brw12

A book I think is crucial is Creativity, Inc. (the Pixar book). The most important piece of its perspective, I think, is the idea that managers can screw things up in a bajillion ways, and that it takes consistent work and focus to create an environment where people WANT to bring up problems, WANT to bring in ideas, and WANT to do their best work.

Another valuable book is Moral Mazes -- it's a tough read, but the takeaway is that managers are almost universally insecure, like INSANELY insecure, because they don't really produce something tangible, they produce the feeling of stability and predictably and (most important) loyalty in THEIR managers, and how the heck do you measure that? They're always one misunderstanding or failure to anticipate a problem or to quell some fussing away from being fired, or shut out of promotion. They exist in a terrifying state of status uncertainty. If they're not careful -- like REALLY, REALLY, affirmatively, pro-actively careful -- they'll create an environment where the people under them, who have front-line knowledge to bring, will suppress problems and avoid difficult conversations because they'll know how upset their manager will get. This can be incredibly costly. A good manager has to be brave, not just for themselves, but for those under them who need bravery to speak up. And that manager needs to go to bat every single time someone under them is right -- even if it costs the manager their job.

Of course, few managers understand this advice or have the slightest spine to stand up for what they (internally think they) believe in. It's much more common to find managers who deal with "the wrong person" under them having a good point (and feeling embarassed, or worried that a superior will feel embarassed) by covering for it by getting angry.

I really liked this -- it's so true about my road to programming (pseudo-) expertise. Almost everything I've been paid to do, I first did on a hobby level, just messing around with my own projects and ideas.

[I was an engineer at Scratch for 4 years]

My suggestion is to try using the contact form again. Sorry that isn't more helpful.

What is "Three"?

Pretty sweet. Eventually DOOM crashed but man what that fun. Bravo

Wow, I've never felt so seen by an essay.

I'm a dedicated Evernote user. I add just about everything I generate or want to record to Evernote, in one big "notebook", and then I extensively use tagging to make sure everything is findable. I try to use every tag I might ever search for, for which this note would be relevant.

Sometimes I add content to existing notes, if they are relevant and include the same family of concepts. I often merge notes; e.g., I save all my tweets to Evernote via IFTTT, and then merge all of them for each given month.

I often add notes with no tagging at all, and I have a shortcut to search for notes with no tags, as a sort of inbox.

The ability to search everything at once is the key: I can search "movies" or "startup" or "medicine" and find everything with those tags, or those words in the title or text, or even in PDFs. (I use a Fuji ScanSnap to scan documents into Evernote, with fully searchable text.)

The biggest feature I wish for is transcription of voice notes or audio files, so the content would be searchable.

Evernote's Mac app is notoriously slow, but it's gotten better over the years. I still don't understand why they can't make it as fast as the web app.

I'm a huge skeptic of no-code among my friends and colleagues.

But seeing how pretty much everyone else here is also expressing skepticism, let me play devil's advocate.

I recognize that the utopian promise of no-code is nonsense. There will always be feature demands that violate the "on-rails" nature of the environment, and either require supplementary code, or require waiting for the platform's coders to code up support, or require rebuilding the application from the ground-up.

That said, there are all sorts of applications that really are so narrow that an existing GUI can accommodate them. Other posters here have called out Excel/Sheets as an example; Wordpress, Squarespace and WYSIWYG web page editors are another. As a coder, I always feel frustrated by WYSIWYG interfaces' side effects, limitations, and inevitable bugs, but people do use them all the time, productively.

Of course, both web editors and spreadsheets do involve the ability to write code! It's just that the code's role is very narrow and limited to a small expressive range (CSS, say, or various SUMs and HLOOKUPs).

When the domain is relatively narrow and its boundaries are pretty clear, no-code can be wonderful. The real question, right now, is whether applications that are innovative can be built using "no-code" tools that necessarily assume all sorts of limitations.

I have seen some clever and impressive uses of, say, Airtable + Zapier + Typeform. That sort of "API-weaving" seems to me the most promising direction for no-code. I'm more skeptical of the projects, like bubble.io, which try to be a sort of Photoshop-for-building-applications.

I largely disagree with this article, but it is informative and decently reasoned. I think the author is haphazard and inconsistent with where they apply their imagination: fantastically generously when it comes to the police who killed George Floyd, and not at all when it comes to appreciating how much of a difference there may be between how police treat those they value vs. those they don't.

From my own 4 years' experience, I echo what zenpaul said, and would add:

* Understand who your client is, and stop and check in if they change. I once had a manager at a client company change mid-project, and the politics (and sense of trust) completely reversed -- in retrospect, I should have insisted that we start the relationship over, clarify expectations, etc.

* It's not always a good idea to agree to disagree. I estimated one sub-project would take 3 weeks, and a client insisted it should take more like one; we decided to proceed, it took 3 weeks, and the client was unhappy. Looking back, I think we should have more seriously considered dropping the project if we couldn't agree on expectations. This can be proposed gently and respectfully: if you don't think that plan is worth it, I'm happy to do my best to help you find someone else.