mmartinson

The problem is that it frequently detours from interesting discussions points to do things like dump on Greenpeace. Not interesting. Being elsewhere on the political spectrum doesn’t discount the interesting points, it just injects too many wacky ideas to make it possible to engage with. Ratio of density between interesting points and fever swamp ranting too low. Trash rag.

Y'all should enjoy drawing pictures and making mediocre music without worrying about how that relates to success or money. Your career is important, but it's only one part of a good life. Things that are enjoyable but unproductive often have a way of building skills and character that can later help you in unexpected ways.

> Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college.

I've experienced this exactly. I have a philosophy degree. I floundered a bit career-wise post undergrad, self-studied for a practical entry vector into a programming job, and 8 years later have a super rewarding career as a software engineer. I felt my humanities undergrad, especially the critical thinking and writing skills I developed, have helped me advance much more quickly.

If I were to change anything, I would have liked to do a CS minor.

> But chances are that a NodeJS back-end and one written in, say, Elixir, won't feel much different after the honeymoon is passed.

This is very, very far from my experience, having worked extensively with both of these particular examples.

At my current job I deep dive into a lot of years old, kinda sketchy Elixir code, and it's almost always less effort to learn/fix something than I've found in other languages, especially other dynamic languages. Except when macros are overused.

> Best strategy for becoming a high paying/good software engineer would be to think of yourselves as problem solver and language as just one of the tool for problem solving.

I'm not sure becoming a high paying/good software engineer are necessarily relevant to the stated goals of the OP's question. There can be inherent reward in working with a set of less popular, well crafted tools. Yes you might grow faster as a professional by working with a group of industry best JS programmers, but working with a small team building in Elixir and moving fast without ever hitting a NaN can be a pretty rewarding experience.

It's valuable to consider the opportunity cost of this compared to a deepened knowledge of an already productive tool

Out of curiosity for someone who is Canadian, what’s the assumed pull? Historically it would be income and career opportunities, but the tide has turned on that quite significantly in the last 5-10 years. Outside of that, it’s safe, clean, people are friendly, there are nice things. With a middle of the road tech salary the price of internet is a non concern.

That said, Canadian politics and crony capitalism are a grind sometimes, but looking over the fence it’s not totally obvious that other systems aren’t trading one set of intractable problems for another.

Nothing makes me long for boilerplate as much as seeing Ruby code with heavy use of metaprogramming.

fprof, recon trace, observer have proved to be the holy trifecta for me for debugging challenging production issues. I miss these deeply when working in other languages.

Having worked with both ActiveRecord and Ecto, Ecto is consistently easier to reason about and change than AR. It feels closer to the DB without compromising composability, and better avoids surprises. Ecto is IMO one of the killer features of the Elixir ecosystem that is undercelebrated compared to the neat things that are rarely used.

More or less. Greater Vancouver suburbs largely unaffected. Farther out peripherals (Abbotsford, Hope) badly flooded. All regional towns and cities beyond those cut off.

I interview a lot of candidates over zoom for remote positions. For me, few to none of the specific details matter. What's important is if the candidate demonstrates that they've had the empathy and self awareness to consider how their call setup affects others' ability to communicate with them. All the suggestions in the linked article seem painfully obvious for anyone working in 2021.

I actually prefer when the candidate has some sort of uncontrollable distraction that comes up during the interview. It provides a good opportunity to see how they handle the real world challenges of remote work. For anyone not sure how to handle this, interrupting with "excuse me, I'm going to mute for 20 seconds while garbage truck passes" is completely reasonable, even in a fairly formal situation.

I’ve always found exercise to be a motivator for getting diet under control. Periods of low exercise correlates with bad eating. Building back the routine makes shifting diet much easier.