Not really related to what I said but I'll bite. Let me try phrasing it in a different way, if someone asked you to, in addition to doing your own job, do someone elses, but instead of paying you for that additional work said you'd get great "exposure" and a future reward, would you jump at that chance?
I know many people that have because they care, they are hungry, they want to advance, they can do higher level things and want to prove themselves, etc. and the vast majority of them have gotten nothing for their trouble but extra work. We live in a world where working hard is always encouraged and its virtues extolled but rarely rewarded.
Nice comparison. When I was living in China, I'd encounter someone who forgot how to write the characters for a word on a weekly basis. I think the difference is that with Latin alphabets you can still misspell something, and having gotten it down on paper, still rely on phonetics to convey your meaning.
Alphabet is such an underrated invention. It's probably higher in significance compared to the invention of wheel. It's the original "bicycle of the mind". For example, Korea pivoting from Chinese characters to its own alphabet or Hangul is very well documented including the positive effects it has in the much improved Korean literacy and civilization after the conversion. Fun facts anyone can learn Hangul alphabet in a single day if they wanted to but the same cannot be said to Chinese characters. If your mother tongue is Korean (e.g Korean American) that only just started learning, it only take one day turnover from illiterate to literate.
Scripts being the main driver of literacy is a pet peeve of mine. It's not the script, it's the schooling system. The high rates of literacy in modern states are just a result of the school system - Japan has a high literacy rate, for example, and their writing system is either the worst in the world or close to it.
That said, the characters are a whole boatload of unnecessary extra effort, and as a student of the two languages, the artificial illiteracy created by kanji, where I often just can't read words I've known for years, is simply maddening. Not having to wrestle with characters does free up a lot of time for both native and foreign students alike.
>their writing system is either the worst in the world or close to it
Yes, it's probably the worst since even Microsoft until now still struggle to provide proper search solution for Japanese names in their Windows OS due to their multitude of writing systems.
By sheer wills of course you can make everything hard feasible but that does not means it's efficient and effective. I consider Japanese as a unique country with extraordinary people that can collectively overcome adversity, that's include a non intuitive and difficult writing systems.
If your mother tongue is Korean (e.g Korean American) that only just started learning, it only take one day turnover from illiterate to literate.
Heritage speakers (of any language, not just Korean) often have limited vocabulary and limited exposure to complex grammar. Being able to sound out words wouldn't be enough to allow a heritage speaker able to fluently read a newspaper.
How many Korean-Americans know the Korean words for things like 'legislature', 'inflation', or 'geopolitical tensions'?
The term that would cover what you mean here is regular. And that is only in regards to correct spelling. Is obviously complicated when considering that we don't have official pronunciation across all dialects for the same word. Even if we do agree on a spelling.
But it is a complete non-sequitur to lead to the modern idea that English isn't phonetic.
This is not about regular VS irregular, there are aspects of English spelling that are highly non-phonetic. It's not uncommon to have letters in words that are entirely irrelevant to the pronunciation. For example the spellings "programme" and "program" would be read the same by any English reader, and yet both persist in certain places. The s in island is completely unnecessary.
Also, the same English word can be read in very different ways by the same speaker, but in different contexts. This is most proeminent with some of the most common words in English - a, the, there, and many other connective words can be pronounced very differently by the same speaker in the same speech, depending on stress (for example "a" can be pronounced as either ə if unstressed or eɪ if stressed). And yet, there is no version of written English that differentiates these - another sign that English is not a phonetic spelling.
Of course, on the other hand, you can't say that there is no correlation between spelling and pronunciation, like you can in Mandarin and other Chinese languages.
That is what is typically meant by a regular orthography. Wikipedia also calls it deep and shallow. These are legit terms that pre-exist to this odd debate that English isn't phonetic.
Nobody that knows how to read English at a level to be on an internet forum is surprised that English has odd spelling. Many people would be deeply confused to be told that written English doesn't follow a phonetic system. Rightfully so.
TL;DR: she thought kids would like grown-up stuff but was wrong.
"Giving my kids unadulterated fun allowed me to relax, at least as much as I could as a mom of three young ones.
I'm not the type of parent who wants to spend all my time off at an indoor water park with dozens of other screaming families, but I'm learning that we need to have age-appropriate fun. And that looks different from what I'd imagined (or what I saw on social media)."
Many people can't mentally context switch for game and aren't prepared for the behavior that is required of the game from those that can. It's an assault on their world view.
For a small but complicated project I got thrown into a while ago, the only way for me to understand it was to print out all the source directly, vertically tape together the pages for a single file, and then lay them all out on a huge table. Then I took multicolored markers and started physically drawing out the call chains. I then I sers-toi the system, and also found an enraging bug: the system widely used the variables "blah_name" and "blah_id", including in many functions' parameters. Except, in one case, blah_id was passed in as blah_name and thenceforth became known as blah_name.
I don't know if an automated visualization system is possible, but you'll have to understand the whole thing before doing so. Pen and paper was the most expedient solution for me at the time.
I use pen and paper as well, but rather than print out all the source code, I write down the call stack. A calls B calls C, etc. along with the line numbers of the call. Much easier than printing out the source and you still have the IDE niceties like go to definition, find in source, etc.
This reminded when I had to maintain dozens of old 10,000 lines COBOL programs as a junior programmer. I felt so lost I made a program that would print only the names of data structures and functions. Seeing the source resumed in a handful of pages, and being able to highlight and draw on it, helped me a lot. Digital has flexibility, but sometimes paper works best.
Hah! I did the exact same thing for ages on paper and eventually evolved the system to manage my workload and context switching… I still use it a lot for going deep while debugging/understanding code. I ended up making it into an app when I broke my wrist and could still type but couldn’t hold a pen. I can’t remember if there’s rules about self promotion in comments here but it’s up at journalist mode dot com
I've done this too, taped a bunch of impenetrable code to the wall and scribbled on it with pen to figure out wtf was happening. I propose that this be called the "Pepe Silvia" debugging method since it looks like a crazy conspiracy chart. Eventually you'll figure out why nobody is getting their mail ...
I also used to do this when working on a big convoluted system. I had a conference room near my desk with all the walls completely covered in code. A big pack of multicolored highlighters is key.
I remember a whole bunch of light bulb moments when I showed other developers the "big picture". It's an awesome technique when you're forced to work on spaghetti!
First principles! I've totally done this. Especially in a large pub/sub oriented frontend codebase where it's really hard to map out where any given data could have come from
Beyond her own professional search, I'd suggest you making more time to be with the kids and handle household crap that she might be dealing with. Take things off her plate so she can recover from her previous situation and reflect and act on her future path. In my experience, this will be hard for you because you'll necessarily do less at work and have less time to improve yourself professionally and personally outside of work, but the payoff in stress reduction for your wife should be worth it in short- and medium-terms until she gets re-settled.
Background: Software engineer for over 15 years; twin 3 year-olds at home; wife is a teacher.
It will be hard, but there's ways to balance this at work - when my wife was attending a bootcamp, my work was flexible enough to let me change my hours to work early mornings and evenings on more asynchronous tasks, while I took the main 9-5 hours to handle childcare.
Everything else suffered, of course - forget improving myself, I had little time for basic maintenance! - but she graduated from bootcamp, got a job, and now has a much better career trajectory than at her previous career.
This resonates with me too. When my wife had a great career opportunity some years ago, this is roughly where it went. Unless you have deep pockets, working odd hours and managing the home ~9-5 is probably in the cards.
I found it incredibly exhausting at the time (definitely didn’t take care of myself either) but it was fortunately worth it. My wife went from soul crushing, dimly lit, repetitive, poorly paid hydrographical work for the navy to real ocean sciences. She gets to survey the coastal waters of BC, Canada, participate in technical dives, install cool tide sensing units, check out places we’d otherwise never see, and is something like 9000% happier.
I probably set my career back less than hers went forward, and ultimately, I think we’re both happier for it regardless of our earning potentials.
But yeah, what a slog. I get tired just thinking about it. To be honest, there were times where it was hard on both of us and I wasn’t sure we’d pull through! That’s why I wanted to add this note and say yes, it takes sacrifice, it’s hard, etc. Go in more prepared than I did. Above all, support the people you love. You’ll be glad you did.
This is something I like to think I'm decent about. We tend to have a fairly decent work split, but you're right that picking up a bit more would probably be a good thing. It's a bit of a balance because having something productive helps her feel better about the job search dragging on.
+1 on the health. At this point, you probably have a lot of time on your hands. Use some of that to learn how to be healthy. Exercise, food, cooking, etc.. are all deep rabbit holes to explore, so develop your baseline of knowledge and habits now so that you can fall back on them when life inevitably takes you away from them.
