

Learn to Embrace Dinkiness - joshux
http://burakkanber.com/blog/learn-to-embrace-dinkiness/

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Singletoned
I guess he's using a different meaning of 'dinky' to the one I'm used to. The
dictionary says that there's a US meaning of dinky meaning 'inconsequential'
which seems to make sense.

From the title I had assumed it was going to be about the UK meaning of 'small
but particularly well formed', which I guess would also make a good article.

~~~
derefr
"Dinky" basically means "trivial" to me (a Canadian.) Not quite
inconsequential—it can do something useful—it just does something simple
enough that a person _with_ experience in the language wouldn't even book time
to accomplish it.

There's a piece of GTD advice—any task that would take you three minutes or
less, just do it right when you think of it instead of putting it in your to-
do list. One might describe those as "dinky tasks."

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perfTerm
Lots of great advice on hacker news lately. Whether it's to start embracing
your time alone and doing activities on your own, or learning by doing the
things which most excite and fulfill your desires, I'm enjoying it.

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iJebus
I didn't immediately understand what was meant by dinkiness, but once I
realised what they meant, yeah, a good read :D

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Dewie3
> Watching him reminded me of an oft-ignored piece of advice: Learn by doing
> what you love. Obsession is key when it comes to mastering programming (or
> anything). While it’s perfectly fine to choose this career path as just
> that—a career—it also takes a level of dedication and excitement that can’t
> be generated without a natural spark.

Or you could use a mixture of natural inclination, as well as trying your best
to adapt to the situation and deal with it in a positive manner.

I suspect that the author's approach is too reactive, and doesn't work for
anyone but those who happened to be lucky enough to stumble upon something
that they love doing in their childhood or early adulthood, and then it
happened to actually be employable. Not to mention, even if you loved
programming _as a teenager_ and/or _in university_ and/or _on OSS_ , that
doesn't mean that you will love programming in "the industry"[1], which might
be a different experience then what you are used to. Then what are going to
do? Rely on this reactive attitude of "either I am naturally inclined to like
this thing, or it isn't for me at all"? Well that might have been enough for
you to learn the ropes and such, but it might be a crushing blow to find out
that you don't fall immediately _in love_ with whatever programming you find
in paid work, or the programming that you have to do for you physics research,
or whatever else you find yourself needing programming for. Then what are you
supposed to do? Go back to school for another 2-5 years, change profession, or
maybe stop being so reactive and start to find pleasure in whatever things you
might think is your natural kryptonite, but actually might be a more
superficial disinclination which can be learned or unlearned.

Programmers are supposedly so passionate. Or at least supposedly a large
subset of them. But for such a _passionate_ group, they sure seem to often
default to reactively being upset and cranky and cynical over whatever facet
of their programming experience they don't like.

[1] I use "the industry" as an example here purely because it tends to come
later in the programming lives of _passionate programmrs_ , not because it is
necessarily terrible compared to other forms of programming. Indeed, I don't
have any industry experience yet myself, and such fears that "You might like
programming in university or whatever, but will you like it when you actually
have to use it to support yourself?" has been a worry of mine for some time
now.

