I guess he's using a different meaning of 'dinky' to the one I'm used to. The dictionary says that there's a US meaning of dinky meaning 'inconsequential' which seems to make sense.<p>From the title I had assumed it was going to be about the UK meaning of 'small but particularly well formed', which I guess would also make a good article.
Lots of great advice on hacker news lately. Whether it's to start embracing your time alone and doing activities on your own, or learning by doing the things which most excite and fulfill your desires, I'm enjoying it.
> Watching him reminded me of an oft-ignored piece of advice: Learn by doing what you love. Obsession is key when it comes to mastering programming (or anything). While it’s perfectly fine to choose this career path as just that—a career—it also takes a level of dedication and excitement that can’t be generated without a natural spark.<p>Or you could use a mixture of natural inclination, as well as trying your best to adapt to the situation and deal with it in a positive manner.<p>I suspect that the author's approach is too reactive, and doesn't work for anyone but those who happened to be lucky enough to stumble upon something that they love doing in their childhood or early adulthood, and then it happened to actually be employable. Not to mention, even if you loved programming <i>as a teenager</i> and/or <i>in university</i> and/or <i>on OSS</i>, that doesn't mean that you will love programming in "the industry"[1], which might be a different experience then what you are used to. Then what are going to do? Rely on this reactive attitude of "either I am naturally inclined to like this thing, or it isn't for me at all"? Well that might have been enough for you to learn the ropes and such, but it might be a crushing blow to find out that you don't fall immediately <i>in love</i> with whatever programming you find in paid work, or the programming that you have to do for you physics research, or whatever else you find yourself needing programming for. Then what are you supposed to do? Go back to school for another 2-5 years, change profession, or maybe stop being so reactive and start to find pleasure in whatever things you might think is your natural kryptonite, but actually might be a more superficial disinclination which can be learned or unlearned.<p>Programmers are supposedly so passionate. Or at least supposedly a large subset of them. But for such a <i>passionate</i> group, they sure seem to often default to reactively being upset and cranky and cynical over whatever facet of their programming experience they don't like.<p>[1] I use "the industry" as an example here purely because it tends to come later in the programming lives of <i>passionate programmrs</i>, not because it is necessarily terrible compared to other forms of programming. Indeed, I don't have any industry experience yet myself, and such fears that "You might like programming in university or whatever, but will you like it when you actually have to use it to support yourself?" has been a worry of mine for some time now.