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cjcenizalon Effective Code Reviews – A Primer

I also love the wording "Can you help me understand the reasons behind X?" because it shows that you're a) just trying to understand/learn and b) you respect the other person, because you're asking for their help.

cjcenizalon Ask HN: How are you getting through (and back from) burning out?

For me, the combo was:

1. Establish healthy habits: eat well, exercise regularly, sleep well, feel gratitude, focus on the people in my life.

2. Derive my sense of self-worth from anything and everything not related to work.

cjcenizalon Problems plagued U.S. Navy destroyer Fitzgerald before fatal collision

The author of the book commanded a US Navy nuclear sub. At the time he assumed command, it was one of the worst performing subs in the fleet. The book is about the organizational and management lessons he learned as he transformed it into a top performing sub.

cjcenizalon John C. Bogle Has Died

^ This! Also, the most valuable part of investing is asset allocation, i.e. how you split your money up between stocks and bonds (and optionally real estate). Take your age, and put that percentage of your money into bonds (if you're 30, put 30% of your money in bonds). Bonds are safer and you want to conserve your money as you age. Make sure the bond maturity dates aren't later than you're going to need them. Reallocate your assets every 18 months so that your diversification continues to match your age. Read fund prospectuses to learn about the fees and expenses they incur -- this is boring, but the lower the fees and expenses the better your portfolio will perform.

cjcenizalon John C. Bogle Has Died

I just finished reading "The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing", which opened my eyes up to how investing _really_ works -- turns out it's much simpler than I thought, which was an exciting realization to have. I'm sad to see him go.

cjcenizalon The New Old Age

For what it’s worth, my grandparents told me that their 60s was one of the best period of their lives.

cjcenizalon Building a Kickass Portfolio

http://cenizal.com/

cjcenizalon Lay Out Your Code Like You'd Lay Out Your House

I'm a fan of grouping by cohesion for the reasons the author lays out, but like any principle you need to understand how and why you're applying it. The author suggests grouping reducers, actions, and components by functional cohesion in a React/Redux app, but the point of grouping by layer in this case is to uncouple the layers in your app (UI vs. store vs. actions). In this situation, those layers represent the functions around which your code coheres.

cjcenizalon Death: From Dungeon Crawl to Meat Boy

Are you thinking of Prey? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game)

cjcenizalon Ask HN:Delete post

Have you consulted your employment agreement? It’s possible your contract assigns this work to your employer already. You should probably consult a lawyer on how to proceed, regardless.

cjcenizalon Why ‘your’ programmers just want to code

You may be saying the same things. It seems like the person you’re replying to emphasized _daily_ justification of work, which does seem unnecessary to me.

cjcenizalon Hiring Developers: look for the ability to abstract and not for experience

Funny, I see where the author is coming from and agree to an extent: capacity for abstract thought is marked by ability to mentally manipulate concepts, not things.

But in software engineering, I think the ability to analyze the information which constitutes a domain and then synthesize ergonomic abstractions out of that information is more relevant. Martin Fowler would call it domain modeling, I just call it software design.

Of course I also obsess over names of things, interface design, and mental models, so I’m biased!

cjcenizalon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2018)

Elastic | Sr. UI Engineer, Sr. JavaScript Engineer, Anywhere (aka REMOTE)

We're the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats. We have positions open for all of these products [1] but this post focuses on roles for Kibana.

We're looking for experienced UI engineers to help us build and maintain our React+Sass UI framework (elastic.github.io/eui/), and JavaScripts engineers to help us build Kibana, a data visualization and dashboarding platform. Check out the links for more details.

Sr. UI engineer: https://www.elastic.co/about/careers/engineering/jobs/825257

Sr. JavaScript engineer: https://www.elastic.co/about/careers/engineering/jobs/593004

GIS UI engineer: https://www.elastic.co/about/careers/engineering/jobs/972336

JavaScript Security engineer: https://www.elastic.co/about/careers/engineering/jobs/937336

[1] https://www.elastic.co/about/careers

cjcenizalon Sound and fury: how pronunciation provokes passionate reactions

To be fair, when you gain most of your vocabulary by reading, you have to guess at pronunciation most of the time. I read voluminously as a kid but still mispronounce words which I feel very comfortable with!

cjcenizalon Things I have learnt as the software engineering lead of a multinational

Point 1 resonated with me (and its value outweighs that of the others by an order of magnitude IMO):

> When the plan is foggy, that’s the moment to communicate as broadly as possible. In fact you should not frame it as a plan, you frame it as the situation and the final state you want to achieve. When you have a detailed plan, that’s when you DON’T need to communicate broadly. So, clearly state the situation and clearly state the foggy goal to everyone who will listen.

This is a great way to clarify a complex problem, draw out and resolve disagreements in understanding, enlist others’ help, and methodically arrive at the optimal solution. It also works well for all kinds of problems, whether they be engineering-related, organizational, or interpersonal.

cjcenizalon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2017)

Kibana team members are in time zones around the world (and sometimes inconsistently since some team members travel and work simultaneously). Most of our communication is asynchronous through GitHub, email, and Slack. When we need to have synchronous conversation we set up video calls, sometimes ad hoc and sometimes scheduled. We try to be mindful of each other’s personal lives and preferred working style and generally things just work out.

cjcenizalon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2017)

Elastic's reviews on Glassdoor are stellar: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Elastic-Reviews-E751551.ht.... I work with the parent on Kibana and the reviews don't even tell the full story of how nice it is to work here.

cjcenizalon My Apology to Naomi Wu and the Make Community

I didn't downvote you, but I think you may be getting downvotes because of the sentence that begins with "But."

> People should absolutely be allowed to dress how they please without fear of judgment. As the article says, "I do my best engineering when sitting half-naked at my desk." There's nothing wrong with that.

That's it. Full stop. There's nothing to add after that. You don't need to add "but..." and then state the exact opposite of that sentiment.

You find something weird about someone? Guess what -- we're all weird. Somebody out there probably finds something about you weird. But who gives a shit! Life's a lot better once you just get over it and accept people despite their weirdness. Or even better, because of their weirdness.

cjcenizalon Bill Gates buys land in Arizona to build 'smart city'

Funny coincidence, but this is the same region where Paolo Soleri founded Arcosanti [1], another attempt at a utopian city.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti

cjcenizalon Your Software May Be Lousy but at Least It Is AGILE

The other popular alternative is to just outsource to a bunch of 'agile developers' you have absolutely no control over in some third world country where the developers can't even speak or write English

...and that's when I stopped reading. Software is used around the world. Software is written around the world. The author only limits himself by adopting this kind of bigoted perspective.

cjcenizalon Lessons I learned while implementing technical RFCs as a management tool

In my job, we create GitHub Issues labeled "Discuss", which are essentially requests for comment. It's a great way to outline a problem you want to solve, test your assumptions, gather thoughts from the team, and create transparency. For the ideas which are really ground-shaking, we send an email to the team with a link to the Issue with a brief synopsis.

cjcenizalon I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

I understand what you're saying but I think this perspective may be mis-framing the issue. One immutable requirement to a solution to the company diversity problem is to form an effective company. Another requirement is to ensure applicants don't suffer discrimination either during the hiring process or the employment period. Ensuring the entire pool of humanity has an equal opportunity to work anywhere / do anything is incontrovertibly not a requirement.

cjcenizalon Convincing people takes time

You sound disillusioned, and I can empathize. Based on similar experiences, I've come to the understand that we're not trying to change individuals, we're trying to change culture. And cultures have inertia. All we can do to change a culture is to simply exist within it. It's not reasonable to have any expectations because we're just single points of influence among hundreds -- too many factors beyond our control. But by lowering expectations perhaps we can find satisfaction in making a small impact on one or two individuals around us. Celebrate the small wins.

cjcenizalon How to present a GitHub project for your resume (2016)

I think there's a correlation between being able to explain something and fully understanding it. Being able to think clearly and communicate clearly are interconnected -- if you're programming by instinct then you're not thinking critically about the problems you're solving.

cjcenizalon Teenager walked for hours to and from work – until a police stop changed his life

Good point, though a bike is a perfect vehicle for a short commute like this, since it requires no gas and much less maintenance. Plus it's good exercise!

cjcenizalon Ask HN: What pressing world problems should a graphic designer work on?

Anything in the public sector, like utilities' and local governments' websites (cough DMV), websites for your local library system, websites for your local law enforcement and/or hospital, public schools. The usability of these sites tends to suck because they're subject to budget cuts, even though thousands of people have no choice but to depend upon them.

cjcenizalon I'm not a Woman in Tech

> Studies are showing that more diverse teams have higher collective intelligence

Absolutely! Discrimination is self-defeating. Why intentionally deprive yourself or your team of resources?

Or, to take a larger perspective, why deprive _humanity_ of resources? Imagine how many more Einsteins we'd have if everyone had the same opportunities.

cjcenizalon Resonance NodeGroup: Create complex animated transitions in React

I completely agree with you. This principle is why I'm so opposed to the trend of using labels as form input placeholders, and animating them into place when the input takes focus. What information is that supposed to communicate to the user?

cjcenizalon Inclusive Design at Microsoft

I love the manual [1] they've published. I recently used it as part of a presentation at work about the importance of web accessibility.

There's a great chart on page 41 that breaks out disabilities into "permanent", "temporary", and "situational". When I saw this, it opened my eyes up to the reality that everyone can and will experience a sub-optimal, disabled experience when trying to use a product. One example from that chart is that you can suffer a permanent sight disability by losing your sight, a temporary one by dealing with a cataract (pre-surgery), and a situational one when you're in an environment with a lot of distractions or poor lighting conditions.

This all underlines the spirit behind "inclusive design": improving a product's accessibility for one person does more than benefit that one person -- it will provide benefits for everyone. In essence, accessible UX is good UX. If anyone's interested in these ideas, I strongly recommend watching Rob Dodson's fantastic presentation on the topic [2]!

[1] https://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/D/B0D4BF87-09CE-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qjgxH384Nc

cjcenizalon TumbleSeed Postmortem: what went wrong

I really appreciated this write-up, and I can 100% empathize with the struggle of the game designer [1].

I'd like to give the author one piece of feedback: please refine your color palette to use contrast and hue to make it easier for players to identify the various game entities! Looking at the screenshots and watching the gameplay videos, it's really hard for me to pick out the what's important and what's just background. Everything blends together and just looks like noise.

Take a look at other games, e.g. Raptor: Call of the Shadows, which make it really easy to scan the screen and identify/differentiate background terrain, power-ups, enemies, and bullets. When it's hard to tell what's going on, you add an unnecessary barrier to entry.

That said, keep making games!! Seems like you're good at it. :)

[1] http://www.atomicarmies.com/