adrianhoward

No.

He also seems completely unaware that there is an entire school of TDD/BDD that doesn't really like mock objects (the Chicago vs London school http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/123627/what-a...).

I've just generally stopped listening to what he says on the topic. It doesn't seem to match the reality of what folk actually do.

(BTW It's slipped to #9 now... if anybody wants to endorse me for coffee that would be lovely ;-)

* It's where my "general business" social network lives. Which is different from my company network (which lives in a CRM). My twitter social network (public facing me) and my facebook social network (mostly private me) and my app.net network (... erm... mostly tumbleweed ;-)

* The rest of the world uses it. Like it or not a stack of people go there to find out about people. Not being there means those people miss you or trust you less.

* It has some level of value that a private site does not. Recommendations etc. are more than mildly useless - but slightly less useless than a random quote on your own web site.

* The network is useful. I've managed to contact and strike up relationships with folk because of my LinkedIn connections. People have reached out to me from my network. Some of those connections have resulted in non-trivial money for my business.

Sure - having LinkedIn as your only profile on the net is foolish in the extreme. Having it as part of your identity online has been useful — for me anyway.

Yup. In fact the opposite is the case. Folk with mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of violence.

See http://psychcentral.com/archives/violence.htm for example. Or the references from http://m.xojane.com/issues/for-the-last-time-stop-conflating....

The story that gets portrayed in the media of mentally ill people being a major danger to the general public is just that - a story. The facts don't back it up.

(Note: not done it myself - so don't know how well it works.)

One time I can remember getting this sheet with this wonderful crossed-grid with rings pattern. I remember staring at it for a good ten minutes before turning it over and trying to draw spider-man ;-)

It was several year before I realised that I was looking at a drawing of core store.

One of my life regrets was that I didn't know to save it. I'd love to have it on the wall framed now ;)

Estate agents have many one off customers. Literary agents have many long-term repeat customers. It's worth their while to make them as money as possible and accelerate their career.

I admit it's a small sample - but the authors I know have made considerably more money post-agent than they did pre-. Which matches what cstross mentioned in his post.

Good question. I have no idea ;-)

I guess it might not even matter. If what you're interested in is the best way to get more good books into the world rather than make the most money. From my experiences the folk in the publishing industry I've met are more interested in the former than the latter.

The issue I was trying to highlight though is that many people seem to ignore the "invest" part of what publishers do and see them as just people who print books. The publishers advance + the publisher/agent network are an investment. And with new authors an especially risky investment.

"Moreover, the best ROI for VC funded anything, seems to be an exit IPO. What would be the equivalent of an "IPO" for authors? A movie?"

I'm guessing getting a Terry Pratchett or a J. K. Rowling. That combination of talent and public zeitgeist that produces wads of cash.

I could that 24 hour coffee & pizza fuelled session and push out a stupid amount of code. I could do that 60-80 hours week with the team and feel good about the work that I did.

Then I started measuring what was produced. Both in quantity (delivery rate of stories) and quality (how many stories returned with bugs) and other things besides. And compared that to what was pushed out in shorter days.

The short version is that what felt productive wasn't. That we produced more better quality stuff when we worked fewer hours. On several different occasions when I've had the opportunity experiment somewhere around 5-6 hours of productive work within 7-8 hours of working day seems to come up.

(The thing I find most fascinating about this was that several teams slipped back into stupid hours, despite the numbers, because the culture couldn't adapt to working less.)

No I'm sure that there are the odd outlier cases. The folk who really are productive over longer periods. But I'd strongly suggest trying to experiment and measure. Otherwise you might be doing what I was: confusing what feels good with what actually is good.

* FBI hires had to be full agents. Run the assault courses, cleared for firearms, etc. Which made hiring some of the white-hat hackers he wanted next to impossible since they were... not really the assault course running types.

* Inter-agency hiring was almost impossible. He wanted to get better humint skills into his group. He had some guy who wanted to move across from the DEA who was dealing with folk who were informing against drug cartels in Mexico who would have been ideal... but couldn't because "that's not how we do things".

Again - no idea if the guy was just bullshitting me... but it seems a mildly odd topic to confuse the English guy with if so ;-)

The former makes the latter more likely. A good agent will:

* get a better advance for the author, which makes it more likely the book will actually get finished

* be on the author's case to get the book finished and out (otherwise less money for them).

* negotiate better promotion with the publishers

* be on the publishers case to make sure that what was agreed actually happens

* etc. etc.

All of which make it more likely that the book gets published, gets promoted, and so seen, and so read, and for that word-of-mouth to kick off ;-)

As for the number of successful authors who were rejected. That's to be expected. Publishers are the VCs of the book industry. They say "no" a lot, and most of the people they say "yes" to aren't hugely successful. Every VC has said no to a successful company. Every publisher has said no to a successful author. They doesn't mean either group are necessarily failing as a whole.

To push the analogy - not everybody needs a VC. Some people can bootstrap. Some people are happy taking on the extra load of marketing, financing, producing, distributing, advertising, editing, admin, etc. etc. They find it fun and interesting and are happy to take the time to do it. Some market segments make that work considerably less than others do.

Other authors want to use that time to write.

Despite what some have said here I don't think using UML is an sign of technical chops, or otherwise. It's just a tool. Some people use it sensibly. Some people use it stupidly. Thus has it ever been.

People drew and draw representations of data, structure and flow long before UML was around, and will continue to do so in years to come.

People wasted a bunch of time writing diagrams which would have been more effectively spent writing code before UML was around, and will continue to do so in years to come.

People wasted a bunch of time writing code when they should have spent five minutes drawing a diagram to make sure they were building the right thing before UML was around, and will continue to do so in years to come.

I'd say the more important skill is being able to talk about data and structure and flow visually - and to know when the right time to do that is. UML is a nice common language to throw on top of that skill.

But UML is certainly not used everywhere. Never has been.

You mean things like http://www.yotel.com/ ? ;-)

I've got a Regus gold card. The number of times I've actually used it in the last 18months - zero. Because the friction in actually making a booking and getting something sane out the other end is so high. I find especially memorable the time where I was running on EST in London and wanted to work at night, was told verbally that Regus has 24 hour office space at X address, only to show up to find a confused security guard and no access ;-)

So it seems like a gap in the market to me !

I love declarative testing tools like QuickCheck. They're excellent. I still test-drive my code though.

Very much not "your" space.

I'd love something like this in London. I live about 2.5 hours out of London, and when I come in for client meetings or on-sites having somewhere to decompress for a couple of hours, grab a shower and a nap, and get some work done in the quiet, would be fantastic.

* Have some external metric that you trust to judge success. Because if you're like me you're internal "sense" of what is productive or not is often wrong. I know my 10 hour long in-zone hacking sessions are way less productive than my four hour well-rested in-zone hacking sessions - no matter how neat they might feel - because I see my delivery-rate drop.

* Get enough sleep (for me, 8 or 9 hours a night).

* Do a sane amount of "work" each day (for me, if I try and code for more than 6 hours a day I see my performance drop).

* Block out time. I have chunks of my day set aside for coding, pair working, reading, etc.

* Don't track time - track off-task interruptions. Keep track of whatever interrupts your N hours off coding (or whatever). Work at preventing those interruptions in future. If you're on a team be broad in your interpretation of "off task" - because your job is to optimise everybody's productivity - not just yours.

* Have rituals / an environment for work (when I sit in this chair at this time I am in work mode.)

* For coding I've found TDD to be a really effective way for me to get into the zone. Especially if I leave myself a failing test. It's got that intermittent reward cycle that's just crack for the brain.

* When I have trouble focussing I find something like Pomodoro Technique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique) a way to trick myself into the zone. I can "force" myself to focus for "just 25 minutes". And after a loop or two it just clicks.

Genuine question ;-)

What utility value will you get out of PHP rather than Java? Why should priorities favour the PHP over Java, or C, or Lisp, or whatever?

I still have this vain hope that folk will get back to teaching programming - rather than specific programming languages. During my degree back in 1988-91 we built non-trivial programs in all of: Pop-11 (yes - nobody has heard of this ;-), Prolog, Lisp, ML, Modula-2, C, plus some stack-based assembler whose name escapes me at the moment. Not to mention trivial playing Smalltalk, Occam, shell scripting and probably others that I've forgotten. And this wasn't even a straight CS degree!

Sometime between now and then the universities started chucking out people who were just taught Java, or Python, or some other single-language.

Sigh.

I seem to have ranted a little off-topic... I'll shush now ;-)

Sometime

Organisations have software that's been around for many years, in many instances decades. Curiously they don't rewrite everything just because COBOL or Java or C++ or whatever has become unfashionable among some portions of the dev world ;-)

I've personally never seen carousels out-perform alternatives like having multiple images on the page, or multiple landing pages with separate messaging, or just dropping multiple options for the one that's most important.

I'm sure that there are some cases where they're an effective option - but I've yet to come across one in testing.

As Brad Frost once observed "Carousels exist to keep people from beating the shit out of each other in meetings." - https://twitter.com/karenmcgrane/status/316563205294010370

And sometimes "people" is just the different people in your head who want to talk about ALL THE THINGS - when talking about just the most important one is what you really need to do.

Every place I've worked - small or large - has been fun in one way or another, made me some friends, and taught me things I didn't know going in. I even made a few neat things that made people's lives better along the way.

Yeah - I run my own company now. Because it gives me some other things that I value. But the idea that a normal job is always a terrible boring experience really does depend on the job. Not every employer on the planet is an asshat. Working for other people can be fun.

DO USABILITY TESTING

Often.

Because if those problems were obvious to the OP - they would have fixed them. By definition. I guarantee that everybody here has there own blind spots with there own application or service.

I've been doing usability tests for nearly twenty years now - and the number of times we've found nothing that can be improved can be counted on approximately no hands.

Use online services like peek (there are many, many others too). Do them yourselves. Do them regularly. If I could pick only one thing to help folk improve their product - usability testing would be it. Even above customer interviewing. Nothing beats watching your customers try and fail to use your product.

Here's three books to get you started:

* Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, Steve Krug - Does exactly what it says on the tin. Short sharp guide to getting you started.

* Handbook of Usability Testing: Howto Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests, Jeffrey Rubin & Dana Chisnell - The last book but in much more depth. The first edition of this was my bible when I started doing usability testing.

* Remote Research, Nate Bolt & Tony Tulathimutte - A great guide to how to approach getting the most out of remote usability testing services like peek. The tools are a few years out of date now. The advice isn't.

Seriously. If you're not already doing usability tests go spend an hour or two reading 'Rocket Surgery Made Easy' and then go test your product with some actual human beings. You'll thank me.

Yes, the larger images were nice to look at - but they got in the way of actually viewing the content for me.

My personal viewing habits of the newsfeed are to give facebook a glance over once a day with my morning coffee. The purpose is to get an overview - quickly. The newer look got in the way of that, especially when viewing in smaller windows.

There are also all the folk who aren't looking at it on large displays, and maybe consistency of experience is important too.

Sure - maybe there's a metrics issue too. But I've seen more than my fair share of usability tests where things that my "design" persona like end up being disliked by the people who actually use the site.

For me - they suck. I have a lousy sense of direction. Despite actively trying to improve it for decades I regularly got lost. Not lost in the fun-exploring-new-places sort of way - but lost in the fuck-me-going-to-miss-the-last-train-home sort of way. I used to regularly schedule in hours of extra time for "just in case" scenarios. I used to avoid unfamiliar locations and over-plan trips to extreme degrees. I never wandered off the beaten track in the middle of the day - coz I could easily spend hours finding my way back.

I now go to strange places with almost zero planning. I can just pick a random direction for a walk and be confident that I can come back again. They have saved me probably weeks of prep time and contingency time at this point, and have let me go to many places that I would have otherwise never have visited. They have lifted a huge weight of worry from my shoulders every time I had to get from A to B.

So for me google maps et al have freed me from the learned helplessness of traditional maps.

I suspect generating them is less effort that many people think. This guy http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-502292/Counterfeiter... - was convicted of creating 14 million fake £1 coins and the technical side was basically a one man operation.