culebron21

Learn to say "no". It's freaking easy.

I do have a smartphone, and every time someone asks me to install something on it, or ask for my phone number for "accumulating bonuses", I say simple and dry "no" looking into their eyes. When there's a queue behind me, they'll just show loading icon on their face a couple of seconds, and then proceed, because of pressure.

Otherwise, when there are no more people, they feel like wasting their and my time, I just stare harder in their eyes, and they feel ill at ease and back up rather quickly.

Leroy Merlin cuts particle boards and laminates the end faces for you, at any arbitrary dimensions (rectangular though). You pick the boards, make the order for cutting with the staff, leave the carriage with the boards, and in 15 minutes they're ready. All you have to do at home is drill and screw the boards together, add hinges etc. (You'll need a drill director for precision.) So this is doable without any home workshop. I myself made couple of lockers this way.

One example where IKEA hacking wouldn't have helped: I needed a thin (20cm) and short (80cm) locker for the bathroom. Ikea had nothing close to this -- at least 30cm thick and 1.5m tall. So, I searched Leroy Merlin catalogue fr the most suitable door facades (they weigh twice less than particle boards of the same size) -- and designed the locker around them. We've been using it for 2.5 years.

At Leroy Merlin, you can order either particle boards, or normal wood boards, whether 16mm for walls, or 30mm for the table top, cut to your sizes (as long as they're rectangular), with end faces laminated as well, and all of that at a fraction of the price.

I had a broken cupboard in a rented apartment, and just built a new replacement one for €15. The bureau in the article could cost 2x..3x of this, which is still lower than overpriced IKEA furniture. (Good furniture, that isn't made of cardboard, is overpriced in IKEA.)

I think the post has kinda contradictory parts. The beginning says that a requirement of formal training, like in medicine or architecture, or transport planning, is desirable.

But then a number of examples are given, that suggest that degrees are orthogonal to skills and promotion, and instead being aggressive promotes better than excellency.

So how a compulsory degree would fix this corrupted promotion mechanism?

I remember in 1999 reading some tech executive (with tech education, I guess) complain, like "I'd like to make executive financial reporting, but not like this horrendous and too complicated accounting". Then he proceeded with ideas. Well, the thing is that all our terms we use are lines from summarized accounting balance sheet, from either assets side, or liabilities. And if you detach them from the rest, the list of figures won't make any sense. I learned that studying accounting in the uni.

Also what I learned back then was that accounting was invented for the same purpose the blockchain: to make fraud in the workplace very hard.

I remember engineers reinvent geospatial technologies, avoiding such thing as map projections, and in the end still came to them.

I see only a grey rectangle and a hand cursor.

Great read. I wish it loaded faster, without the retina resolution images.

That's why I do all DIY myself, incliding plumbing or electrics. Craftsmen cost money and they try to finish in one session, so they do lots of compromises.

Examples: under a sink, there were two 2m-long supply hoses, where 40cm would be enough, convoluted in a double loop together, to spare a visit to a DIY store. Or dowels made to be driven by hammer, for plastic baseboards, used to hang a cupboard (almost fell out). Or a too long corrugated plastic tube making a virage and another, unnecessary, water seal, and impeding outflux -- also to spare a visit to a store.

This is about the journalism that is serious. That tells stories, reports, and goes deep into subjects.

My impression is that most media today is nowhere near this. They're just cheap dopamine source, containing only "news", not any serious discussion.

"This ____ grills ______ on his comments about __________." -- this is typical American title, but in other countries this sort of news is abundant, and differs only in wording, not the essence.

A local media news: Lebron James died in a crash. Which happened at the other side of the world in another country, nothing to do with the place itself. Because the media is owned by a holding company, and metrics are measured and aggressively optimized.

Trump became a source of cheap dopamine for every non-serious media in the world. "American president said that X. <insert your tongque in cheek/sarcastic/caustic comment>".

"Traffic jams in city X reached level 9!" (screenshot of a mobile map with traffic layer)

I must say that already in the early 2000s web developers were tired of hand-coding everything, and many sought some sort of automation -- a framework, a CMS. Already in 2004 I made a site with barebone approach -- put a txt in a diretory tree and let PHP simply add tags instead of linebreaks and insert it into HTML. The alternative those days was a heavy content management systems. And I came to Django after two awful PHP frameworks, written by lead developers at the workplaces. So, frameworks like Django were a more gradual transition, and they were much more pleasant to work with.

Sure, as you pushed it further, like add versioning to objects, things got very tricky and not guaranteed to work, and no way to fix.

But otherwise, yes, the attitudes look similar.

I worked mostly on frontend in 2012-16, in plain HTML+CSS, and then quit, because React was required everywhere, and I tried and hated it.

But before React, I don't recall frontend as very inspiring and joyful.

It was fun to see your work immediately on the screen. I did apply skills and had to solve some weird situations. I could optimize our CSS with OOCSS approach (later used in Bootstrap) -- only to complaints -- semantics! too many classes! (my trump card was that their commits contained +200 lines of CSS, while mine mostly had 0 -- and our CSS was already bloated into several megabytes).

But this was a dead end. I tried making tools to find out unused styles, to automate some patterns -- like click a button and load some content over Ajax. But the guys, who copy-pasted code with dumb solution to this, got 2-3x more tickets closed. I proposed a tool to make screenshots of pages and diff them to search for regressions, but the response was it's heavy RnD, we're not a research institute, we got to ship the next popup tomorrow, etc.

Nobody gave a shit much earlier.