I was in my late twenties before I started programming professionally. Always had super crappy jobs before that, and grew up without a lot of money, so I ended up with a fix-all-the-things mindset. I'd think something like "well, I don't have hundreds of dollars to get my truck's ignition fixed. Guess it's time to learn how ignition systems work and fix it myself before I need to goto work on monday."
It could be super stressful, but I appreciate knowing those things now that I could afford to ignore them if I wanted to.
I actually ended up getting a side job working for a stage magician because I worked for the moving company that moved his stuff. I overheard them talking about a motorcycle they used in a trick, and how it wasn't working. I told them how they could fix it and they asked if I wanted to make some extra cash fixing other tricks, which by their nature were all cobbled together one-offs.
Anything where I have to really focus on motor skills seems to work for me.
I used do indoor and outdoor rock climbing. I also used to free climb buildings, when I was younger and less risk-averse (I'm not suggesting anyone free climbs buildings; it's dangerous and illegal :P).
Right now I don't have the opportunities to do as much climbing as I'd like, and I started learning to play the violin. It has a similar effect because I have to really focus on what I'm doing, and there's no mental space for other issues. I'm also not really good enough for creating music to be a creative process. Mostly I just work on drills and scales. Doesn't really get you outside though.
Personally, if I really want to unwind my brain, I find a super pulpy book series and read it. The less intellectual the better.
This is just my personal opinion, but I really appreciate it when things like this are desktop apps.
I like having my data stored locally and having full control over what's going on and who has what. I don't want to have to worry about whether or not someone's service will be there a few years down the line, or what their uptime is.
I also like that older desktop apps feel really snappy on modern hardware. Usually, depending on the file format, it's not too hard to work out my own sync'ing setup. If I'm the only one using it, dropbox or something like that normally works.
Of course there are also online apps I really like, such as trello etc. I realize I'm giving those short shrift, with my quick list, and that there are really established apps out there with great guarantees that sure don't look like they're going anywhere, but I think you can get a vague idea as to my preference from it.
I'll definitely check out TreeSheets tonight. Appreciate the work you've done on it.
If I'm reading the source article correctly (linked below by Perixoog), it sounds like change was so subtle that the participants themselves weren't even aware of it:
"Participants were unaware of this manipulation"
"We chose to manipulate sensorimotor variability so that participants were unaware of the fact that there was any change in the task"
So not only are the tasks similar, but they're so similar that participants weren't consciously aware that they were doing something different. Wacky
They also mention that "participants strengthened skill through the re-exploration of sensorimotor space."
I wonder how large an exploration of the sensorimotor space could be while generalizing/improving the original skill. (re batting and kendo). No idea, but interesting article either way
Which makes me wonder if you can apply this as an autodidact. If you know you have made subtle changes, do the results still hold. I'd guess the answer would be yes but it could be an interesting problem.
There also might be a delta (variation of the activity) that optimizes the learning progress. My guess for that would be...change too little and you're inefficient, change too much and you are inefficient, too.
This is all speculation, on my part (certainly not an expert in this area)
In the article they say that "Contextual variability can strengthen retention [15] and generalization of skills", but that they "chose to increase sensorimotor variability while maintaining constant the original learning context."
They also mention that "attributing errors to internal sources can strengthen learning [19, 20] and generalization [21] of motor behavior"
My guess for an autodidact would be how powerful internal attribution is compared to the change in context and exploration of the sensorimotor space. Of course, they're probably not discrete, and probably also impact one another.
Sounds like some really interesting possible implications, and possibilities for further research. Really makes me want to reread the article and go through some of the articles they cite
I can't speak for the gp, but they were talking about inheriting a project/legacy code.
If I end up needing to go through legacy code, and there are a lot of gnarly, long methods/blocks, I'll usually add comments and regions to it as I go along. I'll use comments if I just want to note something, and a region if I want to note something about a region of code. It's my rough map. Being able to tell Visual Studio to arbitrarily collapse an area is handy for sketching it. The long term goal is to refactor, but it's handy as a way to quickly outline things.
It made me rethink a few of the ways I've used regions previously. As a stopgap for refactoring legacy code, though, I'm still not 100% sold.
Like a lot of articles here, the comments and the back and forth are as interesting as the answer. I think right now I'd say that, used carefully, there's nothing implicitly wrong with regions, but overall it's probably better to avoid them. Honestly, I'll probably have to do a little more digging and see where it comes out.
They're reminding me of comments in general at this point, where there's nothing implicitly wrong with them, but every time you write one you should be asking yourself if you could clearly bake that intention/information into the code itself.
When I was teaching myself to code, I was on the linux side writing ruby in vim. My first full time job was writing C# in Visual Studio. I really dig both environments, though in philosophy I think linux, vim, and the cli suit me better. I don't know. It might just be how I feel about them, and nostalgia, but it just feels nice.
I'm also wondering how VSCode would stack up against atom on linux, when writing in net languages. I use atom as my general purpose editor right now, mostly with Haskell and Python, and I really dig it. Lots of support for it, and I've started looking around it to try hacking on the editor. Never tried atom with any .net, though.
Thank you for sharing! My impressions are (along with reading user comments about it) is that VSCode currently is just as good (or even a bit better) as Atom is for asp.net core 1 development.
From sibling post:
> when dealing with those annoying UBER-Forms that tend to happen when dealing with legacy WinForms code :)
This is similar to my experience.
I use regions pretty often when I'm refactoring overgrown legacy code, especially older MVC apps (where the controllers get insane)
Basically what you said, but reversed. I use regions as a first step to regaining some kind of order, then continue to pull things apart into more properly factored classes, methods, etc. It helps me mentally map things out. Of course there're a bunch of ways you could do that, but Visual Studio has good support for folding regions, so I prefer it.
That folding is the second reason I'll use them sometimes. If I have a really awkward part of code that I'd like to fold for whatever reason, I'll occasionally use them if I think it'll make things more readable.
I agree with the idea, though. Every time I use a region I have to stop and think "am I just hiding bad design?"
I hear you. Seven year old MVC forms with five pages of inputs, backed up to a single forty column table via Entity Framework, and a controller with another five pages of arcane conditionals for binding and validations :|
It could be super stressful, but I appreciate knowing those things now that I could afford to ignore them if I wanted to.
I actually ended up getting a side job working for a stage magician because I worked for the moving company that moved his stuff. I overheard them talking about a motorcycle they used in a trick, and how it wasn't working. I told them how they could fix it and they asked if I wanted to make some extra cash fixing other tricks, which by their nature were all cobbled together one-offs.