Andy Kessler on being contrarian: “Great investors are contrarian. They take the pulse or check the weather vane of what’s going on today and insist it’s wrong. Why? Because expectations today are always wrong tomorrow. Every day the stock market is on the move because the world changes by the minute. The status quo is never right for long. Of course, the trick to investing is deciding in which direction the world is wrong and determining when others will figure it out. When the world does catch up to your way of thinking, you’ve got to train your mind to move on, to be contrarian all over again, even though your previous view ended up being right as rain. There is no time to celebrate, which invites complacency.”
IEEE Spectrum: “SQL dominated the jobs ranking in IEEE Spectrum’s interactive rankings of the top programming languages this year. Normally, the top position is occupied by Python or other mainstays, such as C, C++, Java, and JavaScript, but the sheer number of times employers said they wanted developers with SQL skills, albeit in addition to a more general-purpose language, boosted it to No. 1.So what’s behind SQL’s soar to the top? The ever-increasing use of databases, for one. SQL has become the primary query language for accessing and managing data stored in such databases—specifically relational databases, which represent data in table form with rows and columns. Databases serve as the foundation of many enterprise applications and are increasingly found in other places as well, for example taking the place of traditional file systems in smartphones.”
What Distinguishes Great Software Engineers? “The study ranked attributes based on developers’ ratings of whether an attribute was essential for “greatness”. The analysis yielded the top five attributes that distinguish great engineers: “writing good code, adjusting behaviors to account for future value and costs, practicing informed decision-making, avoiding making others’ jobs harder, and learning continuously.” The paper.
