And probably beneficial for them. Their natural instinct is to ask for help. Many times I can't get there immediately and so they ultimately figure it out themselves. Once I figured out this "trick" I started doing it more often. I suppose most parents figure this out along the way.
My 9-year-old is playing Tears of the Kingdom right now and I've noticed he's getting better and better because I'm not jumping in to help him.
I remember part of my new manager training at my company started with "Be a lazy manager". The idea being that you should help your directs build muscles to try to help them self first, and then ask for help.
Be prepared for the “You were never there for me” blame later in their lives. I had the same approach with mine (they were smart kids!) and when they grew up they blamed me for not being there and helping them more. Ce la vie.
What I imagine here is following a middle path between being too eager to help their kids to the point of doing everything for them, and being unhelpful and absent. Finding that middle path requires prudence and proper engagement, because you have to know when to let the bicycle go and when to hold on.
Helicopter parents tend to fall into the former category, because they stifle their child's maturation and competence by depriving them of the challenges that build confidence and agency. It encourages dependence and self-centeredness. It's criminal and produces a class of people that will pay the salaries of therapists for decades.
The opposite extreme is parental absenteeism which is like a football match without a referee. Someone always influences children - their habits, their worldview, their attitudes - and if a parent isn't doing that, then someone else is, and perhaps not someone who should. Absenteeism is thus a dereliction of parental duty, as parents serve as examples from whom children learn, even more by how they behave and live than by what they say. We are social animals, and a healthy family life produces healthy people.
And by following this middle path well, you also teach your children to be able to be appropriately helpful to others themselves and in this manner, able to discern when help is appropriate and when it is not. Practical reason is central to the ethical life.
Turns out the “correct” answer was to be there to help them cognitively figure it out by helping them ask the right questions. At least that’s what the therapist said. I guess I don’t mind as they both turned out fine. Way better than the trauma I had so I would say it’s a win.
I went digging through some old folders out of curiosity and I still have things I wrote in middle school and high school. (Not code, although I was starting with HTML at the time but that's lost to Geocities.)
Anyway, a bit of an indirect answer to your question but I found a paper I worked on in November 2000 (when I was a junior in high school). The works cited is below. None of the links still work. It could have been completely plagiarized and no one would know!
Downtime / doing nothing is so crucial for letting your brain marinate over a problem or idea! Leave those gaps be.
Option B: Have a side project or personal you're hacking on with Claude/Codex and pop back to the terminal to respond to the latest prompt / get in cranking on the next feature.
This is cool! I love stuff like this, it's fun to use stuff like this to see the passage of time a little more clearly.
Similar ideas:
I've been keeping notes in Roam Research for nearly 6 years now. Whenever I'm writing notes for that day, I'll go back to the same day 5, 4, 3, etc. years ago and see what I was working on.
I also recently went through the trouble of getting all of my running data into a spreadsheet. I started in 2018 and have gone through three different apps. Currently on my to-vibe-code-list: a little app that takes all of my runs from Apple Health and makes a neat dashboard showing pace, miles, routes, etc. over the years.
1. Why not use supabase auth? I’m using it for a little project and generally like how much you get out of the box with supabase. Curious why you like stack auth.
3. Why 3 analytics tools? I’m thinking about implementing post hog in a little project I’m running right now, and generally would like to avoid having to have a lot of tracking!
Could you explain more about your metabase skill and how you use it? We use metabase (and generally love it) and I’m interested to hear about how other people are using it!
Its really just some rules around auth, some precached lookups (eg databases with ids and which to use), and some explanations around models and where to find them. Everything else it pretty much knows on it own.
I have the same exact problem! I'm super impressed by people who can read books and memorize the details. And I tried really hard to do the same.
So here's a different perspective on solving this problem: don't bother!
I'm sure you have other strengths. Lean into those and don't worry about trying to be the guy/girl that can recall details from books. Life gets much easier when you don't try to fight things that don't come natural to you.
So what do you do about your non-fiction reading? Keep reading! You may enjoy it more when you're not trying to read with an agenda and you're relieved of the burden of trying to memorize. Even if you can't recall the details, your brain will be folding ideas from what you're reading into the things you're working on and you'll have breakthroughs.
What happens for me is that I read some books that resonate so much for me that they become my "bibles." I can't remember all the details, but they're helpful to me in certain periods of my life. I come back to them every few years or when I think they'll be particularly helpful for something going on in my life and I get to read them with fresh eyes and new perspective.
I personally prefer Gsuite + Slack. But I've been on that "stack" for 15 years (although I also still use excel). Hard to say if it's better, because someone coming from the 15 years in the Microsoft world may prefer that.
One anecdote -- I just recently left a large, public company (that acquired the startup I worked for) and they were in the process of evaluating a move to Microsoft (to the point that they migrated some teams over). They opted not to make the switch and there were a lot of complaints from the testing group.
For a 40 person startup, I think two ways about it:
First, I cannot imagine this is the biggest priority right now. Presumably you're trying to hit some growth target. Is this really the thing holding you back? If you're in survival mode, this feels a lot like moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic.
But Second, if you're gonna do it, it's going to be a heck of a lot easier to do it at 40 people than at 60, or 80, or 100.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend doing it unless the ROI looks really, really good. If I was an investor or advisor it would drive me up the wall to hear that this is what you're distracting yourself with right now. And it's one of those problems that when you hit $MILESTONE, you'll have the money/team in place to handle making the migration go smoothly.
This works well with children too!
And probably beneficial for them. Their natural instinct is to ask for help. Many times I can't get there immediately and so they ultimately figure it out themselves. Once I figured out this "trick" I started doing it more often. I suppose most parents figure this out along the way.
My 9-year-old is playing Tears of the Kingdom right now and I've noticed he's getting better and better because I'm not jumping in to help him.
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