My wife (a music teacher) was a Mac only video editing person. She now uses Open Shot almost exclusively, even though for $40 I bought her Sony Vega (she was complaining about Open Shot at the time). I think Open Shot is a good gateway to Blender or other video editing tools. She does all her stay at home videos on Open Shot now because she can do it so quickly. I would say it took about a week to get really comfortable making simple videos.
I couldn’t agree with you more. I wish I could do more than give you an upvote, so here is an internet cheers and just know there are a lot of people who feel the same way. I also love what I do, read when I can, but at the end of the day I work hours which allow me to be with my kids and wife as much as possible. I hope to keep getting better, to become a great engineer, but I will take the slower road if it means more family time.
Exactly the same :) the guilt of not spending time with my kids and my wife is too much. There have been times where I've tried to sit down and work on something but it's no fun when there's a strong feeling of "I should be spending this time with my family".
The other thing I've noticed is that the separation and challenge of raising children has made me more productive. You don't know stress until you've had a newborn. There are things at work that used to affect me and I look back now and think "how was that even a problem?"
> There have been times where I've tried to sit down and work on something but it's no fun when there's a strong feeling of "I should be spending this time with my family".
That doesn't sound like a recommendation for becoming a parent. In fact it sounds the opposite - "don't have children, or you'll guilt yourself out of every other thing you could be doing".
Well life is about choices. People are free not to have children. But yes, when you do you bear a certain level of responsibility to them. I think a lot of people would characterize sitting in your office building CRUD apps every night so that you have a sweet green GitHub calendar while your kids sit alone on the couch watching TV as an abdication of that responsibility.
Well it's not for me to recommend. I don't recommend it if you don't feel you've got where you need to be and that matters very much.
There's tonnes of reasons why I wouldn't recommend parenthood. I don't think I was ready by any margin. All I'm saying is that I don't regret it and I consider it the best decision of my life.
I'll say the selfish thing. There isn't (and rightly so) any law that requires us to have children. I say use it. Let the suckers who want children raise the children we need to take care of us when we are to old.
My personal recommendation us when in doubt, err on the side of not having children. Don't make life harder on you than it has to be.
You don't know stress until you've had a divorce due to all of these after hours spent studying the latest fad. That is real stress and that happens to a lot of programmers. I am dealing with that personally, I have had 2 kids and I have done the best I could. Newborn stress is nothing compared to a divorce from a long term marriage.
This a million times over. We have a very similar environment except you can add in a mainframe and a few MS SQL Servers in addition to the ridiculously expensive Oracle stuff. However, the cost of moving VERY productive .Net staff to something else would be even more expensive. So for now, we just wait and see (while running a .net framework version 2 years out of compliance).
I believe the company I work for is writing just under 500K lines of COBOL code per year... now... how much of that is "new" vs extending vs maintaining is a good question. It is very difficult to measure those things in our environment. If you were to ask the 60 - 75 mainframe programmers we employ, I'm sure they would answer that COBOL is very much alive, and no matter how hard you try to kill it, 40 years of system code is just not going away any time soon (depending on your definition of "dead"). Especially as we hire a good amount of "new to us" people to maintain the system.
I think individual companies should define a language as "dead" based on the number of new people needed to maintain the systems. As the number approaches less than 5%(?) of your replacement hires, have you effectively "killed" the language? At the very least it is on life support, and a decision needs to be made about its future. (A grim analogy, I know).
Well, are we talking dead or just obsolete? It can't be dead if it's actively being developed with significant amounts of money and tooling improvements (eg MicroFocus). It can be obsolete, though, if it's taking up a tiny percentage of new code or hires as you said that keeps going down.
I agree one should try to phase out something on life support. Gradually at the least.
I can confirm this. I don't know why they aren't mentioning the entirety of the broadcast in the article. My favorite is that Simms and Nantz had to think really, really hard about the name of the tablet and just gave up half way through their report by just saying "Microsoft Tablets" instead of the Surface or Surface Tablet.
I work in a very similar environment. I thought forcing a change would work, "they'll see, if I just work on this and show them", and technically it did. Except it then became the norm. Now if we don't deliver X number of features in tight deadlines plus all the expected but not well thought out "improvements", it is looked at like a failure by the clients. My point : setting expectations internally and externally is equally important. Don't go too far off the reservation with your ideas, but quite frankly, you're too valuable to completely stop you. Find a happy medium that works till you gain the skills you need to possibly move yourself elsewhere (internally or externally).
Not the worlds greatest advice, not the way I would want someone to start off doing, but something I am and feel I had to do to make my life more meaningful. Good luck!
I find a plumber or electrician analogy works pretty well here. They have a job to do, there are only so many ways to do it that aren't stark raving mad, and they'll be fucked if they're going to do it your way because your ten minutes of thinking about the problem space informs you it's the 'right thing to do'.
I was just thinking the same thing... We have lines of commented out code from 1988 (yes. that is a correct date) that people flat out refuse to delete. I am so glad I got out of that mess...
In all fairness, I have had to touch somebody else's code on a few occasions where they did not use any kind of VCS, and I was very reluctant to flat out delete code, so I did the same thing described in the linked page - comment out the original code and add an explanation why I replaced or removed it, along with a date.
And when reading somebody else's code, I tend to appreciate if the code carries its history with it, at least to a degree. What I really do not like, though, is when there is a piece of commented-out code with no explanation of why it's there in the first place or why it was commented out.
Ditto... it was a way for them to standardize reports from various teams veiled as a cost cutting initiative. Since they are unwilling to pay for anything (read plugins), our JIRA boards are shells of the tools we were using and paying for team by team.
I am now left to wonder if IBM Watson will soon follow suit. IBM is really a very well constructed consultancy company.. I wonder if they plan to keep their IP for Machine Learning proprietary or if they see an opportunity to get more people using their technology (it has the better marketing name right now) and sell their services to a larger audience. Time will tell, but it is a very interesting time indeed.
no way, IBM is seeking to monetize it and they have good marketing lead already, everybody has heard of the chess story, but not many even heard about machine learning.
