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chrisbro

59 karma · joined October 21, 2014

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chrisbro··on Show HN: I wrote a book for engineers that want to become engineering managers
I just recently did this in my company and have been mulling over giving a talk about it.
chrisbro··on Developers mentoring other developers: practices I've seen work well
We have had success at my org by anchoring a lot of the mentor/mentee discussion around our documented career ladder. If there's not a pressing specific discussion topic for one of their meetings, they can always bring that out and go through the ladder items to brainstorm ideas on how to progress.

We also recommend mentors to sit in on some agile ceremonies with the mentee's team to get a feel for how the mentee's dynamic is with their team, which can spark some discussion as well.

Fundamental, long-term issues can include encouraging the mentee to be more assertive, how to help their team become more effective, and how to approach navigating the inevitable politics of the organization.

chrisbro··on Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?
I've been kicking around an idea of creating a site dedicated to in-depth writeups of the workflows that professionals use these days to stay organized - I've always had the problem of having too big of a toolbox (note-taking app, todo app, documentation app) but no cohesive way to combine all of them into something resembling organization. Would love to hear the details of how others do it.
chrisbro··on Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
RabbitMQ is written in erlang and is popular, so perhaps a queueing system?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RabbitMQ

chrisbro··on Birds Are Vanishing from North America
Could always just read the underlying study, but I'm guessing you don't care too much about what it's saying, just who's saying it? https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/wp-content/uploads/2019/0...
chrisbro··on Was Etsy too good to be true?
That sounds (sounded) awesome! As I was typing up my previous comment I was wondering if there are any other services out there that does this same sort of thing. Fingers crossed.
chrisbro··on Was Etsy too good to be true?
My wife and I have been slowly buying furniture for our house, and Etsy is our go-to. I don't know where else I can search for such a wide array of styles for things like desks and coffee tables, find exactly the style I want, and THEN get it custom-made to the dimensions I want. I really like the way it opens up smaller shops like that for higher-end purchases like furniture, and I've never had a bad experience despite buying items in the 4-digit range.

That being said, complete dumpster fire on the lower-priced items like this article is getting at. I really enjoy Etsy when it can deliver on its promise of opening up a marketplace of skilled artisans who otherwise would've have had a hard time getting started. Hope it can get back to that.

chrisbro··on During the Renaissance, the beard was the defining feature of a man
I thought I couldn't grow a beard for forever until I followed some advice to just give it three months to fill in natural bald spots. Looks great now that I gave it the chance to actually grow instead of just giving up after 3-4 weeks.
chrisbro··on College Board Drops Plans for SAT Student Adversity Score
What are the conservative-friendly mechanisms for ensuring this type of equality across all zip codes?
chrisbro··on The Moon is older than previously believed
Will this have implications for the giant impact hypothesis, or not at all? Can't tell if shortening the time window in which that could've happened would change much. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis
chrisbro··on Notre-Dame came closer to collapsing than people knew
Absolutely, this article is stunning. And I'd never seen that picture at dusk of the fire with the Eiffel tower in the background. Amazing all around.
chrisbro··on Zoom fixes major Mac webcam security flaw with emergency patch
The thought process is that if they did this bad thing, only walked back the bad thing when it became public, and are maintaining that they didn't think the bad thing was that bad in the first place...what other nefarious things will that product team do?
chrisbro··on What’s New in Apache Kafka 2.3
Drove me nuts after opening a new tab to read it - the tab kept flashing that I had a new message. Closed the tab before reading.
chrisbro··on Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform (2016)
Agreed with ignoramous' reply - interested in reading more literature here around what you're describing.
chrisbro··on AirPods with Wireless Charging Case
The QC35s have been near life-changing for my urban existence. Much better transit experience, and can listen to really loud action movies on my headphones through Apple TV without worrying about disturbing my neighbors. Helps at work to drown others out (thanks open office).
chrisbro··on What we've learned about hiring engineering managers
100% have the team involved. I recently hired for a manager to take over one of my dev teams, had a couple of candidates I was on the fence about, but after hearing the development team's feedback, removed them from the running. A person's manager is one of the most influential people in their lives, like it or not, and it's very important to give people a say in that decision whenever possible.
chrisbro··on SiriusXM buys Pandora for $3.5 billion
I was about to say, if naggy and poor customer service is a hallmark of Pandora, then becoming a part of SiriusXM will be a match made in heaven (hell?). When I finally decided to drop SiriusXM and called in to cancel my account, it took me something like 20 minutes worth of begging the phone rep to just never let me have to pay their company money ever again. They spent the entire time questioning how I used the service and trying to forcibly get me to sign up for some lowered rate for x months. I will never purchase something from them again.
chrisbro··on Tesla CEO Musk Says Company Is Flattening Management Structure in Reorganization
Amen, though once I called them it was pretty easy to get them to cancel me. SiriusXM, though...spent 25 minutes on the phone arguing with the rep that I didn't want to pay for their service anymore, in any fashion or form. I was begging them to let me cancel by the end of the call.
chrisbro··on Show HN: Project Management as Code with Graphviz
This is great, thanks for sharing. I stumbled across this idea myself since no todo manager really represented complex dependencies of tasks - the "list" format is just so prevalent and usually ends up increasing cognitive load as I can sometimes get frustrated trying to figure out what's "next" on a non-linear project.

Have you seen DropTask? It's the same idea, I just haven't dug too much into it yet: https://www.droptask.com/

The key feature for me is being able to have multiple ancestor/dependency tasks to a task node, instead of a hierarchical "next action" setup like most task managers.

chrisbro··on What to Worry About in This Surreal Bull Market
Minor correction: Sarbanes-Oxley was introduced in 2002 after the Enron/Worldcom crises, not after the 2007/2008 financial crises: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act
chrisbro··on Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit (2013)
Link goes to part 2 of a 3-part series for some reason.
chrisbro··on Show HN: Zenkit – Productivity app of List, Kanban, Spreadsheet and Calendar
I didn't know how badly I needed the mind map view until I saw it. Re-creates how I think about planning complex tasks with multiple dependencies.
chrisbro··on C# and .NET's Sudden Ubiquity
Could you elaborate on why server-side .NET is much worse than JVM?