https://codeforamerica.org/jobs/

We are hiring Senior and Staff SWEs to work on civic tech in the US. Applications for our apprenticeship program are open Aug 10th - 17th.

We believe government can work for the people, by the people, in the digital age, and that government at all levels can and should work well for all people. For more than a decade, we’ve worked to show that with the mindful use of technology, we can break down barriers, meet community needs, and find real solutions.

Not required, but a plus worth mentioning when you apply or email me: - Rails expertise - Java expertise - Civic tech experience - Lived experience that overlaps with our mission and the clients we serve

Please apply directly here: https://codeforamerica.org/jobs/

Feel free to send me an email if you have questions, or to let me know you've applied. Please include a resume or linkedin link with your email, and tell me what position(s) you applied for: lusen@codeforamerica.org

for some people, that means learning an actual database and building something rather than consuming more information. for other people, that means learning more computer science concepts and meta knowledge/skills.

cynically, i agree that fundamentals seem to be increasingly on shorter and shorter supply... but i suspect it's a wide world, and that what we're actually seeing is a WIIIIIIIDE spectrum of jobs (and interests!) all called "Software Engineer".

besides, people can think for themselves -- that's the point of learning fundamentals (meta-concepts and thinking skills).

the exact diet someone needs depends on where they are at currently, both technically and financially, and where they want to be.

PS - the main article is about apprenticeships, which serve a way more important function than learning: getting a foot into the job market. for many engineers without work experience, they're not even getting a chance to interview without first getting a network and proven track record.

Because no need. Technologies come and go all the time. They can be learned on the job anyway. With the right mental models that we developed by studying fundamentals, we get to pick up specific technologies quickly too. Studying in our spare time is an investment, so we need to treat our time as the most precious resource.

It also depends on your objectives. Are you studying for fun/general improvement or are you angling for a particular job/vocation? If the latter you better be using the tools the job is likely to require.

Not disagreeing that fundamentals are important, they're vital. But I wouldn't say there's "no need" to study specific technologies. You'll never be competitive if all you do is train fundamentals with no applications or objectives. And not all employers are willing to let a new hire "learn on the job". Also technologies do not "come and go all the time" outside of webDev. My knowledge of c++ and Java from 17 years ago serves me well to this day.

Because time and energy are finite.

A thing to point out as mentioned way above, the issue with any traitor mechanic game is that while they can be great fun, involve a lot of exploration of social dynamics, they are also not really good at team building because they require at least some of you to lie/cheat/back-stab.

As a designated owner/bringer of several traitor mechanic board games, in the before times, I/we had a general rule that traitor mechanic were "first thing in the game night" games, and should if possible generally be followed by a true coop game (things like Hanabi or Pandemic) or a silly judge game (such as Apples-to-Apples or Action Cats), in order to avoid certain types of after-game drama, cleanse the palates a bit, and do a bit of a cooldown/after-care.

Unfortunately, traitor mechanic games are generally very easy to do remotely in a video chat while a lot of the pure coop games are "us versus the board" that are tougher to do remotely. Some of them have great videogame adaptations, but in videogame form lose some of the intimacy you'd want from a good video chat, and also often give all the information to every player at all times which only encourages the types of coop players that like to run the entire game and play everyone's turn as min-maxed as possible.

more generally, when someone says something you find incredulous, consider processing that internally, and then decide if saying "huh, now i know" is not a better reaction to "no way, maybe you're wrong."

Originally I was excited for the "hackability" but that doesn't exist on the latest model and when I looked into it, all the "hacks" were pretty useless like getting the front page of the NYT on the home screen? Like I have a phone and a notebook and both are way better at all the things they do.

1. i love drawing, but notebooks and whiteboards don't easily allow me to edit what i've done. software tools like remarkable allow me to move and resize what i've drawn, or click undo and try again, or perfectly erase. i can turn on the grid template to do lettering and then turn it off so the grid isn't in the finished product. i can't overstate how clutch moving/copying/cutting/undoing are for visual communication. i don't have to redraw that chart to make it more legible or the words fit better. i don't have to go over the pencil in pen to make it more visible when i take a picture and share it. editing visual communication is just as important as editing text, and software is just so freaking good at that compared to paper and whiteboards.

2. i use remarkable for multiple things. one of those things is drawing comics and sketches. sure, when they get complicated or i need to be more professional i'll import to clip studio and use my wacom cintiq, but being able to sit anywhere and pull out the remarkable like i would a sketchpad means i draw way more often. it's a joy.

3. i make planning documents for work projects that easily sync as pdf's so i can keep colleagues up to date. sure, when it comes time to spec details i move to google docs and spreadsheets, but especially these days where we don't have a shared whiteboard in an office, having an easy-to-share notebook has made my design/planning communication more effective and faster. (remarkable has folders and notebooks, so i keep one notebook per ongoing project)

4. one of my remarkable notebooks is "Todos". it's so cool to have one physical "notebook" for all my different notebooks. it's like a kindle but for creating! the internal organization works really well for me. ps - did i mention that digital writing can be edited and doesn't suffer from getting messy and disorganized like paper? such joy.

5. there are just enough features like pens and line widths and "smart vector based selection" to be useful, while still being simple and getting out of the way. i've never had a tablet or ipad. i don't want more screens in my life. i have an old iphone i try not to get attached to. i use a neo for writing stories and journals ;-p

i dont get excited by technology. BUT to me the remarkable is a single purpose tool that works beautifully well.

ps - to me the purpose is to create. i don't need a phone todo app or anything more prescriptive than a futuristic notebook.

pps - i used the remarkable outside today, for example, and didnt think twice. eink is lovely.

yes there are differmented between the remarkable and high quality paper and analog art tools, as well as high quality digital tools (there's some parallax in remarkable among other issues that simply cannot compare to the cintiq, to say nothing of professional art software) but those tools aren't life changing the way the remarkable fills it's particular niche.

totally cool if it's not your cup of tea, i just love it and recommend visual communicators and visual note takers check it out.

pppppps - oh yeah, the scribble to text transcription is on point. that's not my main usage, but i'm impressed it can read my actual-not-lettering scrawls, which sometimes i can't even read.

i can't share examples of most of what i've created, but for fun i've started making comics out of work charts and graphs: https://twitter.com/staycalmcomic

This article presents yet another pop-sci version of this, with a fair dose of the "noble savage" trope to boot:

> Our current climate crisis is the direct result of this unbridled exploitation ... the language had a harmonious relationship with the environment ... Could the rich vocabulary of the Inuit inspire us to redefine our relationship with nature?

No, it doesn't work that way, because the strong version of the hypothesis is essentially disproven (in geek terms, all natural languages are "Turing-complete" and can be used to express anything) and evidence even for the weak version is, well, weak. Correlation does not imply causation, and Western culture won't change if we import a few more Inuit words into it.

There's also the whole business of how propagandists twist language around in order to influence people. How is that not an example of language affecting people's world view?

Anyhow, as an Italian living in the Netherlands, I can tell that to a certain extent this concept does exist: look, people here use the same words for different meanings “in context”. So guess what? Code written by a Dutch often contains a Context object that affects how a generically named Business object behaves.

I wonder how it is in Germany? I guess they don’t use the 80 col code formatting rule :P

Furthermore, the conversation on linguistic relativism is far from done and dusted. The distinction you make between "strong" and "weak" forms sort of shows a loose grasp on the subject matter. I'm also more than a little stumped trying to figure out what correlation you meant.

... that's also not what "Turing complete" means.

I don't know how well this joke translates into English but it works very well in Danish. Here it goes:

> A Danish police officer gets called on the radio by a Greenlandic hunter who has been in an accident. The hunter tells that his partner have fallen into the water and have been pulled up again but might have died from the freezing water. The officer tells the hunter to "make sure he is dead". Over the radio the officer hears a riffle shot and the hunter replies: "There, he's dead now for sure".

The design of Inuktitut and Greenlandic is very in tune with nature but I agree that it doesn't mean you can absorb it's qualities into other languages. That said, doesn't mean you can't learn anything from them, as the author fo the article claims.

> someone in the audience asked what his stories meant. there was a sense of the plots being profound, but just out of reach. > > Murakami replied that there was no great meaning. they were dreams he had.

Yes, "think out loud" is better than being completely silent, but given that many hiring decisions are based on how the interaction feels, including the quality of the communication _in order to assess thinking skills_, candidates can see huge returns by learning specific communication techniques.

I make videos on this topic (technical and non-technical interview and negotiation skills), and happened to have just made a video on what to say while writing code:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv42PpY-nK8

I think there was a combination of things that straight away disposed me negatively towards it - the negative title (stop X!), the negative introduction (stop x, again) and also the camera being so close to your face. It had the effect of feeling like I was being simultaneously negged and mansplained to by some overly aggressive dude (no doubt more an artifact of my own life experiences more than the video. Stop telling me what to do, Dad.). It felt very you-tube, but like, the uglier parts. I stopped watching pretty quickly.

Glancing at your profile, it seems like you have a number of videos titled "Stop X". I'm noting here that you describe this video as "a video on what to say while writing code." There's a clear value prop there: What to say when writing code! But it doesn't exactly come through in the first exposure to the video. I'd watch a video on "what to say while writing code" because I have my own opinions on it, and am interested in comparing my mental model with someone else who's spent time thinking about good communication in a coding context. Feeling scolded by said video made it a solid pass.

I think I read something purporting to be research about how closeup pictures on faces tend to elicit stronger emotional reactions.

I did like that you were modeling perspective taking - "your interviewer is a programmer who can read your code." Building a capable theory of mind is long term work, and it's work that people who are drawn to computers often don't do.

Anyways, thanks for sharing it, and taking the time to make those videos. It seems like a worthy project.

It did leave one gap though - it assumes my handwriting is legible! Many companies (at least pre-COVID) still expect people to hand write code on a whiteboard, under immense time pressure Most people aren't used to writing on a whiteboard, and many interview rooms inexplicably have a combination of large markers and a small whiteboard, which often leads to my output being of marginal readability. Narrating what I'm writing can help move past that.

EDIT: I recognize this article is from NYTimes -- that need not be our gold standard for inspiring awesome communication!

I spent a long time trying to figure out math until I encountered college texts that represented things geometrically, it probably had not occurred to those people who wrote the 20 year old math books I encountered in high school to do such things, but since then someone somewhere figured out how to help people learn better by conveying the information in additional forms.