Every time I post a new behavioral experiment, or share a personal resolution of some kind, I get a few emails telling me not to be so strict with myself.

They always say something like “It’s not good to be so hard on yourself!” or “We shouldn’t be forcing ourselves to do things!”

This is a common thing to hear in our improvement-focused culture. I used to think it was a reasonable caution, but now I think it’s generally bad advice.

It seems well-meaning in most cases—people sometimes do go overboard with exercise, frugality, and personal efficiency. But I think it’s much more common for people to go under-board in some or all of those areas, and you can bet the person giving you a hard time is one of them.

We often hear about the importance of “balance” in our self-improvement efforts. But what exactly are we balancing? Good behaviors and bad ones? Are we looking for lives that are equal parts wisdom and recklessness?

Can you imagine someone saying “I don’t think we should force ourselves to brush our teeth every day. You have to live a little!”

100+ free online tools for image conversion, PDF editing, text processing, and calculations. All client-side, no uploads, completely private.

Arm yourself with knowledge

Avoid these things:

• Asking the developer how things should work: It’s your responsibility to know how a feature should work; if you don’t, how can you test it?

• Reporting bugs outside of the ticket: Avoid informal bug discussions, as they waste time for you and your team.

• Using vague phrases like “This does not work properly”: ‘Properly’ is unclear—specify exactly what’s wrong.

Про депрессию

If you actively use Stack Overflow as a coding instrument, your reputation will be lofty; if you don't use it, you're not really a professional software engineer.

Instead of asking over and over again if she is working tomorrow. I just consult her very organised calendar — and when she wants to check if I'm free she looks at my very empty calendar.

the best solution would be to show the application's previous state and point out that the application is still loading

Если для придания уверенности в себе вам нужен карманный ствол — я рекомендую обратиться к психологу. Это дурной симптом.

Бывает, проблему можно поправить функцией или макросом, но в код тянут библиотеку. Или можно купить готовое решение, но тимлид говорит: мы напишем свое через три месяца. Или разработчик насмотрелся видосов со свежей конфы и хочет проверить чужие идеи.

The most important consideration when defining a concatenated index is how to choose the column order so it can be used as often as possible.

Например, поиск по имени без фамилии бесполезен. Значит, составной индекс должен начинаться с фамилии, а потом уже будет имя.

Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.

Никита рассказывает про текст и кодировки

I am a dad, and as a dad I watch a lot of kids TV. Some shows I think are actually pretty great (Hey Duggee, Bluey), and some shows are fine, not my thing, but inoffensive (Fireman Sam, Chuggington, Octonauts). There is, however, one show that I just really hate. Paw Patrol. It’s bad.