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I'm not sure if it would help, but you might get in touch with an old friend of mine from college; I became an engineer, she diverged into a brilliant software developer. Her company is thriving and I can barely understand her language anymore, though her webinars are interesting. https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-geller-856491116/[^]
Will Rogers never met me.
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My personal blog has a page devoted to autodidactism though I did not know it was it was referred to as such. The main point of the article is that autodidactism has no pitfalls. Well maybe this one exception.
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Oh there are other issues, like having large or critical holes in one's knowledge vs having been taught formally, and probably the worst one - getting it wrong - learning something incorrectly, and then having expended all that effort only to have to unlearn it and relearn it the right way.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Thank you for your no doubt useful thoughts. Please permit me to consider further. I have never understood why an instructor reciting information exactly identical to that which can be obtained from any number of text authors is superior. If you wish to read my brief essay on the subject the address is How to Save on College Tuition (and get a superior education in the offing)[^]
re/ "getting it wrong" it seems to me technical subjects have an advantage id est the problems at the end of each chapter can either be solved or not exempli gratia either the software / circuit performs as required or not.
On a personal note I hated / hated / hated taking notes. If I wished to train as a note taking secretary I would have trained as such though a fellow student once told me doing so helps her greatly. I recall one lecture in particular I refused to take notes but instead listened intently and found for onceI understood everything perfectly.
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I'd say it's not superior. It has its own problems, like a tendency to box you into the instructor's point of view.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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One of the points made in my essay is the superiority of autodidactism is at least due to the opportunity to read multiple authors. I discovered even in specialized technical fields different authors have new and different things to say even on the same subject.
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I've got a bit of a "not invented here syndrome" (other people's work often just doesn't cut it) and so I created my own time registration and invoicing software for use at my company.
Usual story, it started out as Excel, migrated to a database, then a simple .NET Core application born from hopes and dreams of which I've realized maybe a third.
So this application works really well for me and my coworkers, but it has some quirks and lots of stuff I don't use or haven't finished...
Decided to fix them, then decided to completely modernize it, then decided to cut the fluff, then decided to add features I was really missing...
And a business partner of mine has been nagging me to let him use it for years now so I'm making it multi-tenant (he's my best salesman, bringing in two of my best clients, and I don't even pay him, so I guess I owe him one).
Haven't had so much fun programming in years!
I've been programming instead of gaming, so that's really saying something! 
And then when all was good and well my girlfriend suddenly broke up with me this week (we weren't in a fight or anything, but she just lost her romantic feelings for me and thought of me more as a good friend) 
It's only been three days, and usually I wouldn't even have seen her in that time either, but I'm already missing her and somehow the house feels empty even though she was around only about half of the time.
Well, sh*t happens and I've been through breakups before so I'll probably survive this one as well.
At least I've found a sort of new purpose in my software and I'm not bored 
Oh yeah, and I've been losing weight (after gaining 10 kg in about a year time! ) and this morning I was "suddenly" 1.5 kg lighter (after watching my eating and hiking and biking for weeks, mind you)
I've already lost about 5 kg in as many weeks (really going for it)!
I guess with my girlfriend breaking up I've even lost 65 kg (quote Ross from Friends: "ah, humor based on my pain, ah, ha, ha") 
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We have lived a parallel life up to the point where your girlfriend left.
I found myself in a sole proprietor retail given quickbooks desktop and a laser printer with the un-spoken words of ok, get after it.
Oh, hell no and got to writing my own POS webapp to support daily life in the little shop.
It also grew the same way as yours, going multi-tenant along the way etc.
Best of blessing going forward bro. 
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Ron Anders wrote: Oh, hell no and got to writing my own POS webapp to support daily life in the little shop.
1,000%. If you're a small business, reinventing the wheel while getting started is lacking focus at beast and a waste of resources at worst.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: lacking focus at beast
Now I'm trying to find an excuse to use this expression in conversation  .
Software Zen: delete this;
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Ha ha ha ha. Yay typos. 
Jeremy Falcon
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Sander Rossel wrote: I created my own time registration and invoicing software for use at my company
I learned Classic ASP over 23 years ago writing a little customer lookup utility. Over the years, it grew to handle other stuff like billing, customer portal, bug tracking/reporting, and customer contacts (remotes/issues/offline work, etc.) That's the nice thing about 'rolling your own'.
Sorry to hear about your breakup. ![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.freetls.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
BTW, did you ever get those Azure DNS issues worked out from last week?
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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kmoorevs wrote: BTW, did you ever get those Azure DNS issues worked out from last week?
Sort of, I had to ask the Azure problem to my customer because we don't have full access to their network and DNS, so they should be the ones to fix it.
The localhost issue was a weird one.
I attributed the problems to differences in different (local?) DNS servers and fixed it by adding the following to my hosts file:
127.0.0.1 sub1.localhost
127.0.0.1 sub2.localhost So it's fixed, but not the satisfying sort 
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Sander Rossel wrote: I've got a bit of a "not invented here syndrome" (other people's work often just doesn't cut it) and so I created my own time registration and invoicing software for use at my company.
You sure that's the best use of your time for a small business, man? QBO will handle both of these and just about any CPA can work with QBO exports. Remember, just because you can do something, doesn't mean you always should.
Sander Rossel wrote: I've been programming instead of gaming, so that's really saying something!
Noice
Sander Rossel wrote: And then when all was good and well my girlfriend suddenly broke up with me this week (we weren't in a fight or anything, but she just lost her romantic feelings for me and thought of me more as a good friend)
Sorry to hear that buddy. Not sure if you wanna hear my thoughts on the matter or just need to let it out. So, I'll shut up and just say sorry to hear that.
Sander Rossel wrote: I guess with my girlfriend breaking up I've even lost 65 kg
Niiiice. I'm in a similar boat. Let myself get way out of shape. You're human. At least you're fixing it man.
Jeremy Falcon
modified 22-Jun-24 11:35am.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: You sure that's the best use of your time for a small business, man?
I'm pretty sure it's not, but time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time 
I've looked at some alternatives, but they get pretty expensive once you want time registration and invoicing and have employees.
And I'm doing with the time I've got to spare, so mainly instead of gaming.
It's a bit of a "playground" for new tech and upgrades too, though.
So I'm updating some components and checking if they're not breaking anything so we can update them for customers with minimum risk when the time comes.
Don't worry, there's still plenty of stuff I'm not doing myself
Jeremy Falcon wrote: Not sure if you wanna hear my thoughts on the matter or just need to let it out. So, I'll shut up and just say sorry to hear that.
Not really, well enough equipped emotionally and rationally to deal with this.
Jeremy Falcon wrote: Niiiice. I'm in a similar boat. Let myself get way out of shape. You're human. At least you're fixing it man.
In fact, my girlfriend was a bit of the reason I gained so much in the first place.
She likes candy and bought it.
I like it too, so I never bought it, but when she bought it I just couldn't help myself (while she could, so more for me!) 
I've been pretty much stable for years until I met her 
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Sander Rossel wrote: I've looked at some alternatives, but they get pretty expensive once you want time registration and invoicing and have employees.
There's also OSS time tracking. Granted, I never used it so it may suck.
I can give you idea of how much QBO is though. I pay around $300 a year and $50 an employee per month for payroll. I don't do any hardcore time tracking, so I don't use that package. But, according to their site it's $10-$20 a month and $10 per user. So, to go all out for 5 employees it's about $4k USD a year, but the biggest chunk of that is payroll. If you don't need that module it gets cheaper.
Granted Intuit's customer service sucks when it comes to Payroll. So, maybe I should change.
Sander Rossel wrote: It's a bit of a "playground" for new tech and upgrades too, though.
If you find something that handles Payroll and is better/cheaper than QBO, let me know please.
Sander Rossel wrote: Don't worry, there's still plenty of stuff I'm not doing myself
Noice
Sander Rossel wrote: In fact, my girlfriend was a bit of the reason I gained so much in the first place.
Been there, done that. For me it was stress in a bad relationship that's been on and off over 5 years. I'm a stress eater. So....
Sander Rossel wrote: I like it too, so I never bought it, but when she bought it I just couldn't help myself (while she could, so more for me!)
Dunno why, but even when I'm on a health kick, there's just something about junk food already being inside the home. Like, you can resist it at the store no prob, but when it's home... you can hear it calling your name... eat me... eat me... it says.
Jeremy Falcon
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Sander Rossel wrote: time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time 
Sander Rossel wrote: It's a bit of a "playground" for new tech and upgrades too, though.
Bingo, got it in 1, imo.
I too started invoicing with excel and grew to hate it, so similarly rolled my own in html. Then I got the hump with the pdfs the virtual printer was producing so rolled-up my sleeves and wrote a pdf creation library. In javascript.
I'm in the middle of dealing with becoming frustrated at having to choose from one of the 14 inbuilt fonts. I've got a browser window open with more documents that say Apple on them than is reasonable and I've got a basic understanding of True Type Fonts, all ready to start creating a 'subset-font' which only contains the glyphs actually present in the document. Did you know that some TTFs are in excess of 25mb !?
The last invoice I created with Excel has a single line-item and is about 37.5kb, while the ones my library is bashing out often have about 20 line-items and weigh-in at about 2kb The font I started using in Excel was Calibri. The TTF file for that bad-boy is something like 8mb.
No. I'm not a complete masochist. I did grab someone else's library to handle the FLATE compression used in the document. (but only after becoming frustrated with my inability to create a compatible bit-stream)
Even entering the 20 or so line-items for each client every month is getting a bit old now. Next step is to write a mobile-app with access to SMS messages, since I send "start work" and "stop work" messages and bill by the minute instead of 15 min blocks, as is the norm with the work I'm doing.
But none of the software-dev is what I consider uselessly wasted time. It's all been as Sebastian Lague puts it, a coding-adventure.
Coding Adventure: Rendering Text - YouTube
/ramble
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Sander Rossel wrote: time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time
Thank you, I'm adopting that as my new life's slogan.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
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Sander Rossel wrote: I guess with my girlfriend breaking up I've even lost 65 kg
Well you're not supposed to be carrying her in your arms when you get on the scale.
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This is what the Boeing CEO has said in the Senate hearing. Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun faces grilling at Senate hearing - YouTube [^]
Having a non-engineer as the CEO of a life-critical high-tech engineering company; with that CEO having senior engineers advising him on technical matters - seems to be sub-optimal, isn't it? What value can such a CEO add in say, a design review meeting? What engineering judgement can he have?
IMHO, it should be the other way around - the CEO of such an engineering company should be an engineer, with senior business people advising him/her on stock market and other business matters.
What say you?
modified 22-Jun-24 0:21am.
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I say "Yay". However were not both NASA Shuttle disasters the result of decisions by trained engineers.
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Agree.
However one point. NASA missions are kindof exploratory/research type of missions, and not as commercial as passenger aviation.
Research has its own risks/rewards, and not always guaranteed of success.
Whereas this is time tested, more than a century old aviation industry, where they are expected to (at least) maintain status quo, as regards passenger safety.
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No, the shuttle disasters were a result of management interfering in design and safety decisions. Worth a watch if you’ve never seen it
The Challenger Disaster - YouTube[^]
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Businesses aren't about the products - they are about the units. A CEO markets units, he doesn't really care what they are units of.
Sadly, the accountants are in charge of most businesses, and they know "the cost of everything and the value of nothing" (the late, great pTerry).
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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All accountants know is how to cut costs and so boost the next quaterly dividend and consequently their bonus. Their thinking is very short term. They don't appreciate what such short term thinking is doing to the company in the long term.
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
modified 22-Jun-24 10:34am.
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