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Build Impossible Programs
- hatchback176 8y agoJust be an ENTP https://legacy.keirsey.com/4temps/inventor.asp https://legacy.keirsey.com/4temps/inventor.asp
- saagarjha 8y agoI do love it when people post their slides for presentations, because this means I can usually get the gist of it without watching the video. Thanks, Julia! Though one quick comment: you're drawing your slides by hand, which unfortunately makes it a bit annoying for other people to consume–copy/paste doesn't work, and I'd assume people with limited vision might even be completely out of luck. So a transcript would be really nice.
- tobyjsullivan 8y agoThe transcript is linked on the page. https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/julia-evans-build-impossible-programs https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/julia-evans-build-impos...
- saagarjha 8y agoThanks, I must have missed that when I glanced through this.
- Elrac 8y agoI would have liked to see the slides, and I see a paragraph headed "Slides" but no link. Am I blind or is it my browser? Would appreciate a pointer.
- cattlefarmer 8y agoI can't tell if she's nervous or awkward or excited but it reminds me of myself when giving talks, even to small groups. I get so flustered that my mind races and then the rest of my body tries to catch up so I'm now talking really fast and moving and jumping all over and being very fidgety with things. Anyway the difference is that she managed to get her points through while mine often gets lost. I still don't know how to fix that except to practise and memorise what I'm going to say, and then just read it. But then it just becomes very monotone-y.
- jaytaylor 8y agoRecording yourself and reviewing the recordings is a technique I've used. I am uncomfortable doing it (do not like hearing / watching myself!), but it's definitely helped me analyze how I come across and then adjust accordingly. Also a good strategy to use when preparing for interviews.
- cattlefarmer 8y agoIt really is very weird talking by yourself to a camera. The first few takes have the very obvious 'I'm talking to a wall' feel to them. It's strange but it feels more natural to have a real person behind the camera and pretend you're talking to that person instead.
- mscasts 8y agoA tip is to talk in slow motion, because if you talk super slow and think of it during your talk, you will probably talk normally. Your mind and heart races and so does your speech, so that trick is good for when you're nervous and have helped me several times when giving presentations. You will think that you're talking in slow, but in reality you are talking normally.
- jen729w 8y agoWhenever I have to speak publicly, I try to channel Barack Obama. He talks so ... slowly. He pauses so ... ... long between sentences. It feels like agony when you’re doing it, but it works. In reality the pauses are never as long as you imagine, and it gives the audience time to absorb what you’re saying.
- lprd 8y agoI'm really enjoying the content that Julia Evans is releasing these days!
- ensiferum 8y agoBut if it can be built.. then it's not impossible. Hence the topic should be "Build possible programs".
- Senderman 8y agoI'm pretty sure the implied sentiment is "Build programs that look impossible because they might turn out to be possible."
- wscott 8y agoDon't assume something is impossible. Or assume that if your idea was any good then someone else would have already done it.
- princekolt 8y agoIf you use a really large telescope, say, 3500mm, you might be able to spot the point, which you missed, about 3 light years from where you are right now.
- tomerbd 8y agothere is nothing like jvns I wish I had more spare time to read her content. :/
- NotUsingLinux 8y agoWhat about thinking impossible thoughts? https://gist.github.com/AndreasS2501/2dc6c5813f5fd8abc79aad44479843be https://gist.github.com/AndreasS2501/2dc6c5813f5fd8abc79aad4... Philosophy is pretty cool?
- thecatspaw 8y agoSo I admit that I didnt read the whole thing, but this seems more like yet another push for bitcoin, and not actually about philosophy? > So lets focus on that, the impossible thought: How can we live together in peace and prosperity with each other and nature? By fixing ethical misstandings, improving laws and destroying borders where none need be. > So again, blockchains and ethereum are software and you can do any thing with them. You cannot fight racism with it. You cannot fight prejudice with it. If all you have is a hammer, lots of things start to look like nails. Sure, you might be able to hit your girlfriend with the hammer, but the relationship would probably improve more if you talked about the problem.
- CiPHPerCoder 8y ago"Sure, you might be able to hit your girlfriend with the hammer, but the relationship would probably improve more if you talked about the problem." Or, rather, if the relationship ceased before violence entered the equation. (In case anyone complains about pessimism, a friend of mine says often: "Relationships can only end in one of two ways: death or breakup." I'd rather think of it as a stoic position.)
- thecatspaw 8y agowell yeah, I didnt mean it that literally
- speps 8y agoDoes someone have a direct link to the video? The iframe Vimeo player doesn't work and I can't seem to be able to find the original video on there. EDIT: M3U8 link: https://skyfire.vimeocdn.com/1537357126-0x19388e9cb2a5d6095b66b7f25139c7e6b7668931/290376045/video/1100074443/playlist.m3u8 https://skyfire.vimeocdn.com/1537357126-0x19388e9cb2a5d6095b...
- allenleein 8y agoHere: https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/julia-evans-build-impossible-programs https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/julia-evans-build-impos...
- xaranke 8y agohttps://player.vimeo.com/video/290376045 https://player.vimeo.com/video/290376045
- speps 8y agoThanks but that doesn't work for me, I can't figure which extension is blocking me. I get this when opening that link: TypeError: "play" is read-only player.js:2:3975 VimeoPlayer< https://f.vimeocdn.com/p/3.3.17/js/player.js:2:3975 https://f.vimeocdn.com/p/3.3.17/js/player.js:2:3975 <anonymous> https://f.vimeocdn.com/p/3.3.17/js/player.js:2:260 https://f.vimeocdn.com/p/3.3.17/js/player.js:2:260 TypeError: VimeoPlayer is not a constructor 290376045:1:9150 <anonymous> https://player.vimeo.com/video/290376045:1:9150 https://player.vimeo.com/video/290376045:1:9150
- xaranke 8y agoPutting the link in youtube-dl and watching offline works for me.
- speps 8y agoThanks I got this, playable with VLC for example: https://skyfire.vimeocdn.com/1537357126-0x19388e9cb2a5d6095b66b7f25139c7e6b7668931/290376045/video/1100074443/playlist.m3u8 https://skyfire.vimeocdn.com/1537357126-0x19388e9cb2a5d6095b...
- DanielBMarkham 8y agoSome of the best experiences I've had programming is when I thought of something I'd like to make, but it seemed impossible. Then I went and made it. You do that enough times and coding becomes like real-world magic. You know you can do it, you don't know how yet. Yes, there are places you can get stuck. Rules-processing, unstructured data, Markov Chains, ML, and so forth. But even that's a win. You start understanding the various classes of problems to be solved and how best to approach each one of them. That kind of meta-knowledge is really difficult to get without wading into things. At the end of the day, you realize that there's no such thing as impossible problems in coding. There's just problems that people can't figure out how to produce optimum results. A lot of the ML stuff we're seeing now is more like "make the best of things" and less like math. Programming is a hoot.
- z3phyr 8y agoIt's rosy, but there are actual theoretical limits (like the halting problem) which act as a bedrock in that magic. Eventually we might find a way around, but we cant be sure of it now.
- phaedrus 8y agoEven something like the Halting Problem does not rule out as much as people impute it to. It just proves you can't write a program that can analyze all programs, but doesn't mean you can't analyze some programs. However I disagree with your concluding sentence - the whole point of a proof is that we are sure of it now, there is no way around. I would instead phrase it as, we may in the future find that the things we're interested in doing need not run into this barrier, because we refine the notion of what we actually want to accomplish.
- DanielBMarkham 8y agoYep. Want a program to halt? Put a timer on it. I thought the comment was both interesting and illustrative. Sure, in CS there's a ton of things still to do. But my comment wasn't about CS, it was about programming -- making things for people. The programs don't have to be provably correct or even consistent. That kind of stuff is the science part of programming which is completely different from the applied philosophy that is programming computers to make stuff people want.
- yuanotes 8y agoHow do you make those lovely slides?
- afroisalreadyin 8y agoThis is so inspiring, thanks a lot. It's great to see that there are now resources going into supporting OSS developers that require only an idea and pedigree, and not a finished product and a business plan.
- amirouche 8y agoAt last someone speak up about that very subject "doing impossible things" without being negative about the fact the community (of haters) forbids that behavior. Innovation is NIH somewhat, somehow and that is a Good Thing.
- hinkley 8y agoI don’t want to work for a company that only bolts together off the shelf components, although talking to me a few times you might get the idea that this is precisely what I want. I hate working at a place where people are so busy being clever that they reinvent everything. You steal from the younger devs an opportunity to learn, and you externalize the cost of your poor documentation and interface consistency onto your coworkers instead of spreading it out over the entire industry. This is NIH. What you should do is pick a segment of your problem space that has mediocre tools and make something much better. The 80/20 Rule seems to work quite well here, when I see it applied, which is not often enough.
- amirouche 8y ago> The 80/20 Rule seems to work quite well here, when I see it applied, which is not often enough. That is 20% of the effort can deliver 80% of the features?
- hinkley 8y agoThe other side. We spend 80% of our time on the last 20% of the code. Make it count for something. Do something that differntiates you from competitors.
- 8y ago
- AJRF 8y agoAnyone know what Julia is using for those handwritten slides? I absolutely love everything Julia writes. She writes in a way that makes absolutely zero assumptions about your level of technical competence. You could be a junior, mid, senior and still get something from most of her articles. Anecdotally; Almost every female engineer I work with writes and communicates in this fashion and I really bloody wish more of my male counterparts would speak with less jargon/acronyms for the sake of new starts/non-engineers.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TomasSedovic 8y agoJulia uses Squid for Android for her zines: https://jvns.ca/teach-tech-with-cartoons/#tools-that-make-it-easy https://jvns.ca/teach-tech-with-cartoons/#tools-that-make-it... Presumably, she uses the same to do the slides. Here she talks some more about her tools: https://usesthis.com/interviews/julia.evans/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/julia.evans/
- AJRF 8y agoThank you very much Tomas!
- ant6n 8y agoJulia's now using Ipad with pencil and the Notability app. She previously used a Samsung Chromebook Plus with Squid. She actually wrote a blog post about reverse engineering the file formats when transitioning between them: https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/03/31/reverse-engineering-notability-format/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/03/31/reverse-engineering-notabili... (btw, if you go through her drawings over the years, they got better and better. I think a lot of what makes them great nowadays is practice, practice, practice)
- AJRF 8y agoOh that looks like an interesting read, i've previously missed that post. I'll check both out, going to give that presentation style a try. Cheers for the links.
- mikekchar 8y agoIf I'm reading that correctly, Segment was (is?) providing some people $8K per month for 3 months to work on open source projects. That's amazing! Here's a link to their 2017 application page: https://open.segment.com/fellowship https://open.segment.com/fellowship
- Serow225 8y agoYes!
- meuk 8y agoWow, $8K per month is a crazy amount of money (for a developer in Europe), especially to work on a project of your choice.
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoNot really- it’s a decent amount but not crazy. You would have to be a contractor to take this up, and that’s quite a bit less than a contractor on say 500 EUR/day would make.
- Jyaif 8y agoThat's also less than what a contractor on say 10000 EUR/day would make.
- eneveu 8y agoOf course, but 500€/day is what you'd get in Paris as a Java developer with 3-4 years of experience. Which amounts to 10000€/month (counting 20 days).
- mikekchar 8y agoI'm a contractor and if someone offered me $8K per month for a 3 month contract building open source software of my choice, I would leap at it with both hands. Normally I do the same thing, but I don't actually get paid. ;-) I suppose I should be spending more time looking out for this kind of thing. It's possible there is more money in open source development than I had previously considered.
- georgecalm 8y agoOne thing that caught my attention is Julia’s value of work / life balance and the humanization (if that’s the right word) of programming. She very deliberately didn’t work on this in her spare time (underlining that coding isn’t the only important thing in her life) and when she did build the prototype she explicitly wanted to do it at a weekend coders retreat with other “wonderful” people around (as opposed to secluding oneself in a room and coming out of it with a solution).
- stuxnet79 8y agoSame here. I had to do a double take when she mentioned that. She is a pretty accomplished individual and I always assumed that a lot of her personal time was taken up doing programming related activities. Now I know you don't necessarily need to sacrifice all your personal time to become HN famous.
- Serow225 8y agoI'm glad she mentioned that too, sometimes it feels like there's cultural pressure thag if you aren't hacking in every non-work hour then you're a slacker…
- brrt 8y agoI just wanted to share that everything jvns is saying here is true. In 2014, for the Google Summer of Code program, I applied to build a JIT compiler for the MoarVM virtual machine. (It is actually more correct to speak of my work as a JIT backend than a full-fledged compiler - the 'frontend' of the compiler was already under development when I started). At the time, I knew just short of nothing about compilers, let alone JIT compilation. So what I did instead was learn, and make lots and lots of mistakes. And it worked. The JIT backend I created has been in production since 2014, with a new backend since 2017, and a small (but thriving) community of contributors. It is far from the worlds most advanced JIT compiler, but it does provide a nice speedup on real-world perl 6 programs. All the while I've continued learning. So... definitely try ambitious things :-)
- Serow225 8y agoThat's awesome, congrats!
- brrt 8y agoThank you. I should add I have had support of more people than I can name :-)
- criddell 8y agoMy problem sometimes is just getting started. I have a simple little project I'd like to make to manage movie night with my friends. Right now we do it all over email and it's a confusing mess. Since I'm new to the world of web apps (and looking for an excuse to dive in), I needed to learn some background and now I'm firmly gripped by analysis paralysis. I've learned a bit of Go, of Ruby and Rails, Dart, Angular, and some others. I've read through most of the HTTP spec and I have Roy Fielding's paper where he defines REST in my Pocket account. This morning I'm thinking I should check out Azure or maybe Google Cloud. But also I've done work in Java + Tomcat... maybe I should dust of my JDK? I need somebody to say "here are the four things you need to make a one-page app that lets users express some preferences and constraints and a little engine in the background can tally the results".
- gorpomon 8y agoThis is really cool inspiring work. Julia Evans makes the world a better place.
- kashosoft 8y agohttps://www.programsnow.com/ https://www.programsnow.com/