental abilities, it is going to be much more difficult to fix it.
I do an interview in which we do TDD on a problem together. So we are frequently running tests during the interview. However, one of the things that's expected from the candidate is that they will be able to predict what happens when we run tests. Will the tests pass? Will an exception be thrown? How will it fail?
Maybe as do often the difference in this discussion is a quantitative one not one in principle.
Wrt the comments about translations currently on the site: a lot of the newer translations standard in modern churches are under copyrights that, while quite permissive for use by individual faith-based organizations and even some commercial endeavors (like publishing), might be hard to protect in API form.
