fadzlan

Worked with one big Indian company here in Malaysia last time and I see intimidation as common means of dealing with employees. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work well here, since most of people have a lot of choices moving around.

I've been pushed to accept work that has a minimum wage in a different country, despite my experience and the fact I can't possibly survive with my family there. I've had my resume jacked up multiple times when they sent my resume to the client, up to the point that I had to deny I had never put certain things on my resume.

For fresh grad though, if they quit earlier than 18 months, they have to pay almost a year of their salary, which seems reasonable when there are trainings when they joined the company. Except for the fact that the first year salary of said fresh grad are being paid in full by the Malaysian government (in exchange of hiring certain number of locals per year). Some of the trainings are subsidized by the government too.

Which explained how they can force employees to take a much less pay than what they are getting in other countries, where the cost of living is higher, because they can intimidate.

Malaysia job market is much smaller than India, and such tactic didn't bode well, since there are not much replacement to come by when people are quitting, and smaller market means once you had bad reputation, new hires slowed to trickle.

Now, I am not generalizing all Indian companies, there bad apples around the world, but I am just sharing my experience on how intimidation come about. I just find it disgusting that such practices are being practice somewhere in the world.

Yup there is, especially for something niche.

One that I can think of is "Selenium 2 WebDriver Basics With Java". The the topic is niche, and the course seems comprehensive. And for the price tag, it somehow never gets to the discount bin(I know this since its been on my wishlist for so long).

If the price is cheap, I would bought this as a casual learner, but if I am really into testing with Selenium, I would not mind at all paying the full price.

With the price, that course garners something like 800+ students. So if you are into supporting your student when they are going through the course, charging high is the way to go IMO.

I think that will depend on the country you are working on.

I work in Malaysia, and by that age, you will have hard time finding work as a developer, since people are expecting you to start manage other people after a certain age.

The economics are different, most jobs here are based on projects, there is not much product work. Even if you get infinitely better over time, there is not much economic on leveraging the knowledge, especially if you are the only one on the team that can be that good.

Companies tend not to keep people long and people are keep moving on companies once projects are done, unless new projects are on the line.

Since the turnover rate is high, it will only make sense to keep thing simple, hence there is not much use of much advanced knowledge of anyone.

Because of that, up to a certain age, you very much reached the plateau of the max knowledge expected at the market. Keeping your development skill better may help you with your job, but it may not bring much to the negotiation table. That also means, it make sense to hire cheaper, younger talent if both have reach past the plateau, no matter which one is better. I am guessing this is a reason that people are expecting you to move "up" to the management ladder past the age.

Works fine for me in Chrome.

Have you tried disabling the plugins or Incognito mode?

Thanks for the time you are willing to spend with me to talk about the issue Anthony!

Its been helpful and I've got some actionable items on my hands and a plan on how to conquer this.

Thanks again! I'll post it here in a month for any progress so far.

Thanks for responding. I'll be reaching you out through email!

What about using JSP? It's somewhat Java and doesn't require Java on the front end(which is the source of most security problem).

On the server side, you have to look for the vulnerability of the web container that you are using.

I do not see how would a CA helps you in your concern. Yes, having certs provides you encryption when your data is travelling, and client side cert may also helps you as a method as authentication if you wish, but all those does not help you in the Java security problem itself.

I'd be interested of a different opinion.

This is awesome! Saves me from the trouble of writing the directives myself.

Well... I am from Malaysia. As long as you are not employed, not conducting any activities that earn money from locals (ie. consulting, etc), not employing anyone, you are not technically running a business/being employed. So you are not running against the letter of the law

Come to think of it, there could be a lot of people coming here with business on Ebay... and keep checking their Ebay website every minute. It would be weird not to mention wrong to be checking anyone doing anything on a webpage on a coffee shop.

And if there is co working area, well, as long as you are not hired and not running local business, believe me, no one cares. Just by being there does not constitute you breaking the visa, when employment visa specifically talks about being employed.

And if you want to open a local company, that is easy too. I had a guy from Australia interviewed me after he had opened a company here. It takes somewhat less than a day to do.

If you want to hire foreigners however, that might take a while, since you need to go through the due process. But if you are in the tech sector, you could go for MSC status application, where you could hire foreigners as much as you want and even have tax exemption for few years.

The worse case is that you are here working for your company for few months before the MSC status is approved. Last time I worked it took about 8 months for it to get approved, all the time where my Italian boss and European colleagues keep leaving the countries after 90 days. From what I understand, even that is kosher, since they are in a payroll from an incorporated company in UK.

Bottom line is, at least for Malaysia, the government here is doing the best it can to get the cross pollination of talent from outside to the locals. And as many of the commenters here mentioned, if you are not causing trouble with anyone, no one has any reason to check on you.

I would suppose when you see a page from Amazon, there are numbers of the system that contributes to the page. Some with HTML, some with API. And as other commenter mentions, these are all generated by some backend system. Probably no one has to full control on how to format HTML at the front. Or they probably can, but with a lot of meetings.

The store front probably just gather all this stuff to produce the final page that you see.

My team right now has around 30 members in the sprint. I've checked with some of the experienced Scrum master in my company, the ideal member is around 4 - 6 person. Even having 7th member's slow things down in his experience. And this is not on just the standups, it applies to daily operations as well.

My take here is that we should have much smaller teams and if possible have Scrum of Scrums to handle bigger project. However, I know that this might not be possible for some since some project tends not to have a good demarcation on what should be in which teams.

It never was a silver bullet to begin with. There is no way that unit testing could cover every ground. Granted, for what its worth, it is something that is reasonably cheap that you could run over and over again cheaply. Functional testing can cover most of the cases, but its more costly, requiring a full system setup, takes longer time to run and more expensive to write.

Manual testing seems straightforward, but its not repeatable, hence more expensive, since it requires warm bodies to run it every single time.

Given the effectiveness and the cost of each approach, it makes more sense to have different coverage for different test. For something that is more expensive, you would choose to create and run it for the most important part of the system. For something that is dirt cheap, well, why not just run it everywhere?

Consider regression test. It covers every part of the system. But its not possible to run it every single time a developer change something. The cost is too prohibitive to run it at every changes, even with automation, much less using the manual approach. What about unit test? Dirt cheap. You can run it every 15 minutes or so if you are inclined and it would still be okay.

I would say that it is wrong to start a software development exercise and just religiously say we have use TDD. The right question to ask, is what is your of degree quality and what is the cost that you are willing to pay.

For some people, hey, lets just hire rock star developers for everything, but some projects cannot afford that. And if can only afford a team that barely knows what unit testing is, there is not much point of training everyone for a short project (say, 3 months with 1 month warranty).

And yeah, there is limited benefit with unit testing (as is with everything), but still I don't think its fair to throw the baby into the bathwater too soon either. Do what make sense and do what works.

This is one feature that Eclipse don't have since you have to refresh everytime there is changes outside the IDE.

Every time someone says VS blows Eclipse I wonder what VS have that Eclipse don't. When I dabbled C# few years ago, I find the textual support for refactoring and such are much lacking in VS IMO. I haven't tried Resharper though.

My brother applaud VS for its WYSIWYG, but you rarely do that when you program in Java.

Are you saying those c# devs who use C++ libs are okay but Java devs who use Java libs are lazy simply because they use Java?

So a good programmer reinvent the wheel whenever he can?

There is MVC. Its just a concept, unlike those design patterns from GoF which are specific.

Models are just data, View are just representations and Controllers are just endpoints. You can program your own way in your language, and if you can categorize your code as such, you can argue it is MVC.

And of course, because its just a concept, anyone in the world can argue why your implementation is not MVC as well.

No, MVC is not the reason to justify Spring, inversion of control, containers, dependency injection, annotation and all other "enterprisey J2EE-esque shovelware" as you mentioned.

MVC has been around since SmallTalk (you know, before even Java...). Heck, you even get MVC in Rails. You see Spring in Rails? Dependency Injections? Annotations? Of course not, since I could not even begin to think they are related.

I think the point is there may come the times when there two frameworks that depends on different version of dependencies. It could be the Backbone-UI and something else.

It would be okay if the consumer code is dependent on all the libraries. But if one of your framework is dependent on certain version of library and another one depends on another version of the said library, that is disaster waiting to happen. It would be hard to upgrade one framework , hence making it hard to move forward since your code is all tangled to all the frameworks.

Even without the "app store" model, the company in question could still prevent the access to the said application by court injunction. It is not to the stage yet now, and while you can say that Apple acted prematurely, it is a matter of time that such injunction happen.

And with the App Store model, the application is took down from the store. You still have the local copy. There is no updates from the App Store anymore, but do you think there will be updates from the developer when the court injunction finally happens?

Bad laws need to be fixed.

Care to specify at which point the author of the blog post misunderstand MongoDB? Its not pretty clear to me about that.

Are you saying that one of the way he is using MongoDB is incorrect? If yes, what point did he say reflects that?

His rants seems quite specific.

Other plumbers might give a shit.

Besides, I enjoy analysis of programming languages, the good and the bad parts.

There is a quote from Bjarne Stroustrup saying along the same line...

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” ― Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language: Special Edition

Lets say for someone who is new to PHP, how long does it normally takes to learn where the minefields are? Is there anyway to start on this? I know in JS there is Javascript The Good Part. Is there anything equivalent in PHP?

I'd like to know how much of his massive complaint "don't really matter".

Programming language critic come up every now and then in HN, this is nothing new. If you got a point, why not refute it?

Are you saying language design don't matter and not worth discussing?

Then again, why can't the author not post it on HIS blog? No less.

Any old tired issues for you could be something new for someone else.

Do you have a project on the sides? Or at least, if you dont have a project yet, are you learning anything interesting so that you might have a future personal project?

At the very least, you could also list things that you find interesting.

You are right. But I think the point that the author makes is that pure(or almost pure) open source project will have only "interesting" contribution, where as by far what makes a programming language usable are those "unglamorous" fundamental things.

Yes, whoever contributes can choose whatever they wanted to contribute. But most successful project, companies or startup or anything else for that matter, involves doing things that most people would rather do, but necessary.

When you choose a programming language for your business, your business/life or anything related to it will depends on the language. I think its fair for anyone to choose a language to make sure those necessary boring stuff are robust in the language.

Those who contribute can choose what to contribute. Those who consume, can choose what they want to consume. Probably all of us have been on both side of the fence, so I would say its a fair assessment.

With that being said, it seems appalling that it is possible on Rumblefish side to claim copyright on bird songs, assuming that they have vetted the audio personally.

Then again, should we not say that the algorithm that processes for copyrighted audio is imperfect and therefore could be improved further to not have false positive such as this?

I would bet that someone would have copyrighted sounds such as cash register's ka-ching!. Although use of such sounds from a specific recording should be copyrighted, I should be able to record a video of a real world cash register without anybody in the world claiming my work to be theirs.

I believe he is simply just counting his experience while porting GIT to Java. No where did I find that he claims he's an expert. What he did was providing his experience on the trenches.

In case if you are the expert, I would assume that he wouldn't mind if you have any insights to tune in the performance of JGit even further. You can start by joining in the mailing list.

He wasn't quantifying anything since he was not answering your question, he was sharing his experience.

I'm not quite sure I understand. Wouldn't a single atom as it is, the smallest particle possible?

I would say that is more of delaying, rather than smashing it outright.

What is model based programming?