In this post I will detail how to remove yourself from your social life. Well, just the link sharing part on Twitter.
At an event held last September, Twitter released some usage stats, including this: around 25% of Tweets contain links.
One must wonder if Twitter spammers have skewed this data. How would my own account compare against this? Using SnapBird to search my tweets for http, I have calculated that about 34% of my activity on Twitter is link sharing...
I used to read less than one book per year. According to Code Complete, this is the same as the average programmer.
That was while I was at uni though. I sort of expected to learn slowly at uni, and anticipated rapid, mind-blowing learning when I entered the industry. My first job had me working under some of the smartest people I have ever met - it was at a game company. Unfortunately they ran out of money and I had to find a job at a slower-paced place, where I didn't have the luxury of mentorship.
My mind was going stale, I had to do something. I looked up recommended reading lists online and the first programming book I picked up (that wasn't for a uni course) was The Pragmatic Programmer. Are you sick of me mentioning this book in every post yet? ;)
PragProg recommends that you treat your learning as investment, and your knowledge as a portfolio; you should invest regularly, diversify, balance it between high-risk and conservative, buy low and sell high (i.e. take interest in emerging technologies). It recommends several goals, such as reading a technical book each quarter, and when you've developed the habit, one per month. It also recommends reading non-technical books too. I totally fell in love with this idea, and have been reading like a mofo since.
There is a slight problem though...
