Vanderson (u/Vanderson)

Vanderson commented on "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio] feeds.resonaterecordings.... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

Vanderson · 2 years ago

Advanced results require advanced skills.

CSS is one of my favorite languages. And the only way I can consider CSS to be difficult is if you have no experience with HTML. If you try to do HTML by hand, then doing CSS by hand on top of HTML by hand is really easy and wonderful. And this is truly where you gain the fundamental framework for "getting CSS".

Vanderson commented on Ask HN: How do you not take criticism of your work personally? · Posted by u/molly0

Vanderson · 2 years ago

I learned to take it personally but not react badly. This way I am not trying to counter a normal human experience, but instead changing something I have total control over, my response.

This is a fight worth having because the more you do it, the better you get at it and you feel less and less attacked you feel when criticism comes your way.

The first few times doing this are the hardest. But after doing this for some time, I rarely feel criticisms are personal anymore. This also affected how people talk to me, and they make it less personal. It's an odd combination of success from both sides.

A key point to all of this, was I needed to make my criticisms less personal.

A manager told me a key point in a private conversation once that help me change my attitude.

He said "I don't like talking about people, I like talking about processes".

I had just been critical of a "person" in the conversation, and I realized how much easier it was to talk about a "process" with my criticism after I took his hint to heart. And others took some time to follow my lead on this, and for me to be consistent about this change of process.

Vanderson commented on Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong features.apmreports.org/s... · Posted by u/Khaine

tdekken · 2 years ago

Thanks so much for your response Vanderson! I wish I had known about How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons when I was teaching my daughter. I definitely fumbled my way through it :).

> I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)

I completely agree and it really isn't too surprising that DI never took off in schools. FWIW, I am looking to revive the underlying pedagogy (e.g., teaching sequences for non-comparatives, joining forms, etc.) rather than DI proper.

> What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?

Interesting question that I never stopped to consider :). I have met dozens of people through HN, and it seems congruent with the hacker ethic ("throughout writings about hackers and their work processes, a common value of community and collaboration is present"), but ::shrugs::.

Thanks again for sharing your DI story.

Vanderson · 2 years ago

I could certainly put you in touch with my friend. What I meant by "offline" is that I really don't want to put my email address into a public forum to be spammed. Any suggestions how to share contact info?

Vanderson commented on Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong features.apmreports.org/s... · Posted by u/Khaine

bluGill · 2 years ago

I've seen many "science based methods" in my lifetime, and they are contradictory. I am not an expert in the subject of education, which means I cannot evaluate what is really science based. I could do this of course - but my day job is as a programmer and when I'm done with that I just want to make sawdust or music, not do more research.

Vanderson · 2 years ago

Well, by "science based" my understanding is that they could prove the system worked to effectively teach kids to read with predictable results.

Vanderson commented on Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong features.apmreports.org/s... · Posted by u/Khaine

tdekken · 2 years ago

Hi Vanderson, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).

Vanderson · 2 years ago

I have a friend who I met in college who got his PhD working under Zig, which is how people who knew Engelmann called him. And this friend gave me a copy of his book "How to teach your child to read in 100 lessons" and I used it to teach my own kids.

I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)

What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?

Vanderson commented on Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong features.apmreports.org/s... · Posted by u/Khaine

Vanderson · 2 years ago

Here's a video of Siegfried Engelmann, who is mentioned in this article, demonstrating how he had taught inner city grade school age kids that were considered "unteachable" (I can't recall the exact label I was told) doing algebra... live. (about 20 min in) I think they are about 4th or 5th grade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SjFsimywA

Many people didn't like the strict requirement of his reading methods, from what I have been told.

Vanderson commented on Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong features.apmreports.org/s... · Posted by u/Khaine

kleiba · 2 years ago

I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods.

I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?

If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside?

I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?

Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.

Vanderson · 2 years ago

Siegfried Engelmann from the University of Oregon developed a science based method for teaching reading. With simple ideas like making sure the letters were distinguishable, teaching the most common letters first, teaching the sounds the letters make before teaching the names of the letters, immediate feedback on reading mistakes, etc...

Vanderson commented on Ask HN: Good resource on writing web app with plain JavaScript/HTML/CSS? · Posted by u/pipeline_peak

Vanderson · 3 years ago

I recommend just starting from scratch. As a programmer at heart I find programming like playing with Legos. While I needed to understand how all the underlying parts worked, I didn't need instructions on how to build a specific larger thing.

I found MDN to indispensible in learning to make web apps. Everything from learning the basics of string/array/date/etc... objects, to modern ES6 modules.

JS/HTML/CSS - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

CSS - https://css-tricks.com/guides/

As far as actually building apps? After 20+ years of programming, I found my own light weight JS code turned into a framework over time for building apps the way I wanted to. Mostly vanilla JS.

But it didn't stay vanilla JS because too many things are hard on your own. Since everything you build you have to maintain, I found it easier to use jQuery years ago with all it's extra tools. Today? I am still removing jQuery from my code, as vanilla JS does everything jQuery did for me. (I stopped using their widgets as soon as browsers supported features by default, like a proper date picker, etc...)

So, my advice, start from scratch. learn all the pieces one at a time as you need them. This will keep you from getting overwhelmed.

Are their good resources for these from scratch online? Sure, but maybe a book is a good idea here, as it forces a more basic linear learning process if you start at the beginning. Not sure I'd take this route, but it may work for some people.

To your original question - no, I don't know of single source. But no, you do not need Node. You can create an html file and load it directly in a browser, you don't need a server to get started. But this is just step one...

Vanderson commented on What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020) retool.com/blog/erp-for-e... · Posted by u/antonyl

silvershell · 3 years ago

Hi, Vanderson. I'm doing the same thing here where I work. I would be interested in sharing experiences. You can contact me via my profile if you'd like to chat more about it. I would say from my part it's been a good choice, but so much complexity to deal with.

Vanderson · 3 years ago

I actually have not touched any of the code yet as we are using a 3rd party developer to help us. (I will likely work on templates and other things down the road)

My experience when evaluating Odoo was using Studio, which I have found can really mess up your Odoo instance.

Are you working with Odoo code directly?

Vanderson commented on What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020) retool.com/blog/erp-for-e... · Posted by u/antonyl

zitterbewegung · 3 years ago

Customizing odoo is a nightmare it is similar to "It doesn't do everything you want, but it does everything your business needs". (quote by Larry Ellison about Oracle ERP). Underneath its a mess but at least its open source.

Vanderson · 3 years ago

We are doing an Odoo implementation right now. (a few months in)

What did you find is a mess about Odoo? And why is customizing it a nightmare?