cscharenberg

That's great news! I didn't know it was still actively developed. I played with it... criminy how many years ago did it first start? I liked it then but it was brittle and slow.

It looks great now, functionally and speed-wise. Obviously computers themselves changed a lot in that time to give the speed improvement.

Looking forward to playing with it again now.

Indeed. Debugging them is painful at the moment. I'm using Apex to deploy a few and running "apex logs" gets me all recent logs, but that's pretty far from being actually debugging.

I had a personal trainer for a month a few years back and he pointed this out. I was running with a heart rate monitor (belt around chest type). He pointed out that my heart rate fell 10 bpm when I switched from watching readouts on the treadmill to watching whatever was on the many TVs. Same speed and incline, but if I focused on something other than those numbers, I relaxed and it became easier.

It's interesting to see a real test of this. The clever bit in here was asking the cyclists to count red circles on the screen occasionally, ensuring the TV had a large share of their conscious attention.

I dislike it a lot, and I'm otherwise mostly unopinionated about design. I think it has poor usability. It takes me a long time to process the odd placement of things like a "New/Create" button and the animations annoy me and feel distracting.

Slow-cooker meals are indeed great. Very cheap to fix, makes big quantities, and they can be wonderful. Throw things in at 8am, at 5pm you have hot, delicious food in quantities to throw a dinner party or eat for days.

My wife and I did a "month of slow cooking" to try recipes. Most were good and many are part of our regular cooking rotation now.

Additionally, either through malice or mistake many email forms disallow + signs entirely.

Agreed. CloudFlare is a simple way to add some caching power to a site for free. Or for a few bucks a month enable a bunch of other features.

Surveying with drone fleets is going to be huge across many industries. Agriculture and animal husbandry, surveying hard-to-reach things like bridge structures, inside large engines and mechanical systems. Very neat

Salt Lake City. Tons of jobs with expanding companies, both big old ones and hungry new ones. Beautiful scenery, low cost of living, pleasant people.

I just moved here 4 months ago and it's great. If you like hiking, national parks, outdoorsy stuff, Utah is almost unmatched for beauty and nice climate.

I usually go to ThemeForest and buy a theme, for $8 or $20. I have found them easy to customize and cut down to what I want, usually massaging them into a Django template. You get a great look for incredible value.

Don't worry too much about it. Job requirements are ridiculously inflated and mostly meaningless. With your 2 years of experience, you should be fine talking your way through.

I saw (no exaggeration) some job postings the other day for "QA Intern" requiring 2 years of experience with Java, Selenium, Jira, and a half dozen other tools.

Job ads are absurdist these days. If you meet the main requirement, you apply and bluff your way through the rest by saying what you know and talking up how other experience is comparable to what they are asking for.

This reflects the people I know who have done bootcamps or just tried to build a portfolio and change careers. They struggled to get interviews, let alone jobs. A bootcamp instructor friend quit after losing faith in the program's efficacy after watching several graduating classes fail to get jobs.

My wife would take an unpaid internship for a few months if it led to a job, or work at very low pay, just to get into the industry.

Getting that first job changing careers is _hard_, but then you have experience to point at forevermore.

-- Anyway, I've gotten really intrigued by the hiring side of retraining people. I'm wondering if anyone has yet done research on the ability of retrainees to actually land jobs via social networking, which is how it's assumed they will get jobs.

I think this will be a real problem as more retraining programs start turning people out: that many companies' hiring processes aren't able to see, let alone hire them.

You might be onto something there. I will pass that thought onto her, that a legal-focused software company may give her more of a look than others. Thanks for the idea

This is something I commented on recently. Retraining programs and those already in the industry say social networking will get these people jobs. But they have the weakest networks in their new career. Yes, I could reach into 100 companies through my network and get an interview. A new person cannot. The assumption of using social networks is true only for those already established.

Longer discussion of that as a comment on this blog post (http://www.siliconsloper.com/2016/02/tech-hire-utah-initiati...)

At most companies if you changed careers near 30, you will never get a chance to talk with someone and show your potential. The HR filters are so tight that unless you know someone on the inside of a company who can pull strings, you'll never get asked in for an interview.

I'm watching my wife - a lawyer with math degree and programming experience - struggle to even get responses for junior QA positions.

I think the job market will have to get much tighter before companies start hiring people retraining into software. Hiring processes are optimized for new college grads and people with industry experience. Retraining programs are going to fall on their faces if we can't reform HR to hire smart, motivated people that lack a laundry list of qualifications.

The link points directly to the auto-download page. A link to release notes or main project page would be more approachable.

Interesting. That could explain the disparity of experiences being discussed here. I have all my emails in LinkedIn to be discoverable by colleagues, so that means LinkedIn also knows they are specifically me and I'm signed up.

When they discover teenagers smoke and drink - which also exposes them to ridicule, whether they do it or not - it's going to shock them. If federal law, physical ID verification, active law enforcement, massive fines to parents doesn't eliminate drinking and smoking, why would people expect simple age limits stop signing up online?

And yes, online activities open up an avenue for bullying. So does pretty much everything. We should work on that aspect, of preparing children for it and also cracking down on it.

Perhaps a good step for AI chat bots would be monitoring online chat services and learning to detect bullying and taking actions: block all communication, warn a guardian, etc. Detecting harassment could be achievable long before real intelligence is achieved. And detection lets the child, the parent, or the service take many actions in response.

This is my favorite quote from this article "building services that “actually do something” is a recommended practice". This is an argument I make all the time at work when a team wants to create microservices to serve very specific data types so you can get, put, delete data about a Person, and Organization, or whatever.

The service endpoints are easy to define, easy to test, clean and simple... and nearly useless to expose to the frontend. Congrats - you've exposed the database over HTTP. The layer doesn't accomplish anything, so it's pointless. To my mind, every layer should _do something_ or it should be removed.

The end result in some cases has been creating microservices that clients can theoretically build upon, but the orchestration of them is super complex because the services are too data-specific rather than workflow-specific. To do something, a frontend has to make 6 calls just to gather data before it is even ready to present a page of UI.

I'm not making an argument against microservices, just the architecture of exposing data in tiny self-contained (self-absorbed?) chunks. Microservices can expose data that people may want in those tiny pieces, but they should be wrapped up together by other services to aggregate related data to expose to consumers that need to care about workflow. So build a Person service, Organization service, Blog Post service, whatever. But present a Context service that returns large collected pieces.

The product is awesome. I made some really neat visualizations and analyses with it during an MBA project using the 15-day trial. But it's ridiculously expensive - $1000 per year with some real limitations on how many data sources you can connect.

If I could dabble with it for $50/year I would. $1000 though? That limits their market tremendously to big companies only. It's hard enough to get an $80 tool approved.

-- Looks like they give it free for students now, which is cool: https://www.tableau.com/academic/student. But after learning it, there's no path to bring the software with them when they move to actual companies, because of the cost.

This is true. The newsfeed has turned into meme and inspirational quote sharing. I am unfollowing individual people now (just like FB, yay!)

It really is a poor product for what it looked like it might become.

If is. There are very granular controls to control which emails you get and then, separately, how often, including "No emails". Looks like I did all that a year or so ago, since I only get a message now and then for new connect request. Now those are random strangers maybe 30% of the time, but I do want the notifications.

Same here. I get an email when someone asks to connect but nothing else, and I get that because I want it. They have pretty explicit settings. Just checked and "Introductions and InMail" are only thing enabled. You can also adjust frequency for individual types of messages so you get batch updates.

LinkedIn is generally crappy at what is supposed to be its primary purposes, and they do shady UX stuff. But they have very granular controls for email and push notifications.

The value is in creating a summary, to collect all the stream of conscience updates into a coherent statement about status and next steps. A daily standup of summaries removes the burden of mentally remembering yesterday's minutiae to reconstruct the current state.

I mean, if you want to know the status of a system do you go to the dashboard or do you go review every system event for the past few hours? I hope not the latter! That's what you do when something seems off, which is exactly the case too for daily standups. If something doesn't seem right, you go review discussions and updates.

Also, at the risk of triggering on standup philosophy, I do believe that zoning out during standups mean it's being done poorly: updates are too long or people are not engaging each other. That's the problem to fix, by setting an example of good habits yourself: cut off rambling, encourage active cross-questioning and ideas, etc.

From the article: "Uber, Kickstarter, Airbnb, and the rest — is just a glorified listing service, enhanced with some combination of real-time connections, trust-building systems, and transaction-easing tools.

I don't understand this at all. The author seems to be arguing that the blockchain, which is "a cryptographically protected shared database " is actually the major part of Uber, Spotify, and AirBnb's business. That seems like a fantastical, ludicrous statement. The author is dismissing the entirety of the business logic, management tools, and user experience as being irrelevant. It's the other way round: these business could operate with pen and paper because the storage mechanism is irrelevant. But they couldn't operate without a all the operational and user experience in place.

Yes, that's it. Thanks for finding it.

I was just reading about a company started by 2 brothers that does exactly this. If I can remember the name, I'll post back. Maybe I saw it in Bloomberg? Anyone?

> Learn the ropes in big companies for big money, use small startup companies to grow into new functions. Don't stick with the same job too long.

Agree! At big companies you will see the best and worst of software, projects, and variety of different leadership styles. But they can be stultifying over the long term, and many operate by burning out their junior people. Get in, see it all and learn, then get out and explore at smaller companies.

Highly recommend you do some reading on Quora. There are many similar questions, and asking there is likely to get a good set of answers to add to anything here.

Realize also that many engineers are disdainful of managers and management, so take any feedback you get with a grain of salt. Explicitly aiming to become a manager will get a bad reaction from people.

That said, managing people and process is a real set of skills at which people can be good or bad. You can practice and improve these skills like any others. There are plenty of people who are managers who are poor at it, but that's no different than any other job. And no, experience itself won't grow you the way you want. Adding side training will be essential, whether it is individual courses, Udemy and similar coursework, reading, or full degree programs.

I think an Master's in this "Management and Project Innovation" would be valuable. My path was realizing after about 7 years of software work that I really enjoy the larger activities of businesses even moreso than the software development, so I got an Executive MBA. That gave me some negotiation power to finally slot into a leadership role. It also rewired my brain and vastly expanded my knowledge of leadership and of understanding business concerns to be effective. It really revolutionized my whole way of thinking about the world and made me a better person in my personal and professional lives.

So my take would be: if your passion is in _orchestrating_ projects, do consider that MBA and angling for a Project Manageer role as well. But you should also get a year or several of software development so you learn the realities of people working on software projects. I think practical experience is important to stay grounded when you get with with management theories and practices. Without real-world experience anchoring you, it can turn you into a Pointy-Haired Boss personality.

If you already think that is going to be an interest to you, I encourage you to go work 2+ years as a software engineer, then start a Master's degree concurrently after you have some experience.

Email me if you want to talk in more detail.

But the vehicle's route is chosen by exactly-known demand rather than following a centrally-set and inflexible schedule and route. It's not much like a bus at all in actual practice.