My friends and I have been toying with the idea of personalized (cycling indoor) training using AI to assist with planning and tailoring workouts around a busy schedule and ambitious goals, so I decided to build an experiment to see how it would work.Cycling is a sport that's very hard on the body and many cyclists burn out or get frustrated when trying to improve, so my hypothesis is that...
Coming from a country outside the Western world, I became aware of burnout as a psychological phenomenon in the middle of my 20s. Since I moved abroad, I've witnessed burnout in friends and colleagues, and its effects on them have genuinely terrified me because I am relatively ambitious and hard-working, but perhaps not experienced enough to prevent an eventual burnout, and I'm starting to feel...
I lived in the countryside as a kid and saw several generations of our farm cats come & go. We never found out where and when they died, but all of them lived a long (cat) life and I‘m pretty sure most of them died of old age.
My assumption is that humans can feel that their time is coming as well, and apparently the experience seems to be similar for all of us.
Book of Proof by Richard Hammack. A great introduction to proofs in mathematics. The book is available free online [0], but also I bought the physical version because I really enjoyed it.
I can see a pattern emerging in his career.
I was young (25) and naive, with no experience in business within the family. But what was really crucial back then was that I lacked a mentor who’d make me aware of the risks before letting the sharks in.
It took me three years to bounce back and start something new. On the positive side, I learned a lot.
Both require you to be disciplined and dedicate time on a daily basis, otherwise you won’t get further.
Having the time to address this is absolute luxury to me. Only when I became relatively rich (I‘m coming from a poor background) could I consider learning Leetcode problems. Before that point, I was learning whatever earns me survival money.
These days I‘m studying physics and mathematics while having a cushy engineering job and I‘m so genuinely happy that I can sit down and study for hours without having to worry about making ends meet at the end of the month. It’s a blessing.
I have the feeling that all the bitterness towards this interview process comes from people who refuse to do the initial investment of time to learn the foundation for solving coding challenges. Once you go through and understand a few hundred coding challenges, things start to repeat themselves and then it just takes practice and consistency.
Personally, I find coding challenges fun and even quite enjoyable at times, so I don’t see why it’s a waste of time to get good at them. At the very least, I learned a lot about Java doing them than I would‘ve learned if I did a side project where I‘d need to use some framework or library that’s based on Java.
Edit: grammar
Author here. Perhaps I put a little bit too much drama in the classic Eastern European issues. I'm not complaining, I do acknowledge the advancement of Bulgaria's economy (it's definitely not like the 90s as far as the narratives go), but I'm not very satisfied with the competitiveness of our country on the global scene. Take Singapore for example - it's more deprived than Bulgaria in numerous aspects, yet it is one of the technological powerhouses of Asia. I'm not focusing on the problems; I'm focusing on what could be improved and leveraged from the current situation.
> ...there are numerous large-scale companies w/ strong regional presence, as well various small outsourcing shops...
True, but for how long have the co-working spaces been around? Around 5 years. Healthy companies? Since we joined the EU (~10 years). All the companies before that period (Sciant, Telerik, Chaos Group etc.) were made of a bunch of extremely talented young people willing to work almost for free in order to gain reputation and recognition from outside. Plus, the working conditions you mentioned apply only for no more than 20,000 people employed in the tech industry in Bulgaria. The majority of the population is in survival mode.
There is much to be improved.
That's exactly the thought that hits me every morning I wake up. That "feeling" that you're in the right place and in the right time to build some truly revolutionary technology. I hope that I start getting this feeling here, in Bulgaria, soon. Otherwise I'll have too many reasons to emigrate for a few years.
I absolutely agree with your opinion. There are companies like Telerik (acquired by Progress Software) and Chaos Group which have earned our country a formidable reputation on the global tech scene and it's relatively easy to get recognized. The overall ennvironment is good too - the country has grown a lot since it became member of the EU. Despite all this, it doesn't have the extremely competitive atmosphere, the "evolve or die" mindset of the more developed markets. There is nobody who's going to push you out or take you over. Personally I think such type of atmosphere would have let us grow much faster and innovate quicker.
> Nevertheless, the rest of the post shows that it is in fact easier to start a business in Bulgaria.
I'm not implying the opposite. It's easy to start a run-of-the mill software development outsourcing business and sustain it, but with such "immature tech scene", it's very difficult to evolve it in something bigger, and that's a big problem.
p.s I'm the author of this article