This is why learning guitar when I was younger was so difficult to me; people just presented things like "you have to learn these 5 scale patterns" but they didn't really go into why, it was just "memorize this stuff and then you'll be good!", but I hate rote memorization without understanding the underlying principles. I'm old and didn't have the internet back then so I was just learning from various books or friends and it was slow going, but I still see things like this presented in tons of Youtube videos today.
I've since gone back and learned a bit of music theory as an adult and it's been super helpful understanding the underlying principles so I can work things out vs. having to just memorize things without understanding why they work.
I think then you can go practice the various scale patterns and get good at them with the knowledge that you can always work out the scale from first principles if you need to.
Different strokes for different folks though I guess, I'm sure there's an argument to be made for not overwhelming folks with too much theory out of the gate. Not sure if I had started with a bunch of theory if I would have stuck with it when I was younger.
> not overwhelming folks with too much theory out of the gate.
Thing is, it's not even "too much theory". It really is just a simple tone-semitone pattern and a few bare facts about how the usual guitar tuning works, that you'd know anyway if you've ever had to tune your guitar by hand. That's all it takes to make the guitar explainable from first principles. Then sure, you can practice the "patterns" all you want for convenience's sake, but you don't have to commit anything to memory that you could not figure out again from scratch if needed.
I would agree with you. I feel like watching videos where someone goes "hey, so here's this pattern that completely unlocks the neck for you, don't be stuck in a box anymore!" and all they're showing you is where the various notes in a key are along the neck (now I know that, but I wouldn't have known that before...) and it's WAY more confusing than if you just learn how the pentatonic scale works and how to find the notes in a key etc. And the funny thing is, the only reason I was stuck in that box in the first place is because of silly rote memorization without understanding why you play the various notes in a scale etc., it just feels like this thing that kind of compounds when you just learn patterns vs. just learning the underlying principles.
But again, I'm completely amateur at this stuff still, and I don't have any experience teaching other folks an instrument, so it's hard for me to say with any certainty that we should be teaching it one way or another I guess.
> This is why learning guitar when I was younger was so difficult to me
I agree. The downvoted op is right in a way. Guitarists have a way to make things difficult. Just learn to play the 1 octave major scale/arpeggio, and triads, then 7th shells. The guitar is relative, a 1 octave scale on a guitar is the same, on keyboard it's positional.
However it's worth mentioning that I think Berklee does teach patterns, and a few jazz guitarists say to learn it too. It almost seems like learning guitar is not as worked out as other instruments. Everybody that gets good winds up having to learn all the things other guitarists have had to figure out over years after they rote learned it.
This looks super awesome! I just tried it in Chrome however, and after a minute of playing the game it just drops me back to the game library screen. Love the idea though!
Yeah, it was happening on Super Mario Kart. I just tried Super Mario RPG and didn't have any issues. Let me know if I can get you more info or help with a repro.
This. Interviewing is a COMPLETELY different game in the tech industry. Some people spend a lot of time and are very good at this game.
Also my naïve impression is that the market is pretty flooded right now with candidates with impressive-looking credentials (i.e. ex-FAANG employees) from numerous large layoffs, so I wouldn't be surprised if getting a job right now is more challenging than it was a year ago. I have heard anecdotally though that there's still abundant opportunity, but I'm not sure how that nets out. Maybe it just means that the top tier, most desirable jobs are super hard to get right now, but everything below that is pretty much the same? I'd be curious to hear other folks experiences.
I think Dell has pretty good support for this, I had a pretty old Dell model before my current monitor and ddc worked fine with it. I now have an AORUS FO48U and it also supports it. I'm not sure it's always listed as a feature though when you're buying a monitor so it might be tricky.
Well good luck then, in my experience the most free time I've ever had in my life was during college. I squandered massive amounts of that time doing things completely unrelated to education, and I definitely don't regret doing that. College isn't just about book learning after all. But still, BY FAR, college is the time of my life when I had the most free time to do whatever I wanted.
Yeah I hardcore disagree with this. Partly my fault for saying yes too much, partly my work schedule, partly being in a weed out program that really worked you to the bone.
Some semesters I was doing like 70-80 hours a week on average, split between managing clubs, homework, attending class, working part time jobs, studying. One week I remember being busy from 7am to 2am for 6 days straight. a few semesters I had a lot of free time, like second semester of senior year, and first semester of freshman year, but mainly it was the gaps - after midterms, during breaks, where I had obscene amounts of free time.
Interesting. I had a very different experience. Double major, working in two labs simultaneously, active member of local ACM, interned with local startup during the school year, volunteered at a local soup kitchen. All that together was about 50 hours/week. Academics (including homework, studying, etc) was only 25 hrs/week on average. But I was very fortunate to have the advantage of not needing to work, which gave me the freedom to scale back my hours on a particularly busy week.
I learned a lot from my CS classes, but I actually felt like most of the value from the degree came from overhearing random chitchat between professors or other students and the reading more about those ideas and experimenting with them in my free time.
I had quite a lot of free time when in college, but I still feel like I had less time to pursue my interests. Reason being that the course itself was intellectually demanding while also being quite prescribed about what you had to learn. Meaning I ended up using all my mental capacity grinding through a bunch of stuff that my professors wanted me to learn, leaving me with much less time to go off and learn what interested me.
Both before and since I've had more free capacity to pursue learning for it's own sake.
Middle and high school is where a lot of students learn to stop being curious due to a lack of time. College demands far fewer hours per day, but it can be hard to forget what was taught previously.
I have to agree with you. So many of my professors have been vocally disappointed with their students for their lack of intellectual curiosity after it had been beaten out of them through the overstuffed schedules and pointless busy work of K–12.
If you are someone who is on the cusp of a better grade at university then
any
curiosity time is better invested in restudying the past exam papers. I think PhD has more of a curiosity culture
at least in the first year but I
never did one.
Also hard subjects at uni - there is only so much deep thinking you can do per day
It depends on your courseload that semester. When I was taking organic chemistry I would spend a good 8 hours in the library a day monday-thursday on top of class, which would open the weekend up for partying. Wake up at 10 for class at 11, then straight to the library with the occasional break for meals or other classes until 11pm or so, whenever I got too tired to continue. By my senior year when I was just taking interesting electives, I was totally coasting, probably throwing in 2 hours a week in the library in total.
My sense is that your program at school had a light work load - so a difference in experience. My peak workload so far in my life was at college - I had over 40 hours of class time a week which you then have to add on homework, projects and exams. It was a grind.
Since then workload has been intense of course but never comparable. I've had much more time to be able to explore personal interests since college.
Yeah, I wish I'd had "free time" in college. 60-70 hour work weeks were normal - 20 hours a week in class and then a full-time load of courseworks / readings / labs etc. I couldn't afford to take time off on weekends for the first 3.5 years. It was horrendous.
Once I started full-time work it was like a revelation - finally I don't have to work on evenings and weekends! I actually get free time to myself! I can have hobbies!
Where did you study? I was working full time while doing the university... It was HARD... but I was nowhere nearly 40Hs of class a week... unless you do the whole university in 2 years?!
That’s impressive. Between work (30 hours a week) and classes (full time credit load), I’ve never had less free time than when I was in college. And I’m speaking now as someone with 2 young kids and a full time job. Something tells me your experience is not commensurate with the standard college experience. Perhaps you didn’t have a full time job or only took part time credits?
> Something tells me your experience is not commensurate with the standard college experience.
I know very few university students with significant work commitments.
In the US, the stereotypical college student is not also holding down any kind of job. Maybe 5-7 hours of "work study" (light work running the reference desk at the library or working in the dining hall).
Frankly, I doubt the majority could do learn a lot and also work a significant number of job hours.
At a community college, it would be very different - most students also holding down jobs, I would guess. At a flagship state university, I would be very suprised.
Evidence in [1]... about 30% of full time students are working 20+ hours/week. Also apparently I was wrong about the low hours being typical; less than 10% are working but < 10 hours/week.
Yeah, this. I don't have any data to support this, but when I was in school, MOST people didn't have close to full-time jobs. I had a job where I probably worked 10 hours during the week at night and some full 8 hour shifts on the weekends. Most of the people I went to school with (and I would assume, maybe wrongly, that most people in better schools than I went to) didn't work AT ALL while they were in school, it was just those of us less than wealthy folk who actually had to work to have spending money and money to pay for books etc. I don't think my work load was overly demanding, but I was a Comp Sci major, fwiw.
Sounds like you weren’t in a competitive program that constantly tried to get people to drop from college altogether.
I was. Didn’t have anywhere near the free time and the lack of stress I do post-college. Helps that I also make a good chunk of change rather than living off a relatively small stipend in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
This was true for my undergrad, but my graduate program demands almost all of my free time, including weekends. Although, this may mostly be due to a drastic change in field of study from the two (social science to computer science) where I probably have to dedicate more time than those that already have knowledge/experience in this field.
I worked 10-15 hours a week (and somewhat more in the Summer) for about three years of college and can confirm, still the most free time and lowest stress ever. Worst, by a mile, was high school, and I even had a pretty good experience there. Far worse than working a full time job while having multiple young kids, even. Worse than before we had kids but when we made very little money and struggled to pay the bills every month. High school is terrible.
This is pretty much exactly what I do now, but since I'm unfamiliar with the codebase I often find myself thinking "where was that spot where this particular data came from?" or "where was that function defined again?" and I just waste a bunch of time & mental energy trying to track it down. Couple that with the fact that this particular codebase uses JavaScript with a custom / modified module system so you can't just cmd+click to go to definition and it's a real headache. It's also exacerbated here by having LOTS of files that have very similar names (Page, PageView, BaseView, BaseViewModel, config.model, config.view are a few examples...) and these are all just under one directory for a given component, if you look there are tons of components all with the same file names, which is a pet peeve of mine, but we all have our preferences I guess. Plus go to definition is great, but sometimes you go down a path that isn't fruitful and it takes a bit to get back to where you wanted to be, and often while I'm going down a path I want to annotate parts of it so it's easier to remember what each piece is doing. Anyway, it seems like bookmarks are a pretty good solution for this in vs code (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=alefragn...), I just wish I could organize the bookmarks a little bit better than just "show me them by file" or "show me then in an unordered random list".
Edit: Oh and I would normally use the debugger A LOT to trace through the code and understand the call stack and params, but another crappy thing about this project is that it generates a massive JS bundle and it crashes the app I'm testing if I try to put debugger statements in...JS ftw
Ha, that's kind of where I'm leaning now, I thought of the same thing in another response in this thread. It seems like it's lightweight enough to stay out of my way but flexible enough that I can have some control over how I organize things, and being able to quickly add some prose to describe why that particular link is relevant would be great.
Yeah, I also don't really like splits, they just don't feel very scalable. If I just need to open one or two other files they're fine temporarily, but more than that and everything becomes too small. Maybe if there were something that let you zoom in and out, like a Figma canvas, so that you could organize the files spatially in some order that makes sense to you (this is another thing that annoys me about just opening tabs in my editor, they're never really ordered in any meaningful way). If you could do this not just for files but for selected lines / ranges / functions / classes to keep things tightly scoped that would be awesome. I believe this sort of thing was something the original LightTable video explored, but I don't believe it was ever actually implemented.
I use these as well, but maybe something I didn't articulate well is that it's often useful to remember where I've been. One thing that I haven't played with in VS Code but that bites me a lot (and sorry, I don't know the proper name for this setting/feature) is that often when you're navigating you're doing so in the same vs code tab. If I remember to double-click the tab it'll hang around, but that's a pretty janky workflow, and I don't ALWAYS want to do that. Ctrl+- works if I hop into a method/function and want to look at it briefly and hop out, but I find if I go more than a couple levels deep it would be nice to mark certain areas as I go so I can easily get back to them.
Sometimes I do this by just adding a comment, and now that file will at least show up in version control as changed and I can get back to it if I need to, but that's also a little bit janky and I have to be careful I don't leave that cruft around on accident when I commit.
I'm trying out a bookmark extension in VS code and we'll see how it goes, I'm already a little bit annoyed by it in that it doesn't seem to let me organize the bookmarks in any way, so it might be somewhat useful for temporary spelunking, but I won't for example be able to save these bookmarks to refer to them later, which seems like it could be useful.
Sourcegraph has this concept of "Notebooks" which allows you to add files and intermix markdown, which feels like a pretty cool idea, and if I'm just reading code in Sourcegraph it's great, but when I'm in my code editor and making changes I don't want to bounce over to another tool. Maybe it's as simple as keeping some sort of Markdown file open that I write into and then add links to file line numbers as I go, I haven't tried that but I suppose it wouldn't be the worst, and allows me to organize the links in any fashion I see fit.
Sourcegraph Notebooks PM here. We have a notepad feature you can enable that basically does what you're describing and allows you to create a notebook from the saved content in one click. There's a button to enable the notepad on the notebooks page (https://sourcegraph.com/notebooks or https://<your-sg-url.com>/notebooks).
I just discovered this feature so I haven't played with it enough yet but it seems to tick all my boxes. One thing that I found confusing about the UX though was that I didn't realize at first I could continue searching around and adding content, so when I added my first bit of content and clicked "Create Notebook" and then subsequently navigated somewhere else and wanted to add content I ended up creating another notebook instead of adding it to a pre-existing one. Or sometimes I come back and want to add more content to an existing notebook, but I don't see how to do that.
That’s great feedback, thanks. We deliberately kept adding to existing notebooks out of scope for the first Notebooks release but had a feeling it would be requested pretty quickly.
It might also be more intuitive to clear out the notepad after a notebook is created but curious what you think.
Thanks again for the feedback, feel free to reply here if you have any other thoughts.
I find the Peek windows handy (the default experience for Find All References and the difference between Go to Definition and Peek Definition).
I find VS Code's Outline tool quite handy. By default it's hidden away at the bottom of the main Explorer tab, but you can turn on the Secondary Sidebar (now with a button at the top of the window) and drag it over on to the Secondary Sidebar to really give it room to grow and not fight your file explorer view for space. (Timeline I also like to move into the Secondary Sidebar as a good place for it.)
Outline resembles the Breadcrumbs at the top of an editor and even if you don't have great bookmarks, being able to quickly expand to a specific symbol in a file is handy.
Also Back/Forward mostly work pretty well in VS Code. If you've got the extra mouse buttons that can be used for Back/Forward in a browser those work well, as does the most common browser shortcut Alt+Left and Alt+Right. In very recent versions you can right click the Title Bar and turn on the Command Center and it gives you Back and Forward buttons there in the title bar, even more like a browser.
(ETA: holding Ctrl+Tab gives you a History menu in the order of Back/Forward sort order.)
> One thing that I haven't played with in VS Code but that bites me a lot (and sorry, I don't know the proper name for this setting/feature) is that often when you're navigating you're doing so in the same vs code tab. If I remember to double-click the tab it'll hang around, but that's a pretty janky workflow, and I don't ALWAYS want to do that.
This is called "Preview". If you don't double click to open the file, you can double-click the tab itself later if you decide to want to keep it open. (There's also Keep Open on the context menus and it has a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+K Enter.)
You can entirely disable Preview with the Settings key "workbench.editor.enablePreview". (Set it to false. Or uncheck it in the UI.) You could make it apply to only a specific workspace while you are trying to navigate it by adding that to a .vscode/settings.json file in the project (though this specific Setting, I probably would try to avoid checking in to your project repo to avoid annoying other users).
I've since gone back and learned a bit of music theory as an adult and it's been super helpful understanding the underlying principles so I can work things out vs. having to just memorize things without understanding why they work.
I think then you can go practice the various scale patterns and get good at them with the knowledge that you can always work out the scale from first principles if you need to.
Different strokes for different folks though I guess, I'm sure there's an argument to be made for not overwhelming folks with too much theory out of the gate. Not sure if I had started with a bunch of theory if I would have stuck with it when I was younger.