dullroar

One that knocked me upside the head once was, upon remarking "That's going to take a long time, like a year" to accomplish something, as if that made it not worth doing, being told, "That time is going to pass anyway." In other words, you can either start working towards it now, and be in a better place in a year, or let that length of time discourage you and then, when next year rolls around, still be discouraged. So just start.

Back in the 1990s, when I was a software engineer at a database company in the Bay Area (rhymed with "PsyBass", if you pronounce "bass" as a musical instrument :), there was a joke among some of the architects along the lines of, "I DREW the boxes and arrows! If you can't implement it, that's you're fault!" Now, as a "software architect" in a really, really small shop, I basically just try and lead by example, and make sure my ideas work as code before inflicting them on anyone else. But that sorta sounds like keeping it all to myself until I am sure it works, per the article. I like to document (more than most), but have found over the years the only person who reads my documentation tends to be me. So writing docs or writing code, either way, tends to help me refine my ideas.

dotnet interactive (aka Jupyter notebook with a C# kernel). Been using it along with XPlot.Plotly to chart various CV datasets from JHU, the NYT, etc,

I am old (I have seen things). I still have my first program from college, in FORTRAN, on a card deck. I also worked as a "computer operator" (an extinct species) while going to college, putting card decks in the readers, running decks that were output from the punches through "interpreters" (which printed the characters across the top of cards), and remembering that you always (ALWAYS) drew a diagonal line across the top of a deck of cards with a pen, in case you dropped them (colloquially known as a "floor sort"). If you wanted to be really fancy, you'd use different colored cards for different sections of a program, but that was rarely worth the effort. Good times.

Besides card punches, readers and interpreters, other quaint machines I dealt with on a daily basis were chain printers (with carriage tapes - look it up), reel-to-reel tapes (which required cleaning the heads with isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs once a shift), and the most evil of all, decollators (again, look it up). All controlled via consoles that didn't have cursor keys, so to this day I have the TERRIBLE habit of backspacing to nuke and fix typing mistakes rather than cursoring and surgically correcting them. I bet the Backspace key on my keyboard is probably in the top 10 keys in my usage profile. :)

My ex-wife worked for a legal software firm. One thing to note is they were threatened with lawsuits ALL THE TIME, because, after all, their customers were lawyers. So any bug or whatever else would end up with some nasty email from some customer exclaiming, "We're going to sue!" In reality, not many (if any) actually carried through with it, but if that sort of threat makes you queasy, better be (or have) a really good lawyer yourself if you go this route, and not just as a domain expert for the software itself.

AND teaches you all the cool names for facial hair! :)

Nice. One thought I had is it would be cool to be able to click on any (non-zero) point on the graph and see a list of the articles from that day, sort of a drill-down on WHY was that term peaking in popularity then?

Yes. Two teachers (one elementary, one college). A former boss. Each helped me by not just expecting more of me, but mentoring me in ways that allowed a bullied kid with little self-respect recognize and grow into my talents. I think it is a great idea and recommend it. As OP said, the conversations that arose from each were great.

Thanks for the reply. I see my comment got downvoted (I figured it would), but I was still curious as to what your response would be and I appreciate it.

Would be interested in hearing more about your views on this. I use Firefox and Thunderbird almost exclusively, and every time I think about donating money I then remember all the wasted time and effort they've poured into what seem to be pipe dreams over the years. I WANT them to succeed. I WANT there to be an alternative on the desktop to Chrome (now that Edge is basically rebranded Chromium), and on iOS to both Chrome and Safari, I WANT to support their excellent documentation portal (which everyone else rides on the back of - even MS points to it a lot now). But man, I just don't trust the powers-that-be there to make non-braindead strategic decisions, year after year. Talk me out of that prejudice against them, please?