jacobian

> I'm sure you'd agree that the president of the board is ultimately "above" the chief executive if push ever came to shove, at least on paper.

That is not true of the PSF, nor of many (most?) other US nonprofits. Not on paper, and not practically speaking. The director reports to the board, but officers have little to no unitary power. You can go read the PSF’s bylaws if you like, and if you do you’ll see that officers, including the president, can do very little without a board vote. And because of aforementioned policy, that’s a max of two votes from people employed by a single company.

Also, like, do you know anything about Dawn? She’s been serving the Python community waaaay longer than she’s worked for Microsoft. Questioning her ethics based on absolutely nothing is unfounded and, honestly, pretty fucked up.

There’s this pernicious lie that Microsoft is somehow controlling the PSF. It’s based on about as much evidence as there is for Flat Earth, yet here it is again. At best, repeating this lie reflects profound ignorance about how the PSF actually functions; at worst it seems like some kind of weird disinfo campaign against one of the most important nonprofits in open source.

Not exactly. Development on what become Django began sometime in 2003, before Rails was released.

Certainly the release of Rails — and, more importantly, the questions in the Python community about what _our_ web dev story would be — inspired us to extract the framework from the rest of our code and release it. And over the years we’ve taken some inspiration from Rails (as well as anywhere else we see good ideas). The biggest one probably being the basic ethos that web development should be easy — the focus on what we now call “Developer Experience” is the best thing Rails gave the world, I think.

I’m chuckling at your advice because I tried those things! Went part-time, wrote, lots of local volunteering. (Didnt try picking up trash; that’s a good one!) Unfortunately, didn’t work for me. In fact, the more I cut back my hours and did other things, the less I wanted to be working the work hours I had left.

I still think it’s great advice, and probably something that’ll help many people! I just reached a point where I needed something more drastic, and I have the financial security to take a big swing.

Thanks for your perspective. It’s a very real concern I have — am I trading one kind of burnout for another?

I do think there’s a difference between approaching EMS as a first career, and coming to it later in life (I’m 43) as a second career. I’ve talked to a number of people who’ve done what I’m doing and a higher percentage of them are happy with the decision vs those who started younger.

I’m also not going in with rosy glasses. I’ve been thinking about this for at least seven years, and have had plenty of time to talk to folks at all levels of emergency healthcare, including right here where I’d be working. I think I have a pretty realistic view of what I’m signing up for.

Only time will tell, though. Maybe I’m making a terrible decision; only one way to find out.

I'm curious: if you hired a contractor to, I dunno, paint your walls, would you accept "I don't know" as a time frame or price quote? If not, what's different about software development that makes "I don't know" a reasonable answer in our profession?

I think the thing is that it's always been both. The freedom to hack and modify has always been inextricably linked with the $0 license fee. If the early free/open licenses had allowed source access and modification but come with a license fee, or if early FOSS had cost nothing to use but disallowed modification, I don't think we'd have seen the success that we have. The two senses of "free" in "free software" are and always have been linked.

I drew them by hand on a tablet (a Remarkable)

> Suggesting stimulants as the first line of treatment rather than cardiovascular exercise, good sleep, and a healthier relationship with food is at best dismissive of the body of modern research and at worst introduction of a dangerous 'just pop a pill' crutch.

Literally none of this is true. The research overwhelmingly shows that stimulant medication is the most effective treatment for ADHD, and second place isn't even close. Show me a single paper that shows that "good sleep" is a more effective treatment for ADHD than medication and I'll eat my shoe.

> inconvenient fact most of the time you're fat because you consume too much

This is not, in fact, a fact.

If you're a software developer, and your goal is to maximize income, then yeah, don't work for the federal government. If your goal is to do meaningful work that has a tangible positive impact on average people's lives, while being paid a fair living wage, then these jobs are unbeatable.

Can you actually buy these? I've wanted to plant them for a while, but as far as I can tell they're not actually publicly available in any way.

No, there aren't. Knives dull over time; even the most durable steel formulations need sharpening eventually. Those ceramic knives are pretty robust, but they too will dull. More importantly, they're extremely brittle; my experience with them is that they chip very quickly and are really unsuitable for anything other than very light use. For your use, they might be ok, but I think you'd end up being annoyed when they break sooner than you want.

I recommend something from the Victorinox Fibrox line to folks like you who just want to cut stuff and not think about knifes. They're very sharp out of the box, quite durable, and will last a long long time before going dull. When they do, they're so cheap (like $25) that you could just get a new one rather than messing around with sharpening.

I think part of the dynamic here is that when people give advice it often comes from one of two very different modes:

1. There's a piece of advice I want to give, and I'm going to give that advice to some degree regardless of the question or situation. Maybe I'll wait for a question where my advice fits, or maybe I won't, but it's a play _I_ want to suggest, so I'm going to suggest it. For example, "use Django" is advice I might give to anyone who asks anything about web apps because I know Django and it's easy advice to give.

2. I really listen to what someone's asking, and give them specific advice for their situation, without letting it be colored by my own experience or the moves that have worked for _me_ in the past.

The second is a lot less common! It's really hard to pay that level of attention, and force yourself to question your own assumptions. But it's also a lot more useful, since it's specific and tailored.

Critically, in a blogging context, only the first mode is really possible. There isn't someone asking for the advice, it's just me writing a blog post for some imagined asker. This is why most unsolicited advice isn't that useful, which absolutely includes whatever blog post you're reading. Including one of mine.