Lately I’ve read quite a few tweets and blog posts about impostor syndrome. Often the author is self-assigning himself to the group of people experiencing the syndrome. Something about the casual discussions and self-diagnosis of impostor syndrome put me off and triggered my bullshit meter.
Continue reading “You Can’t Self-diagnose Impostor Syndrome”
One of the last side projects I worked on before leaving Big Nerd Ranch was to build a kegerator for the office. We wanted to have beer and nitro iced coffee on draft. We didn’t want to buy a setup for carbon dioxide and nitrogen so we built one.
Recently I’ve spent time trying to answer questions from students and Stack Overflow users. I have found many questions about what to put in an Activity, how to get access to a Context when you need one, how to do some async thing on the UI thread, why use Fragments, etc. Each question is basically “how do I do this thing that Android makes difficult?”.
Inevitably most answers by others provide hacky solutions that, while they technically work, should be ignored. These questions represent a fundamental misunderstanding about one or more class within the Android framework. The right answer to these questions is usually “you’re misunderstanding what this class is used for so you shouldn’t be doing this thing in the first place.”
After writing this post, I re-read it and I realized that I sounded like I was up my own ass with self-importance. But I assure you that I don’t have these rules for myself. If it was up to me I wouldn’t talk to most people. I’d build awesome things by myself, for myself. I have these rules so that I can do awesome things with you and for you. Help me help you.
I’m always refining how I communicate with people, and how I ask others to communicate with me. Here’s where I am at the moment:
Continue reading “Communication”
Several months ago, Georgia Power offered the residents in my condo the chance to switch from their Residential plan to a Residential On Demand plan. I called up Georgia Power to get more information, I was impressed with what I thought our savings would be so I switched over. After three months and getting three bills on this new plan I’m convinced that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, probably a bad idea for most “normal” homes, and maybe even a bit scam-y.
Continue reading “My Time with Georgia Power’s Residential On Demand”