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azhenleyon My HCI toolbox: Methods for designing and evaluating UIs

Yes, dev ops and the surrounding tooling are studied. ICSE, FSE, and CHI publish papers on these topics.

Though you’re right that code gets more attention.

azhenleyon Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system

My favorite OS tutorial that I recommend to students, which uses Rust to target RISC-V: https://osblog.stephenmarz.com/

azhenleyon Software engineering books

I made a list a few years ago, "Books I recommend to my software engineering students".

https://austinhenley.com/blog/booksformystudents.html

azhenleyon There's a Package for That – NPM's Single Use Packages

Does anyone have a list of “single use packages” like this?

Do any companies have policies against their use? I’ve often seen product teams maintain their own set of functions in a utility class instead.

azhenleyon Ask HN: What can you realistically manufacture in your garage?

SBIR grants require a lot of expertise about the arcane application process.

There’s an entire service industry around helping businesses apply. The companies that I’ve seen be successful at it hired several people with SBIR experience specifically to handle the grant proposals.

I had 3 successful NSF proposals and could not have done it without an experienced team helping me just with the legalese and process.

azhenleyon Algorithms by Jeff Erickson (2019)

Jeff was also very active on Academia.StackExchange, where he was invaluable in helping many early career faculty and PhD students, including myself. Nearly 97,000 reputation from more than 500 answers.

His profile: https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65/jeffe

azhenleyon Six programming languages I’d like to see

I think Plasmic is doing that for React.

https://www.plasmic.app/

azhenleyon Why is there no semantic ontology of sentiment in academic citations?

In HCI and SE there is very little incentive and it is way too much effort to disagree with prior research. Most work isn’t replicable. The fields value novelty.

Why would I spend countless hours replicating someone else’s human-subjects study when I could pursue something new?

azhenleyon Learning HTML was too hard so I made a compiler instead

It was Business Professionals of America. At the state competition there were only 5ish people competing in C++ out of >100 schools. We didn't actually have any programming classes or activities within my school.

azhenleyon Launch HN: Foster (YC W21) – Improve your writing with on-demand editing

Finally, someone turned Soylent into a product!

Soylent: A Word Processor with a Crowd Inside https://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/papers/soylent-uist201...

azhenleyon Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

Not only explain the source, but also format and present it in a nicer way.

Many websites’ code now are minified so I have to copy and paste it around then manually clean it up before I can start reading it.

azhenleyon Take my app ideas

Exactly!

“Why I prefer making useless stuff” https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html

azhenleyon Take my app ideas

The post is nearly a month old.

azhenleyon Ask HN: Do you find it challenging to talk to your users?

I’ve been thinking about writing a book on this topic. I love running user studies!

azhenleyon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://austinhenley.com/

My personal site including my blog about dev tools, academia, usability, and product design.

azhenleyon Jack Dongarra wins Turing Award

This makes me proud to have been faculty at University of Tennessee, even if I recently resigned :)

azhenleyon Show HN: Search Engine for Blogs

This is awesome! I see some blog posts of mine already on here but using an outdated URL.

Are there any plans to check for redirects and update the URL or to recrawl?

azhenleyon Ask HN: Is it common for a SW Dev to earn $14/hr?

No.

azhenleyon Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter egg in Windows 1.0

Fascinating! Any resource you recommend to learn more about this origin story?

azhenleyon Ask HN: What book changed your life?

The Design of Everyday Things.

azhenleyon Build or don't build a software feature?

The value seems to range from 5% to 95%, is that to leave room for uncertainty?

azhenleyon What a $500k grant proposal looks like

I wasn’t happy.

I shared a bit more detail here: https://austinhenley.com/blog/leavingacademia.html

azhenleyon What a $500k grant proposal looks like

I might not be very rational :)

azhenleyon How to Reject Job Offers from Google

This seems similar to attacking a customer service representative for something you know is out of their control.

azhenleyon Ask HN: What if I have insane execution but 0 creativity?

Practice. Creativity can be learned.

Partner with people that are.

azhenleyon My worst tech interview experience

The "aha moment" is also known as the eureka effect. Psychologists call this "insight problem solving", which is terrible for interviewing since like you said since it isn't a problem that you can build up towards solving. As a teacher, I try to make sure my assignments/quizzes don't fall victim of this.

For anyone interested, there are a lot of interesting studies on the topic if you search on Google Scholar. You've probably already seen matchstick arithmetic problems before (i.e., move a single matchstick to make the equation valid).

azhenleyon “This project will only take 2 hours”

But I didn’t give the students a programming problem. I gave them a software project to solve a problem I have, which involves UX and PM work along with some coding.

azhenleyon BonziBuddy

What is in the zip file when you click the download button??

azhenleyon Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

Professor here.

You definitely aren’t too old, but I would never take on a PhD student that wants to continue working elsewhere. A PhD is a full-time job. It took me 6.5 years and was hard enough with very little outside distractions.