To Catch A Shooting Star

As I am starting to get back into computing after my break with it to learn about and solidfy personal discipline I came across an article that clarified something that used to puzzle me so much when 'playing around' with coding.

 I always struggled with the fact that once a process produced its outcome, say 5+5, the answer would be produced and the program would either close or go onto its next process seemingly destroying the outcome of the previous process. Well it turns out this is to do with the fact that computers only do what they are told and if you told them to add '5+5', that's exactly what they are going to do. You didn't ask them to save that outcome so they obviously are not going to do that for you. What you have to do however is 'Catch a Shooting Star'. The shooting Star in this instance being the outcome from the process that is going to blink up on your screen then just disappear. To save this shooting star you have to hold on to it, hold on to it by storing it as a Variable. 

 Hopefully this produced one of those 'ohhhhhh yeah, of course' moments to you as it did me'. Knowing that if I want anything to continue existing in computing it has to be stored makes a huge difference to the way I view programming and I am feeling far more confident about not being confused about why my 'programs' would just blink up and then disappear. One thing that still puzzles me however is where does that '25' (from the '5+5' example) go, is it just erased?, was it ever stored?. 

 Anyway I hope this provides a little bit more clarity to understanding programming as it did for me.

Getting back on track

I appreciate a lot of readers who have visited this site will have been poorly disappointed with the quality and consistency of posts thus far, there is no real excuse for my lack of posting or personal progress bar not being disciplined. The initial realization I came to about this life project or spiritual quest was that I am obviously going to fail when I have terrible discipline and have never worked a real day of my life at improving my discipline. My one hope is that I do have a good work ethic once I can sit myself down to work. So needing a plan I had to evaluate what was my biggest problem or biggest source of procrastination problems was, the conclusion I quickly came to was that the overall problem is that I have too much free time in proportion to strength of will not to waste that free time. This realization coincided with me obtaining a second job.

Having got myself two jobs and now working 7days a week I have cut off my potential procrastination time by a huge amount, making the limited free time that I actually have in my day feel far more valuable. So far I have been working 7days a week for about a month and in that time, on the train to work and such I have read three relatively large 300+ page plus books on self-discipline. All of which I would highly recommend to read if you have similar problems to me. I would also recommend you read them in the order I did.

 The first book willpower gives you factual evidence as to the function of human willpower. A vastly entertaining book and incredibly useful as a guide to life. It discusses the role of blood sugar on every function of the human mind and how important it is for a person wanting to master themselves to be in complete control of their intake and the quality of the substances they ingest. Essentially it reaffirms that looking after yourself is so seriously important to your minds health.
 The second book Getting Things Done is referenced highly in Willpower and is a great immediate follow on from willpower, by no means is this book entertaining, it is quite dry and rightly so it is literally a hands on guide on how to get your life in order and keep it in order. It gives you brilliant models to handle any problems you may come  across throughout the day whilst allowing you simultaneously manage your daily to do lists that you will have synced up to your lifes purpose. Sounds weird, really isnt; another 5* self discipline book.
 The final book 7habits essentially elaborates on the two books and gives you real life applications for them as well as bringing your awareness to the responsibilities you have, being a conscious pro-active person to the communities immediately around you.

 I am now currently planning to read two books that discuss proper diet for establishing the mind. I will do small book reviews on these texts if they are relevant.

 The important thing now to note is that I am feeling confident that in the near future I will be on top of myself enough as a person to tackle the initial tasks I set myself. After having read a post today I am going to try and help establish a study group that will try to emulate this :http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/. The start date for this project will be January 1 2013. Assuming the planet still exists and whatnot.

Time to tick off those hours

I've decided that trying to tackle all of computer science in one go with no real structure for someone like me is incredibly futile so I am going to structure my learning around completing a series of online lectures. Obviously biting off more than I can chew left me escaping my responsibilities in a bubble of gaming and procrastination, so I am going to ease myself into a good cycle by forcing myself to watch just one lecture a day from a selected series. As I get more confident with myself I am going to up the pace, but for now I can manage just one video a day.

 As I have stated previously I am going to be starting with computer architecture and pad out the theoretical learning with practical experience in Assembly language. I have a layman's understanding of computer architecture but I would still consider myself a complete newbie to this topic area. With everything being essentially new I am going to take this slow and do one lecture then make sure I fully get it, summarise what I know into an interesting post, then tackle the next lecture.


 The Lecture series I am going to follow is an old one from 1996 but is recommended as a great introduction to computer architecture. It follows the book 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' - (The full book can be found here, for free). The sites description of the lectures is as follows;
- 'These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced by Hewlett-Packard Television. '

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/video-lectures/

Advice from a Computing Professional

Not much to report by the way of personal progress, I've been giving in to my weak discipline again and playing Starcraft and DayZ all day. Wasted a potentially good day of learning so my technical hours still stand at 9,998/10,000. Which after three days is terrible and testament to the dangers of not heavily discipling your mind and your body when attempting any kind of 'me vs. the odds' type quest. Quite frankly its depressing to go from being so eager to for no conceivable reason being a lazy waste of time. Oh well this day is gone and I have tomorrow to redeem myself. Gotta be up really early for work so I plan to get some crunching of Computer Architecture in before work then hit it hard after work, maybe start exercising aswell as I can't be ignorant to the facts surrounding the saying 'healthy body, healthy mind'.

 Sorry to disappoint you if you came today expecting something worth your while from me today, I have such terrible discipline. I suppose my crap discipline makes this quest all the more epic, if I ever finish it. For now anyway, some advice from someone who managed to get his head down and work his way up to a good position in a company.

 Valuable advice if you are planning on entering into a computing career.

Enjoy -

"I've been hanging around here for a while and it seems to me like there's a lot of people on here who are still in school or are in the early stages of a career as a developer. I thought it would help some of you guys to have a thread where you can get the perspective of a long time software development leader about what we look for when hiring, promoting, etc.

As far as my credentials go, I won't say who I work for just that it's a massive company. I manage a team of 105 programmers working across ~40 project teams. Based on lines of code written my teams work in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, PHP, C#, Java and Python most often, with a bit of F#, Ruby and a few others I'm probably forgetting in there. I'm a 15 year vet, the majority of my team are guys who are just out of college or have a few years experience.

That said, here's my top 3 things you can do to get and keep a job:

1) Be Language Agnostic
When I'm hiring there's a 50% chance that I don't REALLY care what languages you've written in before, just that you're familiar with the language I need you in and can get up and running in general. Since most of our projects are short turn around items, onboarding takes a long time relative to how long the project will last (e.g. 3 weeks of onboarding on a 6 month project). Also, be flexible... I can't tell you how many college kids I just fucking walk out of my office because they tell me all about how Lisp is the greatest language ever invented and we're wrong to be using anything else, which brings me to point 2

2) Be Humble
That kid who tells me we should be using Lisp is wrong. You know how I know he's wrong? Because MY TEAM IS SUCCESSFUL. Again, I can't tell you how shockingly shitty most young guys act in that first interview. Obviously once you're on the team if you think we should switch something I ABSOLUTELY want to hear your idea but make sure it makes sense (and is demonstrably better) and don't get all butthurt if I don't agree. We work based on what the developers pitch to me and we decide as a group is the right play, which backs me into point 3

3) Remember that you're a fucking unicorn
You are the aberration here, your non technical managers, bosses, finance people, HR people, NOBODY in the company understands what the fuck it is you do. You may as well be named Merlin to these people. My job (to crib a line from Jay Mohr) is to not let management spook the thoroughbred. Your part in this is to be that thoroughbred AT ALL TIMES and to remember that a thoroughbred just KNOWS that it's a thoroughbred, when that belief is strong enough, other people will get it naturally. Carry yourself like a boss and you'll be a boss."

Remember, be the Unicorn :)

Life 2.0

 A user based documentary on Second life players.

http://www.putlocker.com/file/BDBD149C71AE0F6B#

I personally am not the biggest fan of Second Life but this documentary is for anyone who loves the internet as it really explores life's lastest dimension in so many brilliant ways. What should be a 'nerdy' documentary ends up becoming a very philosophically and emotionally challenging short film, you really do engage with the users and their lives for a short time draw parallels to your own. Definitely worth a watch.
Its main themes surround addictions, affairs, exploring sub-conscious feelings, ignoring real-life, the losers, the winners and the business of the second life world. It also poses many interesting philosophical questions about reality.

Tell me if the link goes down, I'll find a new one. :)