firstworldman

Elearning project

Cloud Productions is hiring a full stack developer to help us create an elearning platform and work on a few other products in various states of readiness.

You'll take an MVP (currently in use by a few of our customers) to a market-ready state. Product currently utilizing:

Go, Fabric, AWS, MySQL and typical front-end stuff.

The main product is a leadership development tool based on the bestselling books and private executive coaching experience of psychologist Dr. Henry Cloud. The application uses video and various question types to instruct users on how to become better leaders. Clients are mostly managers and executives at medium-to-big companies, but will eventually launch to the public.

Big pluses would be experience in working on quiz-based elearning products, using data to build user dashboards.

We are a small, very close-knit team. We're all friendly, understanding, tolerant, caring people trying to build something really big and exciting. We meet up for company retreats in nice locations 3 or 4 times per year, and some of us get together to work in person for a few days at a time a couple times per year. Otherwise the position is completely remote.

Replies should start going out on Tuesday, September 5.

Send your resume and any relevant links and info to [email protected]

There are real divisions between people, socially constructed ones. That will likely always persist, and discussing categorical representation (or lack thereof) is an important part of making genuine strides toward diversity (in the workplace, in culture, etc). The goal is not to have everybody be the same, it's to make the 'thing' representative of the the diverse people that make up the 'thing'.

Do you not agree that a young black kid deserves black heroes that she can relate her own story to? Why ignore that aspect of the story?

Rather than stating that you don't know why it would be relevant to mention the man's race, why don't you just actually ask yourself the question? Why does it matter that he is black? You all are great problem solvers. I think you can come up with some interesting answers.

As an aside, my son was born 12 lb 1 oz, he now weighs 31 lbs at 5 months. The same weight as my 3 1/2 year old daughter.

Charlie Rose interviews with comedians (specifically the types that you're referring to) are one of my favorite things to fall asleep to.

When something is hard and you can't manage to get the desired result no matter how hard you try, consider that rather than to keep working 'hard', you just try something different.

I know you haven't (and couldn't, on this forum) encapsulated the breadth of all of the things you've tried to overcome this lack of meaning that you've been experiencing throughout your life. But, and please forgive me if I'm oversimplifying your search, it seems pretty clear that you've been looking in the wrong places. Trying something different doesn't necessarily mean trying a different activity, or finding a new thrill, or a new drug, or anything like that. Put simply, it means try doing something that you wouldn't otherwise do.

When you say that the people around you hate it, that's what I'm getting at when I say, 'Can you imagine what it's like being on the other side of you?' Are you giving the people close to you the access and information they need to help you? Do they know you need their care? Do they know what things they do that give you energy, and what things they do for you that are demotivating and de-energizing? Simply giving them access to 'where you're at' can do a lot to empower them to help you. You can't get through this alone. You need to do everything you can to let them know that you're working on it and that they can help.

When you say that 'everyone else seems fine', that's a symptom of the lack of authentic connections in your life. If you're like most of the people on this forum, it's possible you spend a likely unhealthy amount of time working. That makes it crucially important that you have some professional relationships that can help fuel you to do the best work you can do (for the sake of your own business, your own sanity, and just generally making the world a better place by being easy to work with), and to get through the business of being a human being within the constraints of our economy. I don't know what business you're in, but I would be shocked if you couldn't improve it by being better connected to the people you're working with.

Whatever is stopping you from improving those connections, whether it's introversion, a sense of superiority, or simply being a low-friction provider of a minimal interaction service, just be aware that there are steps that you can take to make those connections stronger. There is not nothing you can do.

The fact that happiness comes from the inside is so easily written off by so many people is a persistent and vexing concern. Think of how much you contain, honestly. Within you is all of the pain and all of the joy of every Russian novel, every bit of the dazzling, puzzling, frustrating and ecstatic complexity of every single film, poem, painting, song, etc, ever made. The degree of difference between you and me and every other human being is infinitesimally small if you zoom out just a little bit. So, if someone else is able to apply that idea that happiness originates from within, so can you. I hate myself for writing things that contrived, but it's true. For what it's worth, you may have to take someone at their word that they were able to build happiness just with what was contained within them. Trust it. It's true. Set aside the practical dilemma of working it out in steps that can be described to fit your life, and understand that it's possible.

You mention having a dozen therapists. That sucks to go through that many therapists and not find 'the one', but please keep searching. It's the same with mentors. The compounding problem of trying to attain happiness and to have massive amounts of real effort turn up little reward is a huge and understandably discouraging one.

Despite the absurd and self-aggrandizing length of this reply, I have no answers and no wisdom that couldn't be more succinctly expressed through common idioms. The only thing I can offer is my own experience, and to vouch for the experience of some people I know that were able to slough off the feeling of torpor and malaise that can set in when hopelessness comes easier than hope.

Your Rodney Dangerfield example is well appreciated. The best comedians give us the pain of the world wrapped in a bow. I have found that in my own life, I get both much happier, and also experience much more sadness and even depression as I open more and deeper connections with other people, and with the world at large. In general, you just feel more. That is one of the beautiful (and obvious) things about connecting with others... you get to feel more.

The 'road' that I mentioned sharing with you was probably a bit presumptuous on my part... the road that I was talking about was basically my own history of trying to obfuscate my needs and feelings with more-than-casual drug and alcohol use, believing that the reason 'things' weren't 'happening' had mostly to do with people/influences/circumstances/other factors outside my control, which led to blame and avoidance and some bad stuff that comes along with those things.

Your example comparing the accumulation of experiences/memories with saving Polaroids is concerning because, sure, collecting Polaroids is a bit boring if they're all the same picture, but ideally they shouldn't be. But anyway the analogy doesn't really work, because the important factor is not that they 'happened', but instead that they accumulate, which leads to deeper connections, new connections, etc.

Sorry in advance for the ridiculous length of this post.

I don't know you, and I wouldn't presume to know anything about you other than what you've revealed in your comments, but what I can say is that you've been handed enough lego blocks to build anything you want to, and it seems like you've set them aside because they're not the specific blocks that you had in mind to build the thing that you envisioned at some point in the past.

No one automatically receives happiness. But you have an obligation to work on yourself, to do better than you seem to be doing, at building a happy self out of the life that you've made. That obligation is a result of choices you've made to build a family. Like it or not, you owe it to your wife and children to do the extra work of finding the meaning and sense of significance that is absolutely there waiting to be uncovered by you, and put to use by you.

All of the extrinsic life experiences you've mentioned in your comments do not entitle you to wait for something to click, to be more than a 'yawning void of nothing'.

If what you're talking about is something that you face no matter how many good, wise, smart moves that you make, then you may need to face the reality that you need treatment for depression or some other issue.

No amount of travel or physical trials that you've put yourself through can supplant the reality that you can build for yourself by simply looking inward. In fact, it seems as though by constantly abstracting the search into various physical or worldly concerns, you've done the opposite.

Happiness and fulfillment are moving targets. Personally, I suspect that I may never get all the way there. But I've spent some time on the road you're describing, and I know it's a dead end road. It's ego, it's self-indulgence, it's blame, it's a withering loneliness that makes you a small island, one that can be described in just a few seconds with cliches, easily traversed by foot, and forgotten or ignored by others.

Whether or not you're clinically depressed, you should probably work on the quality of your relationships. Are there people that you can authentically connect with? If not, find them. They're out there. Are there people with whom your connection leaves you feeling bad or more isolated? Get rid of them. Are there people that you keep trying to connect with but it doesn't happen? Stop trying, and refocus your energy on authentic connections. Are there superficial connections that satisfy some social or validating urge that you have? Figure out whether your relationships with those people can be evolved into authentic, meaningful connections or not, and work on the good ones and discard the bad ones.

It's an absolute tragedy to waste all of the time and beautiful experiences and memories that you could be accumulating with all of the people in your life, for lack of addressing a few relatively simple and totally fixable issues.

The other issues also need to be treated. Those are comparatively complex issues... Homelessness is, by comparison, not complex. Put people in houses. As evidenced by examples in Utah (and apparently Canada too, about which I was unaware until this thread), this is the fiscally smart move. The smart move and the right move aren't always in alignment, so this should be a no-brainer.

There are likely no homeless people who actually prefer to be homeless. There are people whose lives have been so massively changed by their circumstances that adjusting to a more comfortable housing situation might take some adjustment, and probably some therapy, assistance, and monitoring.

The sticker shock of doing this is what seems to keep it from getting fixed at once, as it's apparently much easier to periodically ask for money to develop ineffective piecemeal solutions.

The letter to Ed Lee reads like a parody. It will doubtless be forgotten, but I hope that's not the case. It should be one of a few artifacts used to encapsulate the historic moment we're living in.

'Worst of all, it is unsafe.' Sure, it sucks that it's a safety hazard to area residents. Is that really the worst part though? If you think the worst part of the homeless crisis is that it makes you and your well-to-do neighbors unsafe, you should probably ask yourself what exactly makes you so important.

'My girlfriend was terrified and myself and many people ran out of the theater.' I can't judge anyone for what scares them, and sure, the incident sounds like it would have been a surprise... But this guy makes it sound like an actual monster came into the theater and ran everyone out. A homeless person came in and did something that interrupted the film. Things like this will occasionally happen in a city that has a terrible homeless problem. Justin Keller's reaction is everything you need to know that he doesn't have the emotional or psychological maturity necessary to process homelessness as an issue separate from the effect it has on himself.

San Francisco is a city rich with ideas and capital, but I don't know how you can incentivize tech-community participation in solving this crisis. I keep thinking that we've reached peak obliviousness, and then something like this letter comes along, and frankly I didn't expect to find so many people here basically affirming the sentiments. I really worry that this is how a sizable portion of SF's tech community feels, whether they admit to it or not.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop is more influential than they're ever given credit for, even now that the story is somewhat well known. And they were at the time too... If you're looking for 'pop' musicians who were influenced by those experiments in early electronics, check An Electric Storm by White Noise (band that featured Delia and Brian from BBC RWS), as well as United States of America's self-titled 1968 record. Both radical and timeless.

That's a Bowie quote I think of with unusual regularity. It appeared 16 years ago in Spin Magazine. He was asked why his then newest album wasn't as contemporary sounding as his previous album, Earthling.

It's advice that may be applicable to the projects worked on by many here as well.

This is a very strange and unqualified statement. I know a couple dozen very successful nightlife personalities/DJs/promoters who are sober... Not exactly sure what you mean by successful -- as in make it through the night? Cope with hanging out with zonked morons? Hook up with someone?

I'm not sober, personally, but I really admire people who manage to make the changes they need to make, particularly if they're involved in nightlife by necessity. It seems unusual if you go out a lot and don't know anyone by that description.

I suspect the web will eventually cannibalize GQ (not because it's bad, but because it's not specific enough), but The New Yorker will outlive us all.

I understand that hypocrisy is frustrating, but perhaps this situation is more illustrative of the fact that "The System" has so pervasively invaded free spaces (physical spaces as well as psychogeographic ones), than it is that these (or others) are just young punks who won't know any better until their older and wiser (like us -- by implication?). What criteria do their motivations not satisfy, and in what way do their actions or desires/beliefs/ideas impact you to the extent that it would provoke any reaction at all? Is it dishonest to say you're disconnecting and still wear shoes? That doesn't seem right to me.

I'm forever interested in why righteous motivations seem to automatically provoke feelings of judgement or disdain from some people, who usually make comparative observations about the relative purity of a project or intentions, against their own values and wisdom.

There are certain people for whom the simple act of someone's wanting to do something substantially different (and who knows, maybe better?) seems to be an existential threat. I'm not saying that your reaction here is that serious, but I've seen it in many others.

It just seems like there is a knee-jerk reaction from many quarters that finds any discussion about alternatives to simply accepting and living within the defined parameters of "The System", and I wonder where that often-vehement opposition comes from.

*typo edit

I benefited greatly from the structured curriculum, but it didn't go much deeper than Hartl's Rails tutorial. Once you've got the basics, you're really only limited by your imagination and your desire to make interesting things that have a range of practical applications that might get you job ready.

I'm still quite lost in any conversation with advanced programmers, but I'm doing alright helping my sister learn to code at the moment. I've got a lot to learn, and I'm doing that on my own now. The program was a decent jumpstart.

Midway through the course I adjusted my expectations for where I'd be by the end, so I'm not really disappointed with how it turned out. Now, I'm basically a marketer with much stronger than average coding chops for someone in marketing.