This advice is solid gold. I declined many interviews when I was at the top of my game for silly-in-hindsight reasons such as I have just joined, I am happy here etc. Have always regretted it ever since.
In early 40's with outdated skills, I am in the same boat except a physical disability. While development only roles have gone out of reach now, I have been able to find QA, documentation, support, generalist roles at a non-profit, academia, and an early stage startup in that order. Reached advanced interview stages with employers looking for outdated skills (Perl scripting) or in-office positions, so you might want to explore similar. LinkedIn, Fiverr never worked for me. My resume generated a lot more interest via HN's monthly threads. Good luck!
Wordpress powers like 40% of the web, unless you really, really, really hate PHP, your skills aren't outdated. It's probably tough to connect to the right people but there are endless companies and individuals out there that need help with their sites that run on WP.
Just as a reminder that there's the Modern-Software-Development Paradise where you need to keep learning new technology and everything is futuristic and shiny, and then there's the Wordpress-Running-On-Php5.6 Real World which is gigantic but few people blog about because it's not fancy and it smells bad sometimes.
Statistics by Freedman, Pisani and Purves. Don't know if I got better but loved the real world examples and cartoons. Does not have too many pre-requisites. Each section presents a tiny concept which is followed by plenty of exercises that have answers at the end. The furthest I got in a book in recent days, Math or not.
I taught from this book (it wasn't my choice, it was the standard book where I was teaching). It's really good for intuition, but because it doesn't use standard notation I think it might have done a disservice to students who were going to go on to learn more.
My pandemic project in 2020 was to finally read through the used copy I bought a decade ago. I agree it was really useful at building foundational intuitions. And that it doesn't use professional jargon which sometimes makes Stats Wikipedia's "death by integrals" approach a dense barrier to entry.
For example, the book uses "the box model" all over the book but is not used anywhere else, and every else uses the phrase "i.i.d" which is not used in the book.
Still, it's been really useful at my job in reasoning about timeseries data from Prometheus, especially in canary analysis. Far more useful than the whirlwind tour of distributions my 1 semester "Statistics for Engineers" course in college undertook.
Any suggestions for more conventional Statistics books? (Math-oriented, with proofs if possible). I'm reading Devore's one for Engineering and the Sciences and it's pretty good but I'm having a bit of hard time with p-values, hypothesis tests, etc. and wanted a second book as reference for those topics.
It is heartening to see folks concerned about being lightweight. I keep running out of space on my 32GB Debian 9 VM because every time I cargo build or npm install I feel like I am downloading all of the internet and generating more of it locally. And then docker build creates a few "diff-only" container images that need another 32GB of attached storage of their own.
The basic set of MS-DOS 3.3 commands, plus TB/TP 5.5, in an HD floppy (1.44), was part of my student kit during highschool that I used to carry around for the labs.
In the context of the article, I imagine it's that some Kubernetes expert couldn't design and sell them an overcomplicated microservices-based solution which would basically only really be useful at Netflix-scale.
I think he also has a way of writing that makes him look like he doesn't know how to. Will look forward to that post. For now I'll just go back to the second or maybe third reading of his post.
