HN Explorer

Ask HN: Tutor? Seeking Tutor? (June 2019)

12 points by afarrell ↗ HN
Please lead with either SEEKING TUTOR or SEEKING TUTOR, your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.

Please include a bit about your background and what situations you would like to confidently be able to handle.

7 comments

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afarrell
SEEKING TUTOR | London, UK or Remote | Prioritisation

I'm software engineer with 6 years of experience working at startups on APIs and web UIs. I'm looking for a professional who can train me in a method to prioritise more efficiently and be more confident in my prioritsation. At the end of working together, I'd like to be able to confidently & quickly handle the following situations:

- Identify the highest priority among a set of 10 tasks and explain why it is the highest. (Goal: 2-3x faster than current. 30% less verbose explanations. Roughly.)

- Given a set of 40 recent emails from colleagues and error-monitoring systems, identify the subset which can be safely de-prioritised or delegated to another person/team. (Goal: 15 minutes or less. Roughly.)

quickthrower2
It is definitely a good move to get mentored in the things you mentioned, and great that you are looking to improve in areas where most developers wouldn't care so much.

I'm interested in the driver behind this because it sounds like you might work somewhere where they don't have a lot of patience or time for thinking. Which to me is a bad sign. I think people at your work should be helping you with most of these things, as they have all the context.

Normally things are prioritised in teams (unless you are the only technical person there?). If you have your own mini backlog that needs prioritising, then you should be able to draw on your colleagues to help you. Stand ups can be useful for this. There might be some skills for you to improve, but it's not all on you.

In addition to getting a mentor, I recommend go to a coding meetup and ask other developers how they do things and handle the same problems.

For me prioritisation is simple. If production systems are down - that is the priority. Otherwise major bugs, and then tasks, and tasks where the boss has said its high priority first.

Other than that I usually try to finish what I have started before starting something new unless blocked. And keep long running things going (e.g. something where you need to check logs once a week).

For the general backlog someone else decides the priority - the role is normally called product owner or product manager, but might be done by a manager, team leader or even CTO/CEO. However developers can influence the order if they have an opinion.

afarrell
I am joining a new company as a Senior Software Engineer soon—thats one of the main drivers of this. I’m going to likely be in the position of giving others guidance on prioritization. Now, sometimes it will be obvious, but I’d like to be prepared for when it is not.

I would say that my last employer did give me time for thinking. However, I’d like to spend more of my time on harder questions and to get to be more efficient at resolving this particular sort of ambiguity. I’ve long felt like I wasn’t as confident in my prioritization as I ought be. Thats why I say I want to be able to explain my prioritization.

throwaway13000
I am looking for someone to help me with CSS. I can make basic websites (inspite of reading theory and following tutorials on countless websites). I want to make a few simple websites along with my tutor so he can answer my questions in real time. I have tried JsFiddle, Stackoverflow, treehouse etc. I am not a beginner but also definitely not an experienced frontend engineer.

I am a backend engineer in my day job. I can help you with Java, APIs, system design, algorithms and anything else non UI related. I have expertise in compiler design and hardware design also.

Email in profile.

amirouche
SEEKING TUTOR | Remote | NLP

My background is in software engineering. I know Python, JavaScript and Scheme. I would like to transition to a data-science position related to Natural-Language-Processing.

alok-g
Reach out to me using the details in my profile. I just helped someone like you encountered via Hacker News.

I am a pro in Classical NLP (pre Deep Learning) and generally understand Deep Learning (DL) well too. However, I am a couple years behind on the latest DL techniques for NLP. As a start, I can share my slides giving a very broad overview of Classical NLP that this other person had found very useful.