Dgplug

More Gaiman truisms for me. He talks about writing. Holds true for all of my endeavours though. lazynoodlepuff asked: Hi Neil, I wonder what could tell not native speaker like me. I struggle with writing anything. Words don’t flow in my native language and in English it’s even more difficult. Sonetimes I struggle with every sentence. But I really want to create things in English and be a part of English-speaking culture. Is this too much to try learn not only to write but also write in another language? I feel like I am so far behind everyone and have to try so hard just to keep up (I moved to the UK to study) ...

For me. For posterity. From Neil Gaiman. miriams-song asked: Hey Neil. Someone recently told me that because I’m not ethnically Jewish (I’m a conversion student set to be “official” within the next year), I shouldn’t be writing ethnically Jewish characters. What do you think? I’ve been actively involved with my Jewish community for years so accusations like that are pretty hurtful. As a writer of fiction part of your duty and obligation is to write characters who are not you. Write them well, write them with respect and interest. And don’t listen to anyone who tells you you aren’t allowed to write people who aren’t you. You are. ...

As the year draws to an end, here’s what the folks I follow read this year. Vishal Khandelwal, has a couple of short, sweet posts on “The Books That Made Me.” Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2. If you’ve already read (and reread) Taleb’s books, here’s a list of books he loves (and hates). Here is Ryan Holiday’s evergreen list and here’s what he was unto in 2018. Patrick Collison has a whole antilbrary. (via this ttfs episode). ...

Scott H Young on writing as a tool to sharpen your thinking. From the article … First, by jotting down your thoughts on paper, you can hold more ideas than you could in your limited working memory. This means you can more easily work through thoughts that have several parts which are difficult to keep in mind simultaneously. Second, writing allows editing. If I write down an idea, then later notice a contradiction further down the page, I can go back and edit it. Editing mentally quickly becomes exhausting as, like in the n-back task, the old information interferes with the new. ...

Today I really understood what deliberate practice was all about. What did I do today? Wrote and ran the birthday app I watched yesterday. It’s a simple app that asks you for your birthday and then tells you, how many days to or since your birthday. What did I learn? I spent at least 30 minutes hunting down and looking up errors, caused by a tiny typo. I ought to be more careful. On the other hand, while I know the basic syntax, my python vocabulary isn’t large enough yet. I still need to see what my 80/20 ratio of fluency to lookup will be. Right now I am looking up everything. I am beginning to think of programming as cooking. It’s a really good analogy and it makes programming a lot less intimidating. And finally I actually figured what deliberate practice was all about. I worked at a hard enough task that was just out of reach. As opposed to times in the past where stuff was too easy or frighteningly hard. This is a really good space to work in. My head still hurts, but it hurts in a good way 🙂 Onwards … ...

Happy Deepavali folks :) Had an easy day today. The slog yesterday paid off! What did I do today? Finished the Guess the number game app. Watched videos for the next one, the Birthday Countdown App. What did I learn? Have to be wary with while loops and where I choose to exit them. Also I should always initialise them with some value that is not in the answer / solution range. I can break my code into functional pieces. This piece of code doing one thing and that one doing that. These little mini programs of code are called … functions. I felt like Hansa when I realised this. When you ask the user for any input, it’ll always come in as a string. You need to convert it, to the format you need. Onwards … ...