Scubabear68

Selfish of me, but I wish we got out of the sky scraper business. I’ve had chronic and acute sinusitis for years, and one result is I get vertigo very easily. And buildings are designed to sway in high winds, which I can feel. I can’t describe how awful it is to have vertigo in a high building.

I wonder how many other people suffer from this?

I am amazed at how much “process” developers these days have to adhere to, including complicated branching strategies plus a whole lot more. So much time wasted doing busy work.

I have always been happiest in a trunk-based dev model, but in many orgs it is heresy to even mention it.

Not just Murray Hill, but all of their offices were special.

I went to Holmdel High and my girlfriend’s dad was a distinguished engineer at the Holmdel Bell Labs installation, we drove by regularly (loved the transistor water tower), and got to visit him inside the building a few times. It was awe inspiring as an 18 year old to enter into such a sacred hall of engineering and science. I had a strong engineering bent since I was little, but knowing such a towering figure cemented it (inventor of Adaptive Delta Modulation).

Part of the reason for the long lasting aspect is the over engineering of the products back then. See also Roman aqueducts. Slave labor or nearly free peons also probably contributed to this.

Today we have much tighter engineering tolerances for cost reasons.

I think one of the biggest mistakes of Scrum is the Sprint concept. Artificially carving work into an X-week, immutable window makes no sense. Plan releases for when feature sets reach the level of maturity users and product folks want them.

The Sprint approach leads to half-assed features hiding behind a small army of feature flags.

At a minimum, if you can’t get rid of sprints, at least change the default 2 weeks into 3 or 4 weeks. Your meeting burden will go down add you’ll actually have time to deliver working features.

Interesting, I have a very similar story from last year. Existing CTO and head of product acted as if they were writing complex, mission critical software (they weren’t) and instituted processes to match. It went from overly ad hoc to over-the-top scrum. As a result, features took months to develop and everyone was terrified of releases. Teams bloated to massive size.

CTO was fired, I came in and evaluated everything, slashed the consulting teams down to the ones clearly performing, and slashed the processes down to boot. Within a month the team velocity was way up and we were releasing to a nice cadence without fear.

And this was not because I’m a super man. I’m not. Any competent tech lead or manager could have done the same. The only difficult part was dragging the product folks along, they kicked and screamed the whole way, predicting doom, and were amazed when the sky didn’t fall.

Agreed. This is more or less what we did in the 90s, deliver quickly and incrementally with right-sized processes.

Scrum adds so much complexity, heavy processes and endless meetings it is truly incredible.

One comment - the article mentions that Waterfall was basically the only approach used prior to agile. This is false. In some industries waterfall was used, but in others software was designed and driven incrementally just as with core agile. The work I did in fixed income brokerages in the early 90s was largely ad hoc agile.

My memory is dim on this (having last done 6502 assembly almost 40 years ago), but the extreme lack of registers on the 6502 meant many programs were a tedious, endless parade of lda, sta instructions.

Go vertical if you have the room. Put in lots of ramps and places to perch. They like grass and small plants.

For construction, we did a two by four frame with welded wire covering it. The welded wire is very secure but still allows a nice view, and is pretty cheap. If you have a Tractor Supply store near you in US) they have it.

+1 on the Catio, we built a really large one years ago (16' wide x 8' deep x 10' high) against our house with a convenient window with a flap cut in the window screen. It has a small tree growing out of it and some flowers and plants, with a few different levels. Cats love it, especially when the odd bird wanders in through the welded wire.

Not directly, but it does increase cost. Thicker pipe costs more.

Somewhat related to this is the regulations for interstate natural gas pipelines. The regs have four “classes” which dictate the thickness and depth of a pipeline based on the diameter and pressure of the pipe.

Those “classes” are determined by population density near the pipe eg high density means thicker pipe.

This means city dwellers get the biggest safety margin, while those out in rural regions get pipelines that are around 50% thinner. And such pipelines can be within a few feet of an occupied dwelling.

Based on the environmental and community based work I’ve done, and also my experience at school. I pick up most things on my own, and always suffered in a classroom environment.

But most people I know and have worked with are the opposite. They have real trouble picking up new subjects without a teacher guiding them through it and formal courses.

Anecdotal I know, but the true autodidacts I’ve encountered are rare in general terms. That said, a LOT of technology people can largely self-teach, and I think a much higher percentage of HN readers can learn new subjects quickly compared to the general population.

I found this out late in life working on an environmental cause. We were all volunteers and had limited money, so I started learning about pipelines and regulations and legal concepts, etc etc. If you have the right kind of mind, it very empowering to be able to step into a new field and really learn it and work it.

The flip side of this is that not everyone’s brain works this way. In fact, I’d say the vast majority can’t do this. The biggest mistake an autodidact can make is assuming other people can learn like they do. But if you have the gift, use it and explore it and it will likely be highly rewarding to your life.

We have one of the dumb ones in NJ, circle at 202, 206, 28, with 202 going over it via a bridge. It is a very high stress round about where you can be stuck for some time waiting for an opening during rush hour, then you have to make a mad dash to another stop sign.

Maybe I need to rethink sitting in the exit row.

We started our teenage son on Fairlife 2% milk. Half the sugar, lots more protein than regular milk. So far so good, tastes the same and he’s getting the protein he needs (along with other sources) to build muscle for football.

One thing I always wondered is how the hardware that compares the N computer’s output (and fails it silent if one has a different result) is itself hardened.

Failure of that I imagine would be catastrophic.

This is what I came here to say. Assuming the team is working from JIRA or something, put the ticket number in the commit message. The ticket itself is where your “why” goes.

This is my experience as well. Unit test suites tend to be huge, which costs effort to maintain, and they generally tell you little about the actual quality of the software.

A good end to end test suite will give you a much truer indication of the state of your systems.

Of course I don’t say do zero unit tests, they have value, but I think too many orgs are too zealous about unit tests and too soft on higher level testing.

This really depends on the organization and the manager. I have been in orgs where my manager knows very well what I am doing and my impact. A list like this would be fairly useless in that case.

I have worked for bigger corps where my manager has no idea what I do, especially consulting service companies. If I’ve worked with 7 clients over 3 different account groups, I am the only one who knows what those 7 clients are, and what I did for them. In those cases I do document my accomplishments. I have even gone as far as create a brief presentation for when I get a new manager.

This also differs from a CV not only in being more detailed, but also flagging things like “successfully worked with XYZ account manager, who is widely known to be difficult to work with”.

My first hobby project was a BASIC program to track my AD&D character stats on my Timex Sinclair 1000.

Naming is hard, I hope the industry can come up with something better eventually.

It is definitely jarring in my head every time I hear it or read it.

Indeed, I wonder if convoys will be resurrected to protect shipping in the Red Sea area.

And what if the company is new? Or the company lies about ownership?

You seem to think people should randomly trust any old LLC to be honest with the public. Why?

It is frustrating if you are trying to research an LLC for any reason at all.

A non exhaustive list of examples: an LLC trying to do business with your town; an LLC filing permits for construction or some business venture; LLC bidding on public projects; an LLC filing for eminent domain privileges at the muni, State or Federal level.

Etc etc.

In general, hiding ownership of LLCs is not done for benign reasons.

Heavy nostalgia for me thinking of computer magazines. We were fairly poor, but I could afford Byte magazine. Late 70’s and early 80s I absorbed computing like a sponge from about age 10, with my only time using actual computers in stores like K-Mart. When I saw the ZX-80 kit in Popular Electronics I started my begging to dad. Then the ZX-81 came out along with its sister the Timex-Sinclair 1000, and it was finally cheap enough for my dad to manage it.

I didn’t care about the membrane keyboard. Or the tape cassette inputs. Or the crashing from the 16k ram pack. It was a computer, and it was mine. And I started applying all that Byte knowledge.

I barely attended college, and didn’t need to. Byte, and its lesser sisters was a far better education for me.

The article referenced conflates public companies and private ones. Public companies do have liability restrictions, but notably (in the U.S.) ownership is explicitly reported. LLC’s are private companies, but in many states their ownership can be masked or wholly secret.

In my experience masking ownership or allowing secret ownership of LLC’s is a net loss for society as a whole. There is a large surface area where ownership is not being masked for a good reason, but is being done as deliberate deception.

The LLC transparency stuff drives me nuts. If a company wants LLC guarantees, it should publish who their owners are. It is incredibly frustrating to literally have no idea who is being XYZ LLC.

Especially when you have “special purpose vehicle” LLC’s which aren’t really even real companies at all.