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ctraynor

11 karma · joined June 8, 2017

https://twitter.com/CraigTraynor1

Current: Growth @ Perlego

Previous: Head of Digital @ MadeBrave CTO @ StoriiCare CTO @ Avarix

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ctraynor··on While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working
The reason why this will fix it is because Ctrl+Alt+Delete has a higher level of system interrupt than alternate ways to get to task manager. Ctrl+Alt+Delete fixes a surprising number of issues by interrupting runaway issues.
ctraynor··on Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
The problem with some of this is product-market-timing fit.

There are huge problems to solve that add value. But some of these businesses are very old school.

You can't force someone to digitise if they don't want to.

There are a lot of barriers to entry, and there can be lengthy sales cycles.

Someone will definitely get there and be hugely succesful, I'm just not sure if the time is now or if we'll need to wait years.

ctraynor··on Ask HN: What is key to good technical documentation?
> while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more

The agile manifesto doesn't say that you shouldn't write documentation. That's an incredibly damaging idea.

ctraynor··on Rethinking GPS: Engineering Next-Gen Location at Uber
There's a UK company https://what3words.com/ that's been working on this for a while
ctraynor··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2018)
Hey, I get a response from your mail server saying the "jobs" group may not exist.
ctraynor··on YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals
Yes self censorship is part of the system.

It's a process that maintains the existing polarization.

ctraynor··on YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals
The content of two videos don't need to disagree with each other for the general effect to be called polarization.

The polarization isn't about income models, it's about the different kinds of content (light hearted safe content that aligns with advertisers vs extreme content that doesn't). I may have confused things by mentioning gain. The different goals of the creators was just my basic explanation as to why similar content continues being created because the effect is already in place.

I find it disturbing that you disregard the effect of capital. Advertisers are 100% focused on monetary optimization, and they're very good at driving creators to what will work best for them.

Of course content and context is important. But, money drives the content creation. Even when it isn't used to pay for the original content. Advertisers want impressions and clicks. Content creators want more viewers. The type of content aligns with advertisers goals -> money becomes involved -> more similar content. And other creators see this and want part of it.

ctraynor··on YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals
What you're describing seems to be pretty much exactly polarization.

You get one set of creators who want monetary gain and so their content fits within certain limits. Over time this will create more similar content as they watch what works for other people.

The other set of creators have different goals and don't care about monetary gain. The popular parts of this content will also tend to local maximum based on the level of extremism that's popular.

ctraynor··on YouTube and Facebook Are Losing Creators to Blockchain-Powered Rivals
Can you give a bit more detail on the term "Averagisation", couldn't find much about it from a quick google.

What you describe sounds more like polarization.

ctraynor··on Show HN: Key Values – Find engineering teams that share your values
These are interesting but fairly generic and easy for a company to claim many to look good.

When defining culture I think it's best to avoid generalisations and have specifics:

- If something breaks, what is more important: Preserving state for debuggability or getting online fast

- Developers can always say they are not ready to push and continue testing

- There are defined SLI's and error budgets

- Design docs are required for new functionality

- Senior developers are expected to {mentor junior developers, be proactive in creating tooling, understand the full technology stack, refactor}

- Sliding scale of time spent on feature development vs keeping on top of technical debt

- How much time is spent on automation

- Are there well defined leadership tracks for technical and management (a yes/no isn't really enough here)

- Onboarding/mentoring, paired with a senior developer or a hire that joined ~6 months ago

There are a lot more engineering culture questions based on ownership, communication, personal development and specific engineering tradeoffs.