nkangoh

Thought: Why would anyone use this when they could use Anki for free?

Honestly? Just practice a lot and get people who have some familiarity with Software Engineering/Computer Science to interview you. It's also important that you ask those people to not take it easy on you.

The initial discomfort is necessary if you want to get better at this.

Excellent website. What did you use for the front-end, is it based off a template? It looks great!

What exactly is wrong with using notepad to code? No syntax highlighting?

I've been doing some heavy investigation to how (and where) I should start my career in terms of maximizing learning. I have friends who will be working at Microsoft, and other friends who criticize said 'Microsoft' friends, saying that they won't learn much. Others say you learn the [most] at big companies, and a small minority say that start-ups are the way to go when you're early in your career.

I wonder what advice Jessica (and the HN community) would have for people like me, as I imagine there are a lot of people like me visiting HN.

This is slightly off topic, but why aren't folding bikes or scooters more popular? Their folding mechanism allows you to take them with you which would presumably prevent theft more than a lock. If a bike lock is the only thing that's keeping your bike from being stolen it doesn't seem like it'll work more than it just delays the inevitable.

Plus aren't locks really inconvenient to carry around with you? 10+ pounds is a lot when your bike is only 20lbs.

I find this paragraph interesting:

"From the outside, it might have looked like I was crazy to feel this way. I had graduated from Stanford, I had a CS degree, and I knew how to play the startup game. In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding."

Pardon my ignorance, but if a startup is a game, wouldn't knowing how to play be knowing how to win, i.e. an exit? I feel like getting venture capital would be the equivalent of prolonging the game, which is a +0 type of action. Is raising money really "playing?" From what I've read raising money just results in needing to raise more money.

I would be interested to hear the opinions (or more accurately, experiences) of developers regarding "practice." I'm beginning my career as a software engineer this summer and I would like to become an "excellent" engineer. Employable, of course, but also the go-to for knowledge in a subset of computer science (let's say natural language processing, for example).

Given I have a very long life (hopefully) ahead of me, what would you say is the best way to do this? Yes, coding is good, but is it the best way? I spend a large amount of time doing side projects, but eventually I'll have a family and other obligations, so I would need higher impact, less time consuming practicing options.

An example of this I guess is how many expert violinists actually "practice" for a surprisingly small amount of time because the practice is so deliberate. What's the equivalent for us?