DIVx0

I started off in management with a small team but as I continued to deliver I kept on getting more and more teams.

Turns out I am not cut out to lead from such an abstract level, directing other directors and barely knowing how stuff is being shipped.

However this is where I was most surprised. My senior leadership recognizes where my skills are and have let me “manage myself” out of my role and move into a senior (think fellow/principal/staff) individual contributor role where I manage peers and work hands-on with whatever interests me (as long as i can align it to some product).

I have influence in a couple major tech areas for this Corp. influence in a type that I develop strategy and report on a semi regular basis to the C suite and am actively brought into other silos to contribute or kickoff ideas.

Long story short. I’ve spent years as “lead developer” at startups with no where to go except perhaps CTO. Here I am able to carve out an influential space that can maximize whatever talents I have while working closely with others who can augment skills I lack.

I had such a negative view of this corporate world prior to joining that I am ashamed of myself now that I know what the reality is, at least for my own experience.

Taking a chance and joining a very large corporation.

Previously I was all about startups or small companies and was very much against the mega-corp environment.

Over several months a colleague "recruited" me to join their team and I don't regret it.

I've been able to climb pretty high within this corp and it has been a wild ride. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd have any sort of influence over technology strategy that one of the largest US corporations would follow for the next decade.

So, I've learned to keep an open mind and not let preconceived notions on how others do business until I see it for myself. If I had not done this I'd still be hopping from start-up to start-up.

I pick at my facial hair whenever I'm reading or thinking, it's a big problem for me since I like having a beard. I have to shave it every so often because it gets scraggly with bald patches of plucked hair. Thankfully growing facial hair is my super power so I typical have a full beard again soon enough.. only to start the cycle all over again. When I shave it off I'll pluck at my eyebrows instead which take longer to grow back and patchy eyebrows look more weird (to me) than a patchy beard.

I've tried all sorts of ways to stop but the activity is sub conscious and by the time I'm aware of it its too late.

There are many, but one of the points above mentions that participants are distributed globally and that saying that everyone must use the same platform was a nonstarter. I'll add that trust is not necessarily granted by inclusion. The needs for privacy do not have to include explicit trust and that a blockchain still solves very specific problems in this scenario.

we did a long evaluation of HyperLedger Fabric (0.6 - 1.x) for a project at my company.

We really wanted it to work since the chain code model was cool however we ran into stumbling block after stumbling block and in the end ditched it for something else.

List of pain points (no idea if any have been solved since we gave up on it)

1) Distributing chaincode updates to participants was an exercise in coordination that is unscalable

2) Kafka as consensus. At the time you had to use an infinite kafka queue since pruning it would throw fabric nodes into a panic and they'd drop off the network. We thought for sure we were doing something wrong but the need for an infinite queue was verified by someone at IBM

3) Community. The community around HL F was mostly IBM people or folks off doing their own weird thing and adding features or pull requests that were bizarre (a custom fork of postgres to act as state dB??). With that said there were a handful of _very_ helpful people there just never was a good mass of them

4) Performance. We wanted to run a private blockchain but amongst nodes distributed across the globe in whatever datacenter they chose. Running fabic in a truly distributed way just kills performance. There is a lot of cross talk and waiting for the ordering service to get sorted

5) Not really a blockchain. Fabric relied on the centralized ordering service and each node would contain its own state. If the ordering service pruned logs (which I guess is a feature now) then the distributed nodes could have ledgers that have content the central order does not know about. If that node wanted to rebuild it would need to rebuild from other nodes without a way to truly verify the content of the chain. This may have been solved but it was a gaping wound of a question when we raised it

There are others, in the end it was just way to much work and we moved off to a more popular blockchain and brought our proof of concept to feature parity and beyond in just two weeks.

We reached out to IBM for help several times and the answer was mostly "just buy bluemix" or "pay us and we'll implement it for you"

To use HyperLedger Fabric in any sense of scale and operational readiness you must run it all within one data center. If you have external participants in your network they must also be customers of that service or you can just run it all yourself in y our own DC for your own needs.

IF you go that route, it begs the question of "why bother?" You're putting everything in the hands of one entity and then adding in a ton of complexity and slowness. Just use a database or something right?

*edit format

I've gone through some "company culture training." At first I thought it was a good way to waste two days and was resentful because it was required training. However, even with that poor mindset I gained several key insights from it and I'm glad I was forced to go.

With that experience in mind now I approach all company training in a more positive attitude. Sure most of it is useless but every so often there is something to gain so might as well make the most of it.

I really wish we could use Surface Hubs or this new whiteboard product at my company. We're a huge global enterprise and many development teams are split across boarders. It is very difficult to convey complicated technical work over a conference call or to whip out a visio type diagram on the fly.

We're heavy cisco users and are using Webex Teams (formally cisco spark) along with Cisco Spark boards. It's cool that it can work on any number of devices but the UX is far inferior to MS Surface Hub. Even with the bad UX these tools have been helpful.

These tools are expensive but they have paid for themselves many times over on time/travel savings.

The press release is vague for the same reason why I can't directly answer some of your questions/challenges.

However, the fact that we're using a permissioned network does not automatically say that trust is absolutely granted. In this case it is more of a wall for a rather large and weird garden and at this stage of development it is helpful to know at least who is walking around in the garden. What they are up to is a different matter.

Also, the press release mentions the problem of many provider directories existing and not every directory contains the same information. Provider data is a tent pole in the American healthcare industry and it is used in just about every area of it, from claims processing to personal health record management.

You ask why not just have a central database for it? Well, the answer is simply "why do you think there are so many directories already?" The field is littered with directories that aimed to be "The single master directory for everyone!" There is a large amount of "not invented here syndrome" and an equal amount of "we have 20 years of data models that wont fit your commercial directory." So every large payer ends up building their own and then spends a lot of time and effort maintaining the data in it. Other consumers/producers of provider data may also maintain their own directories or subscribe to a commercial product.

The network we constructed is not simply yet another provider master database but-on-a-blockchain. It goes beyond that and really does use key features of what most consider to be a blockchain's major benefits.

I apologize for not being able to share details of what I consider to be really neat stuff but more news is on the horizon.

Yes, my company is using Quorum to build a permissioned blockchain amongst industry parties to exchange data for various value-add purposes.

We have done a lot of analysis and can see large benefits of using Ethereum based private network in this way.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2018/04/02/unitedhe...

This is great. I often use "find the bacon number of two wikipedia" as a take-home programming challenge question for software dev candidates.

I used to live in an exurb of Minneapolis (25 miles) and had to commute to/from the city.

I'm sorry to say that at least for Minneapolis this map is wildly inaccurate. My 25 mile commute would take me, not accounting for unusual weather, at best 1 hour and at worst 2 hours.

I wish I could live in whatever fantasy world they pulled the data from.

I just bought a house that has two 2nd gen protects along with traditional style detectors, So far so good! No false positives so far. I reset both detectors and had them go through their self test when we moved in and they both report being fully operational.

Neither of the protects are near the kitchen or regular smoke producing spaces though. However They are near bathrooms. I hear steam can set these off pretty easily but I have not had that experience.

I might buy more protects to replace the other detectors but I want to wait a bit and see if nest comes out with any other products.

Its been a long time since i've subscribed to a magazine but I have always enjoyed reading Nautilus articles. $29 for print and digital is a steal for the quality of content they produce.

Anecdote; I just went though Denver TSA earlier this weeek and managed to make it though the scanners while wearing my belt with a very obvious metallic belt buckle. Was waved though with no extra screening. Incidentally I was flagged aside on my way out of Minneapolis because I had a parking reminder ticket in my back pocket.

These scanners are so inconsistent that they are useless.

This is very timely news. I'm involved in a fairly large project to migrate some enterprise infrastructure onto Azure. We've hit a road block with ACS and their newly announced ACS-Engine addresses all of that [0].

This Container Registry is icing on the cake.

[0] https://github.com/Azure/acs-engine

As is said every time this blog updates: This is very interesting stuff and I enjoy reading about the progress.

I can't imagine the excitement these folks felt when the machine finally booted up. All of their skilled trouble shooting and hard work were spot on.

I can't wait to read more.

I'm a dev manager at a mega corp. I spend about 60 - 75% of my day in meetings.

I don't really mind the volume because when I was a developer I liked working with managers who tried to keep my calendar as open as possible and only bringing me into meetings when my opinions were needed.

I try to emulate that now I am a manager and have a sizable staff of developers. I will typically take meetings that traditionally would have included a developer or two. I will only bring them in if it's obvious their input is needed or they specially asked to be more visible to the process.

I'd say developers on my team average about 2 hours a week in scheduled meetings. There of course are times where breakouts need to happen to discuss some fine points of such and such thing but such things are part of the job too.

You're clearly not looking hard enough. There is so much new music available. In my opinion we're in a sort of golden age of music. It is trivial for artists to publish new music and it's even easier for consumers to get it.

Discoverability remains a problem but even still, it's a lot easier to find new stuff than it was just 10 years ago. You still have to do some work if you want to find new examples in genres you like.

Arena filling artists are not all that different now than they were at any other time. It's pop music to one degree or another. The genres that are more popular get the bigger venus. AC/DC style hard rock enjoyed a run in the 80s but is currently 'out' but that does not mean it's dead or will die but the next Iron Maiden won't be shoveled to you via top 40 radio, you'll have to discover them and i guarantee you they're out there.

I like juice and I like kitchen gadgets but wow, this thing is expensive. The only thing it would buy is not having to hassle with owning and using a juicer.

One is still left with the per drink cost, which at these prices does not quite compete with simply going to a juice bar.

This is a very niche and expensive product. I'd worry about the company being around long enough to realize the benefit of owning it.

Interesting, I know about the click on 'web' link to bypass paywall. I did that as I usually do but this time clicking though the google results still put me on a paywall.

I wonder if WSJ has changed their policy on visitors from google.

My wife is a Nurse Practitioner. When she started down that path she had to get into nursing school to earn an RN. Just getting into a school, any school was extremely difficult. The programs are very competitive with limited space. She made it work because she is brilliant and tenacious but that period was really rough.

If 'they' were really worried about the nursing shortage they would introduce more tiers of qualified nursing to cover the gap. Like it was said earlier, places are not hiring LPNs anymore and are putting the squeeze on RNs. The shortage is not because there are a shortage of people who want to be nurses but it is because it is so difficult to get to a level where you are desirable.

My highschool (Spring Lake Park, MN) had a program like this when I was a student in the 90s. It was a specific course you signed up for like autoshop.

The basement and foundations were dug and laid by contractors but all of the other, non heavy equipment, construction was done by students under supervision from pros (like helping out a habitat for humanity project). Everything from framing, plumbing to electrical. Students would rotate and get their hands on every part of the house. Returning students took on leadership roles and more skilled tasks.

My family and I ended up at the museum on a whim late last summer during our vacation.

I'm so happy we went and I'm doubly so I got to see this machine operate during a demo. It makes the most impressive sounds!

Even without this machine, the computer history museum was far more impressive than I imagined it would be.

this site has some good info:

https://github.com/chentsulin/awesome-graphql#lib-c

I live in Minneapolis and Target is a huge presence here amongst just about every type of professional. Everyone knows someone who works(ed) at Target corp and from catching anecdotes from various people it became clear it was no secret that Target Canada was in bad shape from the beginning.

This failure not only damaged the careers of many Canadians but also irrevocably damaged the professional lives of people in my town who were laid off. While the job market in Minneapolis is fairly good it became a struggle for some of these newly jobless Target folks to find work in town because of the massive white collar layoffs.

Target should have been successful in Canada, all of the problems in this article are linked to over the top pressure and hubris.

I'd like to know this too. I can't spend an entire day watching this but I certainly would like to view the talks over time at my own pace!

I am building a GraphQL service to act as a endpoint-to-rule-them-all and GraphiQL has helped me sell the concept very well. It is much easier to talk about how queries work when a developer can just jump right in and start playing with it without having to setup any tooling or whatnot.

ouch, I was all set to preorder but $599 is too much for me to buy this without seeing it in person first.

I will have to wait for retail demo units or something.

This would just lead to 'click-bait' tweets.

I had completely forgotten about this game and now that I read this I really would love to play it again.

It is baffling how something like this could happen, media companies sit on so many properties like this that they will never exploit. I know that in some cases not using the property is some sort of strategy but in cases like this they are leaving money on the table. Might be peanuts to them but it seems like an opportunity for some in-house streamlining to fully exercise dead properties.