Readit NewsMy curiosity is about why aren't the big publishers setting up literacy programs to grow their marketshare?
Why aren't shareholders up in arms about not growing the potential reader base?
Same with sailors, who've been repairing rogue waves for centuries, but it wasn't until it was recorded scientifically on an oil rig that scientists took it seriously.
Still an awesome picture.
There's always a lot of talk about how documentation is important, but there's never budget for a tech writer (well, you must have found some, as you've taken tech writer as a title, but it's not often available) or a documentation maintainer.
But the things I really need from devs is what is the feature supposed to do and why did you do it that way?
I can read the code to know what it does but often that’s not what it’s supposed to do.
The why can be simple too. We had a dev write an archive delete function that failed but the way was because the CEO pressured him.
I’d love to know what you think documentation means.
As a tech writer people have a lot of experience but they never turn it into institutional knowledge because it’s never written down. Ay best it’s tribal knowledge passed by word of mouth.
I know some people refuse to document things because they are hoping for job security but that never happens. Or sometimes for revenge for getting rid of them. But many companies survive despite those efforts.
Most times if you experience pain, you want it gone, either with rest, medication or whatever.
When you are dealing with chronic pain, the relationship changes to something described as spousal. You have to negotiate your life around the pain.
It's hard to describe pain. For me an injection is a 1. But some people have full on panic attacks if they even see a needle.
A friend was at the doctor's office and described their pain as a 4, but the doctor noted they were sweating in a cold office, and reclassified it as at least a 7.
I've had post surgical pain so bad that it pushed my spirit slightly out of my body, is a very odd feeling, which I calibrated to my new 10, which may have led me to describe my gallstones as too low.
A heart attack is often described as the worst pain ever but many women ignore that symptom because giving birth, kidney stones and their periods were worse pain.
Part of measuring pain is what you can't do. Sometimes you do less, sometimes you can't do anything at all, but it would be nice to be believed.
The toughest thing was getting a reliable bit of time each day to sit down and do it. Routine, cajoling, and rewards were all involved. So was keeping it lighthearted; the kid has to be on board! Each lesson has straightforward exercises then a brief story, very short at first, longer later in the book. We'd do the exercises and one read of the story, then kid would read the story to my partner. We started in September, and I remember by Halloween the kid was reading candy wrappers. After finishing it, the next big thing was finding stories the kid genuinely liked to keep it going. Continuing to read together after the lessons ended helped: for a while, kids will keep running into lots of new exceptions to the usual rules, etc.
English spelling and pronunciation are a lot, and the book is also, implicitly, a catalog of the tricks English plays on kids and other learners. Part of the book uses a semi-phonetic alphabet where e.g. ee and sh/ch/th have distinct glyphs, but it all still looks enough like English that the jump to regular writing later in the book is doable for the kid. Even with that alphabet, the book has to teach common words like "is" and "was" as exceptions (with s sounding like z). Decades later one can forget little kids deal with all this and eventually handle it like second nature.
The book's originator thought that you could teach math with a broadly similar approach--breaking things down into very small steps and practicing them in isolation then in larger tasks--and doing that was part of his career, but I haven't found similar teach-your-kid book for arithmetic/basic math. If such a book did exist I'd've given it a try!
"Over the last 50 years, America has kind of told them, 'You can't have both'."
I'd go past that and say you probably can't have a home over 3 bedrooms without already being in an upper income bracket.
So no large families (to offset population challenges). No extended families to help the existing family. No space to help relatives relocate.
No homes for four income earners in a 4-income economy.
Less than 1% of houses are accessible and that is a problem with aging boomers, SIL bought a home near parents to support them but when the stroke and dementia hit, the parents couldn't move in because no bedroom and only a powder room on the main floor, and they couldn't make it up/down the stairs anymore, and the parents house was too small to move into.
Lots of ways to get money from the table.