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dpritchetton Extracting the SuperFish certificate

Code is not the only sort of thing with an optimal chunk size. Languages and APIs (such as sets of library or system calls) run up against the same sorts of human cognitive constraints that produce Hatton's U-curve.

Accordingly, Unix programmers have learned to think very hard about two other properties when designing APIs, command sets, protocols, and other ways to make computers do tricks: compactness and orthogonality.

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch04s02.html

dpritchetton A new wave of videogames offers lessons in powerlessness, scarcity and failure

I just had fun writing a goofy ruby script to rot13 this comment thread: https://gist.github.com/dpritchett/bfa3423dcab85ee46ddf

dpritchetton What I Wish I Knew When Starting Out as a Software Developer: Slow the Fuck Down

Michael has written nearly 30 essays on the Gervais Principle - check out his blog.

dpritchetton But Where Do People Work in This Office?

I am willing to bet that Ed handles all of those activities as needed in modes 1 and 3. Breaking down "prep" and "review" into detailed bits doesn't really challenge his assertion that the core activity of actual programming regularly requires autonomous isolation.

dpritchetton Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony

Subtlety will only get you so far in negotiations, especially when you're already a 'captive' employee.

dpritchetton New Science on Building Great Teams

As much as I like the scientific method in most other aspects of life, Taylorism has always terrified me.

dpritchetton Delve: a debugger for Go, written in Go

The unix philosophy has been chugging along for decades now. It's hard to compare it directly to e.g. Visual Studio but it's very powerful.

dpritchetton Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government

Increasing the costs of an undesirable activity effectively lowers the incidence of that activity. It's probably easier than trying to prevent it unilaterally, too.

dpritchetton Tech salary insights from 1.2M foreign worker visas

There are actual reported data points underlying this. Likely they are just two similar jobs (maybe even the same one in different time frames) that were reported differently.

dpritchetton Tech salary insights from 1.2M foreign worker visas

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/caseh1b.aspx

dpritchetton A Site That Teaches You to Code Well Enough to Get a Job

Likely no one's submitted a PR with C exercises yet. github.com/exercism has repos for many languages.

dpritchetton The global talent crunch

Exactly! Compare the Linux kernel project (globally distributed, world-class devs) to a team of undergrads working in the same room.

Maybe face to face has higher communications bandwidth, but it doesn't automatically win in every scenario.

dpritchetton Find salaries paid at companies using foreign worker data

Imperfect data is still useful in a negotiation. Present it with minimal comment as a negotiating point and let the counterparty poke holes in it if they so choose. Don't undermine yourself!

Sure the large tech employers are going to have better salary databases than an individual, but that doesn't mean there's no point in trying to arm yourself with relevant info.

dpritchetton Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

I won't deny that colocation wins in a ceteris paribus scenario - almost by definition. Remote staffing allows you to tip the scales in many situations though: companies outside of the top 3-5 big tech firms suddenly have access to great people they'd never get otherwise. How many colocated 95th percentile developers are equivalent to one remote Linus Torvalds?

dpritchetton Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

This really sounds like status quo bias to me. No one's going to tell you that face to face communication isn't an incredibly efficient medium, but that doesn't mean teams and companies built around remote work can't (and don't already) thrive. I would even hazard that your experience is possibly colored by the teams you've worked on and the companies you've worked for.

dpritchetton Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011)

The two that come to mind:

- My company sells products that I design, market, sell, or build

- My company bills third parties for my services

Anything else and you're probably working a support function for a business that is selling something that is not your work. The people who make the products or services that are being sold are profit centers, the rest of the company are cost centers.

dpritchetton Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011)

We agree that finding jobs hasn't been hard for US devs in quite a while. It's the longterm career-building aspects of figuring out which jobs are going to be more rewarding and enjoyable over a decades-long timeline that I have had to figure out almost entirely on my own.

I respect patio11 for sharing what he's learned. Remember, he used to work 80 hours a week for a junior dev's wage, and now he has crafted a more comfortable, self-determined lifestyle for himself.

dpritchetton Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011)

Yeah, I suppose there is no explicit guarantee that a CS degree will prepare someone to pursue a wage-earning career in a competitive market.

dpritchetton Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011)

In my experience college curricula have plenty of non-major courses for every degree. Surely there's room for negotiation, sales, and why-being-labeled-a-cost-center-is-generally-bad-for-your-career in a four year degree?

dpritchetton LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

I think the point was that a regulator would be more sympathetically inclined to 'protect' the cleaning workers by legally mandating overtime since they necessarily have less negotiating leverage than white-collar workers.

dpritchetton LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

Reading the DoL's advisory on this [1] suggests that it all hinges on the concept of blue-collar vs. white-collar or production vs. staff employees. I can only imagine that the 'production' employees are seen as more interchangeable and largely incapable of having multiplicative effects on the company's business model. A programmer or accountant who's getting a raw deal can find a better job (where better means pay commensurate with contributions), but a tier 1 help desk tech or factory worker will likely have a lower ceiling on possible pay to begin with, and (more) trouble finding a way to secure compensation that scales with corporate success.

It is surprisingly hard to find explanations for this - the web is choked with articles explaining who's exempt and who's not, but not so many with justifications or reasoning or historical context.

[1]: http://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/preamble_final.htm

dpritchetton YC Hacks Winner: Athelas – Blood imaging and analysis from your smartphone

MS does have a nicely integrated set of developer tools, but they are not particularly useful for people who aren't developing for a Windows platform. Most consumer-facing Websites don't run windows, nor do most cell phone apps.

There are plenty of Windows jobs building corporate software (think intranet web apps and desktop GUI applications) and so there are indeed many devs who build that stuff and enjoy doing so on Windows. I imagine there is an overlap between the Indian devs and the Windows-related dev jobs.

Personally, I build OSS-based web applications on Linux. My last machine was a Mac and while I enjoyed it I chose Linux this time around because of the lower sticker price and the better native integration with OSS tools.

dpritchetton I'm using the standard library

As an entertaining counterpoint, here's Kelsey Hightower's "Go for Sysadmins" from Gophercon where he repeatedly touts the "paste a link to your cross-compiled binary in an internal chatroom" benefits of Go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41GffiXhN6I

I understand what you're saying and I'm a big fan of shell scripting myself, but dependency-free single-binary deployments are very, very convenient.

I upvoted this story because I find the topic interesting even though I don't really agree.

dpritchetton The Craigwatch Story

Looks like it was using XPath to parse the HTML: https://github.com/beaulm/craigwatch/blob/master/post.php

I imagine the 'selling' point was users not even having to know what RSS even means, let alone how to script it.

dpritchetton GoRails – Ruby on Rails screencasts for web developers

There are affordable transcription services out there. DevReps could probably give you some advice if you buy a few hours of their time.

dpritchetton Kara Swisher: Tech's Most Powerful Snoop

I mean that big ideas rarely pay off in the short term. Many of us need to dirty our hands with mundane human concerns in order to survive, even if we are focused on ideas rather than events or people. I'm sure Swisher is not planning on switching to research.

dpritchetton Kara Swisher: Tech's Most Powerful Snoop

How do you eat while you're waiting for your ideas to pay off though? I find it helps to keep up with industry trends and trendsetters.

dpritchetton Emails, court docs show how Sony stood up to Steve Jobs’ and Pixar’s wage-fixing

Why not negotiate a way to make the employee want to stay for the duration of the project? If the monthly salary isn't enough to ensure the duration of service you need, find a way to offer additional compensation.

Try back-loading the employee's contract with increasingly large incentives in the latter stages of the project. Any steps you take that limit the employee's career mobility and agency without employee agreement and compensation are suspect.

dpritchetton The Elephant was a Trojan Horse: On the Death of Map-Reduce at Google

As a non-PhD who doesn't work at Google I'm having trouble reading between the lines. What exactly is the offered improvement here?

Decoupled (compared to Hadoop) systems with distributed data and JIT processing?

dpritchetton My favorite question to the programming language expert

I feel like "my favorite interpreted language is slow" is a bit of a cop-out. Granted, it's the first thing that comes to mind when I try to enumerate the things I dislike about working in Ruby, but it's not really an interesting answer.

I might point to simple aesthetic things like JSON-style hashes of symbols looking funny:

    example = { a: :b }
    => { a: :b }
    example[:a]
    => :b

Or maybe "the way it imports things mean I wind up grepping code / googling docs rather than just looking at the top of the calling file to see the origin of an imported object, and then sometimes I find myself over-stating the namespace for an object just so Ruby won't get it wrong". Compare to python:

   from big_library import named_method

I suppose it's a pretty good question and a reasonable proxy for "so you have actually worked in this language for many, many hours, right?"