Is there any convenient way to get notified when Rich Hickey pushes a new talk or article? I can't seem to find a RSS feed, mailing list or Twitter account to follow. Any advice appreciated!
- Distributed databases (e.g. NoSQL) and cross-system messaging (e.g. ZeroMQ), especially for:
- High performance Rails
Don't need to be brilliant, just need to be able to explain topics clearly and patiently. (I'm a competent-enough Python/PHP guy crash coursing into these other technologies.)
Get paid for a couple hours of your time per week chilling in a coffee shop answering my questions and demonstrating techniques. It'll be fun.
No resume necessary, though hella bonus points for blogs/docs/code demonstrating your ability to teach those fields above.
I don't know if this is antithetical to these recipe/cookbooks, but please consider teaching coherent themes or design principles via these recipes, rather than simply providing an assortment of useful tidbits. Erlang has such a unique foundation (functional programming + event-driven awesomeness) and so few books that there is a great opportunity to teach the Erlang mindset/perspective and not just a bunch of tips and tricks.
Very good and valid point, and it is pretty much at the foundation of the book approach (short guides ondesign principles when applied to real tasks, not just the theory)
Summary and examples for public will be much more helpful than individual consulting. Then make a webpage/book for yourself--pretty much everyone wants to understand this information.
If you want to get wonky, read "Homo Academicus" by Bourdieu. Educators (or other gatekeepers, e.g. job interviewers) apply implicit categories of judgment to applicants. If the applicant matches the class/cultural background of the gatekeeper, there's a higher probability that the applicant has naturally acquired and presented the things the gatekeeper is looking for. (Else, the applicant will come in without having anything to offer that the gatekeeper cares about.)
I respect the intention of this idea, but I'm not in the business of giving general advice about the admissions process to people. I don't think there's much in the way of general advice to give, for one. Also, there's a whole industry based around that, and it's full of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. A few years back, I started a site where families can post user reviews of consultants they hired, http://collegeconsultantreviews.com
Right now I run a social news site for Chicago and received seed funding to launch a new advertising startup that will help save newspapers. I'm happy with my life and excited about these challenges.
One day, if I do decide to come back into admissions, it will be to disrupt the system and hopefully destroy all these awful know-nothing consultants and quacks, rather than to add my voice to their chorus.
So I'm happy to look at applications. Pulling general advice from them is really less useful than you'd imagine. Everyone's different. Everyone's red flags are different.
If you want one piece of general advice though: don't mention video games, gaming, Magic Cards, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokeman, Anime, poker, Comic books, or anything like that on your application. You will automatically be cast into the "misapplied intelligence" pile. I've played my share of video games in life (My Civ III skills are pretty impressive), but at the end of the day, that's time that could have been better spent. My experience in admissions showed that POV to be pretty widespread. No, you won't impress them with your poker winnings or TF2 pro tour success. They think that you are not creating real value with these pursuits for the world, or yourself.
I wouldn't challenge your general advice, as I am just one data point... but just to underscore what a crapshoot this all is, I actually got into to college on the basis of an interview in which my primary schtick concerned why Dungeons and Dragons made me smart.
(How do I know? The head of admissions, who interviewed me, told me so a year later. It was a small school, I was applying for January admission, and she basically made the decision herself. I had nothing on paper to recommend me above anyone else -- she just loved the interview.)
Argument doesn't make sense. Author asserts that goal is "autonomy", "competence", "relatedness," as opposed to "passion" or "personality." You don't have to "care" about your work as long as you self-manage and are good at it.
However, then the author defines:
"Autonomy" as "you endorse [your] actions at the highest level of reflection." This implies work that satisfies your own human values, which seems like part of "passion" or "personality," more than simply freedom of choice.
(Also, what's the point of making your own choices if it's not for pursuing of goals you either care about or enjoy, which again seems like "passion" or "personality.")
"Competence" as "mastering unambiguously useful things." I don't know about you but I have never been able to master anything that I did not in some way have some "passion" or "personality" for.
There is the Carol Dweck argument that if you decide you can learn anything, and put in enough hours of deliberating practice, then you can be good at anything. Given that the amount of deliberate practice people are citing is 10,000 hours required or approximately 10 years, then doing this without passion seems like a hideously painful waste of your life.
"Relatedness" as "to love and care [about people], and to be loved and cared for." Again I don't see how this is independent of passion or personality. Passion is loving and caring about something, e.g. people. Personality I think has some definite non-zero correlation with whom you love, care for, enjoy spending time around.
Autonomy, competence and relatedness seem like fine things to seek in your work, but I'm not convinced of the author's argument that these things are independent of passion or personality.
(Also it's worth pointing out that the author does not provide a "have an awesome experience of work" example so much as he provides a Tim Ferris-style 4 Hour Work Week example of "make a bunch of money quickly and then go spend your free time." The example person in the post, despite having "mastered" database optimization, doesn't actually care to go optimize a database more than once every few _months_.)
