Scubabear68

Very well said.

I had a similar conversation as a new-ish fractional CTO last year. One team was working on a new CRM product that was effectively alpha-level software used only internally. The team had become terrified of shipping and breaking something and was horrifically risk averse. For a new release that the team was going to delay again at the last minute, I got the CEO on the release call and asked him what would happen if the release completely failed and it took us an entire day to get the product working again. He replied “Not a big deal. The users would just write stuff down like they do today and key it on tomorrow. It’s not like this has enough features to be critical or anything”.

The team was completely stunned. It goes without saying we did the release, found a small mistake, fixed it, and life went on.

Teams really do have understand who her users are and criticality of the software.

I have seen this style work really well when it is practiced in a safe environment. By “safe”, I mean everyone is striving for transparency, you don’t shoot the messenger, and you support each other (not back stab).

This can go off the rails quickly if it collides with other groups that are not as safe and have serious issues. In these more common environments, successful people learn the delicate balance of what to say, what not to say, and what order to say it in.

My teenage son loves exclusive hard to get sneakers. I’ve tried to indulge him on sites dedicated to 3rd party apparel sales, but there are endless scams of people putting something like “Size 12 men’s”, and what you get is a size 12 toddlers.

You can eventually get your money back but the friction in the process is very high and time consuming.

Wow, very cool. Works best if you lock your phone to not rotate views as you rotate your phone.

I am a very picky reader, and I rarely say this, but this is an exceptionally well written piece.

The pacing, the wording, the sense of atmosphere, and what to say when are just incredibly well done.

This is what writers should aspire to.

Also, great hook (we are all animals at night).

The most useful architecture diagrams for me are context diagrams (process boundaries and interactions), sequence diagrams for important detail, and ER diagrams for databases.

This does not seem to create any of those, unless I am missing something. This seems to mostly speak to code dependencies. Which is useful, but probably not $300/month useful.

A typical architecture diagram will show you ingress points, API gateways and the like, where your app servers or web servers or whatever are, databases, eventing systems, etc and how they speak to each other. This doesn’t seem to do that, and it generally is not possible to generate such a thing automatically because there are too many dynamic pieces to track, or there are manual steps. Also, as others have stated, good architecture documentation requires thought and experience on what to highlight and what to omit or group together.

The CoDominium series by Jerry Pournelle and David Drake.

The Empire of Man novels by Weber and Ringo.

Belisarius series by Eric Flint and David Drake.

The General series by S.M. Stirling and David Drake.

For the first time ever our local Barnes and Noble have independent Fantasy and Sci Fi sections. It is very refreshing.

I like going into sub genres of Sci Fi (and liked when it was referred to as speculative fiction to cover the gamut, including Fantasy).

In particular, I love Military Sci fiction is a close cousin of Space Opera, but with a harder core emphasis on military logistics, strategy and tactics in a sci fi setting.

Time Travel Sci fiction.

Hard science fiction.

Hybrid worlds - think Proton / Phaze in Piers Anthony’s Split Infinity series, or his Incarnations of Immortality.

Social science fiction (think Stranger in a Strange Land).

Juveniles.

The list goes on!

Same. Variations of Vim have been my go to editor for many decades now. Stellar achievement.

Bloomberg had a history of inventing their own stuff going back to the first terminals. They had their own networking protocols and everything, when I was last there you could still see remnants in how machines were named.

They do adopt a lot of industry stuff, but it is always heavily modified. And of course they love “Invented Here” as a corporate tradition going all the way back to the beginning.

It’s actually nice from a developer perspective, the R&D group is highly valued by management.

When I left Bloomberg around 7 years ago Kafka was being aggressively rolled out and there was a lot of interest in data streaming tech in general.

I am wondering if they ran into performance or resource usage issues with Kafka at scale, and decided to roll their own for use cases that better fit their workloads.

Bloomberg does have vast backend infrastructure for moving around / computing data which the Terminal is a consumer of.

One of the banks I have worked with have done something similar, they are targeting cannabis businesses entirely through a dedicated subsidiary that is firewalled from the rest of the organization.

Cannabis businesses and banking and payments is a real land mine right now. It is still illegal at the Federal level, and the States all have different laws.

What companies are trying to do is ensure transactions don’t potentially cross into a realm where the Feds or a State where cannabis is still illegal could potentially claim jurisdiction and go after the banks / payment companies.

Some banks and other financial institutions are trying to court these businesses, but they have to do it with carefully vetted business structures and infrastructure to keep them as legally safe as possible.

I would add “make toxic competition among team mates mandatory, and make it clear the winner will be well treated”. Then step back and watch the vicious infighting begin.

Double points if you tie this to financial reward like bonuses.

On blogging - I would add to the discussion, ask someone you trust their opinion of your writing. If you are a great or even good writer, this can be good advice.

I’d you are not so good - this can backfire. I’ve seen a lot of CV’s with blog links that turned me off on the candidate immediately. Usually for more architecture type positions, not coding, because architects need good written comm skills.

It was a concrete griffin, about three feet tall. Left wing was sheared off.

Here in Western NJ, Amazon drivers don’t seem to have any training at all. One took out a statue at the top of our driveway at high speed. They routinely park on dangerous blind curves. They hop out of the drover’s side of their vans right into traffic without looking.

The majority here at least are a menace.

By comparison the UPS folks all seem to be professional drivers as a rule and know what they’re doing.

Yes, the glut of websites with stock “analysis” or “news” is almost 100% automated based on a number of financial and technical measures of any given stock. They are, as you say, pretty much worthless.

I’d like to hear more then. Mainframes are traditionally a big investment where you consolidate tons of load and jobs and LPARs onto one honking big machine. A very expandable machine in terms of any resource you can think of.

Why would you turn over something like that every few years? Your narrative sounds more like taking about ephemeral cloud stuff, not multi million dollar main frames.

I call BS on this. I never heard of upgrading mainframes every 2-3 years. It makes no sense. Mainframes are huge investments meant to last a long time, it is not a PC you replace in a few years.

One of the reasons Mainframes continue to be used is depreciation. I know a few companies who love their mainframes because they are fully paid for and from a budget perspective they are seen as “free”.

This can be very attractive compared to the never ending OpEx for running cloud computing.

Pretend this wasn’t education, but literally any other field.

You want KPIs that you can measure that are based somehow on reality.

The problem with public education in the US is teacher’s unions fiercely fight against any sort of KPI, because they would then be evaluated on actual results. They much prefer to have bullet proof tenured jobs for life with no accountability.

Note that school systems in NJ as a rule are not state run, but locally run. Quality varies wildly by district. In fact, real estate prices vary in direct proportion to quality of schools in NJ towns very closely.

We happen to be in a lousy district. Yes, Covid uniformly hurt all schools. But don’t presume to know our kids, our schools, or our context. Our public schools have always had lousy standardized test results, even pre-Covid. Post Covid it is getting worse and worse - a few weeks ago our Superintendent rejoiced that we should all just ignore those scores, because more and more colleges are not requiring SAT or ACT scores for admission. He said this and wrote it in a presentation. A celebration of ignorance. Paid for by my tax dollars.

Ugh.

Two ways:

1) The kids State Standardized test scores were abysmal, but they were given great scores by the school. If they failed tests they were given unrelated “makeup work” to being their grade back.

2) during Covid, everything went online and we could see all the work being given. Our daughter was specifically given topics 2 grades below her actual grade to keep her grade up. Her teachers told her this, and they didn’t assign homework “because of need for school / life balance”. My son’s work was dumbed down as well.

For private school, we see it because we had to help get them back up to par. I have helped my son understand algebra and read Shakespeare, and my younger daughter age appropriate math and English.

Both are now able to take over their own studies, which are far in advance of where the grade equivalent public school is.

Our public schools also have almost no AP courses at all. The private school has only college-prep courses, and the question is only what level - basic to advanced to honors AP.

This is why my kids are in private school now. The public school system here in NJ has been dumbing down its curriculum for years. And while I thought “social promotion” was only a thing in horrible inner city schools, we have it here out in the suburbs, too.

The first six months was very rough as they caught up from being so far behind, but they are being well positioned to the rest of their school careers compared to where they would have ended up academically in the public schools.

I had to finally give up on Google Maps in my car because after 15 minutes or so into a route, Google maps would start to lag reality by about 20 seconds. It got very difficult to actually use to drive a route. I thought it was poor GPS signal, my head unit’s slowness with Carplay, etc. Finally I tried Apple Maps out of desperation and it just worked.

As a bonus, it is better at giving useful driving directions. It will say things like “the right at the second stop sign”, which is a great signal to use to a driver.

I do occasionally use Google maps for finding businesses, but that’s it.

Location - NJ, USA. Car - Kia Telluride with CarPlay.

I think this strongly depends on the couple.

My wife and I have had separate checking accounts for 20 years, and a shared savings account, and a second shared checking account we use strictly for transferring money back and forth (we can’t use savings for that due to stupid banking rules).

We also have split the hills according to our relative incomes. I make a lot more so I have the mortgage and a few big ticket items, she has several of the other bills plus her own car payment.

We make joint decisions on big things like vacations, or more recently, private school for our kids.

I know other couples do it completely differently. Some have totally shared accounts. I know husbands on a strict allowance.

Do what works for you.

I don’t recall if they had a cafeteria, I would not be surprised if they did.

Many employees lived in Holmdel or close by. The schools definitely reflected it. Holmdel itself didn’t have any real commercial areas, nearby Hazlet did.

NJ transit trains were near-ish, but not close enough to walk.

I went to Holmdel High School, and my girlfriend’s dad was a researcher at this facility, he invented a delta wave modulation technique in the 60’s that was (is?) used by NASA for certain spaceship comms. I got to visit him once or twice here, it was truly an inspiring building with all of the open air quality and glass everywhere.

Really part of another era, where AT&T sunk billions into the labs just for pure research. If only corporations could be a far seeing today.