ludicity

12 ms·

91.
by ludicity 2y ago
I'm the author. I've been meaning to write something about this, but for context, I was a very strong psychology student, completed my degree, learned most of my early computer science/statistics from a clinical neuropsycholo
92.
by ludicity 2y ago
Yeah, basically. Although the reason I venerate books specifically is that a great book is just amazing for personal growth. That's true for any great learning resource, but there are things about books specifically that I love, and so
93.
by ludicity 2y ago
I never realized how bad I was at Python until reading Fluent Python, hah.
94.
by ludicity 2y ago
I probably am a nerd, hah. But it sounds like you're doing exactly what I'd do anyway. Read a book to load the brain with some useful concepts and philosophies, then go get lived experience.
95.
by ludicity 2y ago
(I'm the author) Starting with Taleb at a young age was helpful for me, as he introduced me to the Narrative Fallacy. I.e, the easiest way to convince anyone of anything is to posit a causal chain with some neat story, and 95% of the p
96.
by ludicity 2y ago
Thank you for the kind words on the writing! And the implicit skills are important, it's just that reading a book is, broadly speaking, a very strong indicator of ability and a great starting point. The best engineer at my consultancy
97.
by ludicity 2y ago
Thanks very much for the luck, hah, I'll probably need it. We'll see how I go ennui-wise in a year, but people are different, and I'm pretty sure that it'll help a lot. I keep a very healthy dose of activity outside of w
98.
by ludicity 2y ago
People get motivated in different ways, but I definitely would be worried if I saw someone waste $1M to further their own career and didn't feel any anger at all. That doesn't mean hauling off and punching them in the face, but th
99.
by ludicity 2y ago
If the consultancy takes off, I can indeed imagine my writing taking a back seat (I'm assuming Bile Blog just stopped writing and didn't sell out). Now that I pay rent through sales and engineering, taking time off to write is har
100.
by ludicity 2y ago
I experienced only minor psychic harm until the bit about IT saying that the MIT license not being good enough, whereupon I became wracked by both pain and laughter for the remainder of the article. And finding out the whole process could b
101.
by ludicity 2y ago
xoxo thanks! Although editing audio is one of my daily humility reminders. It's touuuugh.
102.
by ludicity 2y ago
We're bootstrapped so we unfortunately can't fling money at sponsorships. Or rather, we can, but it would cut into our runway quite a bit, and we have more promising avenues to pursue. If we acquire bad clients, the type that woul
103.
by ludicity 2y ago
It took me about six months off to start feeling normal, and I think I got out much earlier than most people do. And if you read that post, I still clearly let it get pretty bad before I left.
104.
by ludicity 2y ago
Very much appreciate the kind words! From you and the other commenters too.
105.
by ludicity 2y ago
In Australia, data jobs have a high floor but a low-ish ceiling at most places. Salaries start at around A$100K if you know how to interview, but 30 years of diligent practice only nets you around A$200K, and this would be considered an ext
106.
by ludicity 2y ago
Author here. This is one of my favourite books of all time. In fact, my two favourite books are ZAMM and The Black Swan, both of which I hated on my first read when I was 19. I recently re-read it for the third time while on holiday and was
107.
by ludicity 2y ago
I was offered a book deal and turned it down, hah. I read in spectacular volumes and books have a very special place in my heart. Growing up in Malaysia, most of my English was initially mastered from a gigantic pile of Enid Blyton books my
108.
by ludicity 2y ago
Author here. This is essentially the case for many clients, especially governemnt. But we're bootstrapped, so we can afford to consult and use what we've learned to build tooling that only targets a small handful of sane clients.
109.
by ludicity 2y ago
The boring answer is that it's context dependent, but fundamentally "do data engineering the same way you do high-performance software engineering". Have tests that run fast, where fast means "a few seconds when you star
110.
by ludicity 2y ago
I'm the author. This is the track we're on. We also named our company "Hermit" so there's something extremely serendipitous about this comment, hah. I definitely think it isn't viable for many people, but I&#x2
111.
by ludicity 2y ago
I wrote a piece last year on how they were running a $500K Snowflake bill due to typing one number in wrong, and how I noticed within my first few weeks there by literally eyeballing something and going "queries take milliseconds so yo
112.
by ludicity 2y ago
You're right. I actually did propose this, but the other difficulty is getting stuff put onto the Jira board. My belief, yet to be verified, is that it was possible to deliver everything the executives promised AND perform the refactor
113.
by ludicity 2y ago
You are the only person in months that has called me anything other than "the AI rant guy" and I just wanted to say I appreciate you. <3
114.
by ludicity 2y ago
It's so many things. Dishonesty, lack of technical competence, political pressure, hype, organization structure, and incentives. If I had to summarize though, it's that the median performance in any field will be at much lower lev
115.
by ludicity 2y ago
Hah, well, it was easy in some ways. Performance expectations were so low that I could have cruised for years if I didn't care about my job. Just not easy in other ways.
116.
by ludicity 2y ago
Hah, yes, I'm not in cybersecurity but am very close to a few people that are. The incompetence is not evenly distributed and not as bad as it is in data, but some companies are in terrible states, and the stakes are much higher.
117.
by ludicity 2y ago
The good news is that, since the others are also looking for work elsewhere, there will be more engineers out in gen pop that actually thinks tests are useful, hah.
118.
by ludicity 2y ago
I also get to spend a lot of time with executives thanks to the blog's success, and part of it isn't just incentives, it's pure confusion. People have no idea what they're buying. I also get invitations to "sponsor
119.
by ludicity 2y ago
Author here. I now know some places in Melbourne that have a good success rate on projects. Some of them are so small as to be invisible and rarely hire. One uses two specific independent recruiters or internal referrals. As far as I know,
120.
by ludicity 2y ago
Author here, and also executive director at Hermit Tech now where we do things like this. Your approach has the core of how I'd go about it. The contract stuff is legit, though you don't need to buy a product for it. The thing tha

More ›