• 3 Posts
  • 124 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Looking back on my career, submitting your first merge/pull request can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks (we’re talking about 8+ hour work days). And that’s at companies that have an onboarding process and coworkers you can ask for help and explanations about the code base, architecture etc.

    Getting into someone else’s code (this may include your past self) is almost never easy and often feels convoluted, because it’s very difficult to see the context that existed at the time when the code was written. And by context I mean everything that influenced the decision to write lines the way they were written, including undocumented discussions, necessary but non-obvious workarounds, understanding of the problem and solution space by the dev, general state of mind of the person writing the code and more.

    Don’t beat yourself up because you couldn’t contribute in just a few hours.

    I would first reach out to the devs on IRC/Discord/Matrix and express interest to contribute and see how they react. You don’t know if they would even accept your PR, so I wouldn’t do too much work upfront.

    Then, when they are open to work with you, find out if they are willing to help you ease into the code. What files should you study to implement the changes that you’ve discussed earlier, any considerations that are not obvious, is there legacy code that you shouldn’t touch etc.

    It’s important to keep in mind that (collaborative) software development is more than just being able to write code. And a lot of the surrounding work is not very glamorous or fun.

    I hope that helps and wish you good luck! 🤞


  • I am sorry to hear that your dietary choices are not being respected by the hospital staff.

    What country are you in? I would have assumed hospitals in most developed countries should be able to cater to different dietary needs. What would they do if someone had a sever allergic reaction to certain ingredients? Tell them to just starve?

    I don’t have anything helpful to say. Hope you get better soon.







  • I love this. I’ve never thought about what my trajectory would have looked like, if I had been shamed in person.

    Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure shame is really the emotion that I was feeling before going vegan. I think having to face the reality of my actions probably elicited guilt rather than shame, because there was no social aspect to it (I don’t even know who wrote the sentence in the first place).

    I think shame might be more effective for behavior change when it comes from one’s social context. There were times when I was younger, I wouldn’t mention I was vegan around coworkers, because I was ashamed of what they might have thought (yes, I’ve eaten vegetarian meals after becoming vegan).

    On that token, I would say shame might only “work” in social settings, where the majority is vegan already. But that would probably not make someone believe in animal rights. Rather it might influence a person’s actions while in that setting.

    Thank you for your well thought out reply. You’ve changed by mind 😄

    Btw, I’m sorry to hear that you experienced a lot of shame in your childhood. I hope your doing better nowadays.