< prev 27 Feb 2015 to 27 Feb 2015 next >

Posts from 27 February 2015

  • Learning to ask for help

    Years ago, I was having a fight with a girlfriend, and when things had settled a bit, we had a level-headed conversation about what I needed to do.

    One of the notes I wrote myself was to the effect of "Learning to ask for help, and getting it". Meaning, when I had problems, I expect(ed) to be able to deal with them myself, but that's not how being alive works. No one really get anywhere themselves.

    A couple years ago, my boss sent me a curt email saying that I needed to start asking people for help earlier on in the troubleshooting process, because it can save time. There's a balance between being helpless and always asking others to do your work for you, and never asking for any help. This is, basically, knowing the right time to ask for help even though you could solve your problems on your own.

    I was taking some pride in never asking for TA help on solo days, because there was never any problem that took longer than a couple minutes, but there were always more problems.

    I write about the future of schooling, and how teachers and TAs are education multipliers: they help lead students to good avenues of attack, and know when to step back and let them struggle a bit.

    Last night, I asked Jonathan for advice on an issue with the assets pipeline, and over the course of three quick interactions I was able to generate the behavior I wanted. (Why does every problem fix, including home DIY work, seem to require three tries? Is there some truth to fairy tales?)

    There is no intrinsic virtue to being able to do everything on your own, because the guy who doesn't have that hangup will far surpass you, even though you might feel more self-reliant.

  • Buggin'

    One of those things… I assumed Wordpress was a mature platform, and it is, but there's a bunch of weird interactions between, for instance, Markdown and post by email. In this case, the post I wrote last night cut off early, and it took me a second to figure out why, but I think I know.

    There's an old standard for signature lines that dates back to Usenet and the early days of email. A signature would be demarcated by "– ", that is, two dashes and a space on a line by themselves. Wordpress is supposed to prune off email signatures… but.

    Markdown uses multiple dashes on a line by themselves as a horizontal separator.

    Google, I think, trims excess whitespace.

    Can you guess where this is going?

    I used post by email once a couple weeks ago, and my email signature got attached to the blogpost. I used post by email last night, and everything below my first horizontal separator got pruned. lol what?

    Tumblr has issues, but their markdown and post by email were about all I could ask for—simple, clean, error-free. Wordpress is … leaving a lot to be desired.

< prev 27 Feb 2015 to 27 Feb 2015 next >