Of course, when it's off or weekend days, feel free to swap the rule to 80% learning and 20% to anything else you must do.
Obviously it's just a suggestion, not a mandatory task, but hey; whatever works for you, isn't that right?
But the really surprising thing is how much they affected how I think about software overall. You know, at work I’m busy trying to build things. But taking a step back to understand what computation really is has been so helpful for even the code I’m writing on a daily basis.
Specifically with Alloy, which has an awesome state viewer, you can use it as a tool for prototyping ideas really quickly. It does suck that you can’t take that and use it to test your actual code, but I have ideas there :)
Anyway, yea I can’t recommend those tools enough. I think specification will grow in popularity soon - and no that doesn’t mean specifying your whole program up front. It’s totally possible to spec a program out iteratively. The value is huge - we write user stories and have product docs somewhere which explain what it is we’re building, but they get completely discarded after building. Having a highly simplified description of what a piece of software is expected to do is invaluable, especially as members come and go on the team. Agreed. In 2021, we don’t need another programming language. We need to master the tools and processes that we have.
I've found that having other languages than my workaday ones in my repertoire is a valuable part of the cap of the T -- although it's certainly not the only kind of thing that should be there.
Two and a half years ago I felt stuck working with only dynamic languages most of my career so I started learning Rust. Now I have an extremely powerful tool in my belt that solves problems that most dynamic languages cannot solve [adequately].
But I'm not going to learn yet another dynamic language if that won't make me any money or expose me to a new way of thinking, no. Nor will I relearn C++.
Furthermore, if I make a comeback to JS then I'll prefer to learn TypeScript and pick the most productive tools for it (Parcel struck me as mostly getting out of the way).
I get the overall sentiment of the article even if it expresses it rather poorly.
It has a good point, though; many of us the programmers are rather capricious and spoiled and get distracted by new shinies -- as opposed to learning several skills deeply and be then very useful to the business we're serving.
We easily forget that we do what we do for money.
That is good. I do not want to remember Java and Kotlin.
Use holistic profiling like https://twitter.com/OptimyzeCloud/status/1351203905850519557
When you see performance issues then dig into your language stack and learn how to remediate them.
