My son competes on the national and international level in two different sports, so we do a lot of traveling. The bonding is very important, just as it is knowing when to get out of the way and let them shine.

In one sport, I drop him off and pick him up for practice (he gets distracted/flustered when someone is there watching him practice). In the other, I practice with him and am trying to stay better than him as long as I can.

There are a few other things I think are important...

If they don't want to do something, don't push them to. My son decided not to compete in a national ranking event in a couple of months because his competitions are on Thursday and Saturday and he would miss three days of school when factoring in travel.

Try to anticipate their eventual needs and make sure the right tools/equipment/etc. are available for them before they realize they needed it. Also, have backup equipment just in case something breaks or fails.

Make sure that they understand the 'why' behind all the things that both they have done, and what you have done, to enable them to get to that level.

Finally, from a young age, teach them to "always do your best, and always do better next time." The first national competition he went to, he literally finished dead last out of over 250. When we were in the airport heading home, I let him know that it's alright if he doesn't want to do more of them. He didn't back down in the slightest, and asked me when the next one was because he knew he could do better. Next month will be the second time he competes in the Junior Olympics for that sport.

West coast food (particularly oysters) seems to be a little bit more salty/briny.

My son and I travel all over the US for various competitions, and there are certain regions where he refuses to get OJ because of the flavor differences.

I don't like the lack of buttons/knobs for things like heat (they can be configured based on the weather though), but most of his complaints are just trash.

The S58 engine is spectacular, the handling on the 2024 M4 is amazing.

My only real complaint is when the CarPlay integration comes up as "Unknown Song, Unknown Artist" and I have to change the media source to get control of it from the steering wheel buttons.

Add in something like Flock license plate reading and you now know which vehicle it was.

I then picked up a sizable rock, and told him I could get into the house faster than he could. He didn't understand for a few moments, but the lesson was learned.

Hard disagreement on that one.

He wrote an epic story known as A Song of Ice and Fire (started in '96) that ended up getting out of hand and tied up with too many Goordian knots to complete. Sadly, we'll probably never get a conclusion to it.

Along the line, a producer came along who thought they could make money with it. First few seasons weren't terrible, but were too short to capture it all. The rest were completely rushed and unable to take on all that was going on. They went off the rails after a few seasons.

I will agree that he doesn't owe anyone anything though. My philosophy is that I create for me, if others also enjoy that, excellent.

Edit: I'm still a little bitter after going to a trivia night and losing a question because I gave the canon answer that was different from the show

The thing that changed it was smartphones (~7 years later). Suddenly, the internet was available everywhere and not just a thing for nerds.

Not sure that AI is quite there yet, currently trying to identify what will be the catalyst that makes it seamless.

Still don't have a contact there. Would have thought I would at least get someone there to talk with if issues come up.

It's mostly a thought process...

I have or need something (entity), lets get data about it (repository/extensions), we need to do something with this now (only extensions).

Lots of "static" and "this" involved, but the separation and eventual simplicity makes it worth the effort.

Edit: I tried going through some of them to anonymize some for examples, but it felt like treading in dangerous territory.

You probably already know, but I'll opine a little bit about extension methods. I use them a lot.

Entities > Repositories > Functionality. All split out.

- Entities (pretty much just gets and sets, nothing more than necessary).

- Repositories via extensions to determine where the data comes and goes from (some data comes from SQL, some from Redis, some from Postgres, doesn't matter since it's split out) and any particular queries you need for optimizing things.

- Functionality via more extensions without adding additional code to the entities.

Separation of purpose/use.

I may or may not have completely replaced our data layer in the middle of the height of our season with no interruption. Little bit passionate about this one.

Sometimes, I feel like I'm the only old guy on here. BASIC, VB6, .NET, and some Java along the way.

Too many new ones to list, although that might be a whole other problem in itself.

Currently running nearly a dozen different services written in .NET running on Alpine in K8S.

Started transitioning most of my code to .NET Core/Standard when they first came out. Sadly, I still have to deal with some ASP.NET MVC code that was written before and requires .NET Framework

Would be interesting in what confusing syntax you're referring to. I think one of the beauties of it is that it's additive. You can program plenty of simple stuff in it with conventional style code, but there's a lot of syntactic sugar available that makes things so easy when you need to start scaling things.

I don't think it's mystical. If you don't have an instance of the class yet, you need a starting point and static fills that void (lol. I'll show myself out)

Have to start somewhere, teach them better alternatives as they evolve. Not even going to broach the prototype-based programing stuff until he comfortably has the basics understood.

Edit: I don't GAF about downvotes, but I would at least expect a response about why. If you don't like the philosophy, give me some reasons. Don't like something else, tell me why. I'll happily debate anyone all day long

Apparently, "College Prep" courses more or less determine that Java is the language that they should use.

His teacher thought it was stupid as well, but sometimes your hands are tied. That's what the schools are using as a starting metric though.

He was apparently the only person in the class that said he wanted to do software engineering. Don't worry, he'll be a polyglot before he reaches college.