funkymike

Agreed. I think being able to predict what is likely to change is heavily dependent on knowing the business domain well since that is going to be the driver of change. I think it is a specific application of curiosity. It's also a matter of being forward thinking in general. I think both are skills one can foster and can apply more generally.

I also really like this feature of GitHub reviews and when deleting a comment as I continue reading I try to question whether to add a code comment so the next person doesn't get tripped up because they don't have the full context in their head.

You can do this in vim with the scrollbind option. You could create a simple script to set up the windows and get the views lined up to the correct line numbers. The one caveat is that enabling line wrapping will screw it up.

    :windo set nowrap
    :vsp
    ctrl-w ctrl-w ctrl-d ctrl-d
    :vsp
    ctrl-w ctrl-w ctrl-d ctrl-d
    :windo set scrollbind

Some other very handy shortcuts in MS Office programs (and maybe others) is alt-shift-up/down arrow will move the entire line up or down. Quite handy to move text around when composing an email for instance.

Ctrl-up/down will move the cursor past newlines, so you can more quickly navigate when there are long lines with lots of wrapped text.

I think stories like this show up because there is a set of Amazon users that still want it to be a neutral marketplace where Amazon doesn't have a vested interest in one product selling over another. That hasn't been true for quite a while though.

I think a large part of this topic isn't about a team making a promise and not living up to it. It's about a business (management) wanting to make a promise and getting the team to accept responsibility for it. So let's assume the estimate is very accurate but the business wants it done in half the time. When the project runs past that date being able to point to a very accurate estimate and say I told you so isn't very productive. So we need strategies and techniques for dealing with the mismatch between the desires of the business and what can actually be delivered in a given amount of time.

TFA advocates for bargaining on scope, where I prefer to start the conversation by asking about both scope and timelines to understand which parts of the overall request are negotiable. This is also a great opportunity to make sure the business context is well understood so everyone understands what success means from the perspective of the business

You might then find every single feature really is necessary and the timeline can be relaxed. Audit compliance can be an example when it is something new to an org. You are either going to pass or fail the audit, so there isn't really room to reduce scope. But you may be able to negotiate on the timeline.

I think there's a large difference between arbitrary deadlines that the team themselves set and buy into as a rallying cry vs. an arbitrary deadline that was externally imposed upon a team, often without full context provided to understand the relative priority of features as well as whether the deadline itself is negotiable.

I have this in my .gitconfig so the pull will fail rather than merge.

    [pull]
        ff = only

If it does fail I can decide whether to merge or rebase.

This reminds me of a video I recently watched comparing Sherlock Holmes to a software developer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUZZKtypink

Holmes apparently kept detailed notes on every case but would otherwise forget the details until he needed to go back to them later.

If you are editing over a network connection and you normally have cursorline on, then try turning it off. That makes a big difference for me when there is network latency.

You should check out Paul Sellers' videos and blog. To me he is the opposite of what you describe, preferring hand tools over machines. He describes himself as a lifestyle woodworker rather than someone trying to create results as efficiently as possible.

It seems to me the key then would be to have that programmable interface be used to actually implement the features shipped as part of the project. It will be a lot easier to get the API right if the developers are using it themselves, plus that adds a lot more incentive to maintain backwards compatibility as well.

> I noticed this as a teenager in the 1980s and deliberately tried to 'unspin' stories, but gave up after realizing how much work that was going to be.

This struck a chord with me.

Few specific lessons from school stuck with me. There was one though that was powerful enough that I have tried to not just remember it, but practice it ever since. The lesson was simply to watch the evening national news and pay special attention to words, phrasing, and tone that could sway the opinion of those watching, apart from the facts being presented, then describe what we found in class the following day. Even when seemingly just presenting the facts of the story you can almost always pick out the views of the presenter. The idea was to instill in people how to separate the facts from the opinions of those presenting the facts so one can form their own opinions. You can then also judge how honest the news source seems to be about their biases.

A speech that is described as a "standard policy speech" compared to a "powerful appeal for change" can affect how people think of it, then discuss it with others. Only if we are paying attention to these details can we split out fact from opinion.

Every source of news attempts to influence people. Everyone has opinions and they can come out in very subtle ways. The key for me is how open and honest they are about it. I think the problem we have today are so many news outlets that claim to be objective and unbiased when they are anything but, intentionally. Too many people never had the lesson I did and were never made to realize how much other people are trying to manipulate them, including (especially) those they trust.

One of the things that made multitasking on Windows much better for me was discovering that:

1. win+<number> opens the <number> program on the taskbar from the left. So having a bunch of pinned programs makes opening them very fast and easy.

2. Holding the windows key down then pressing the number multiple times allows switching between multiple instances of the program, similar to holding alt and hitting tab multiple times.

For example, chrome is the tenth icon pinned to the taskbar (counting from the left). So win+0 open chrome or if already open switches to the first window. Holding the windows key and hitting 0 allows me to quickly switch between multiple chrome windows.

So I don't have to mentally keep track of the current alt-tab order to switch between the second putty window and third chrome window. I just hit win+77 for putty and win+000 for chrome.

I had to resort to this for an Ebay account that someone opened with my email address. I finally got sick of them not fixing it so I used the email-based password reset feature to login, change the password, then closed the account.

I had that problem with American Express. Someone put my email address when getting a credit card. Amex not only did not verify the email address before sending me his statements, but it also took 45 minutes of explaining to them on the phone that they need to take my email address off his account.

I had to get up to speed on k8s at work this year and from that experience I would recommend to use minikube at first. Only go to GKE or such once you outgrow minikube. Doing minikube first also makes for a nice way to develop an application. Minikube for local development and testing, then deploy to GKE for QA & prod.

The company I work for went even further. Ops doesn't support anything in public cloud past the basic connectivity to the corporate network. Everything created in public cloud is the product/dev team's responsibility. Kubernetes? Not their problem.

Not at FB but just doing enterprise software development I've had to explain to other developers that capturing and storing user info just because we can is in the "not okay" category. There are plenty of people who don't even consider ethics at work. They get a feature request, so they deliver it, with no second thoughts. These aren't bad people per se, it just doesn't occur to them to question the reasons for a request or what the end result is within a larger context.

I'm a tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment person myself. A multi-line statement should have the same number of tabs on each line. Any line after the first should then have spaces as needed.

I'll work without complaint or changing it with any existing code whether spaces or tabs. Mix the two for indentation however and fixing it is the first commit I make before touching anything else.

That is definitely true for me. I have pretty much stopped going to theaters. At least if I watch a movie at home I can take a break whenever I want. Which might be turning it off and finishing it several days later. Streaming TV just makes this even easier and feel more natural by providing predefined breaks.

Deepfake tech could make a big difference in film editing. Film 15 takes and it doesn't matter if none of them is exactly what the director wants because they could make the perfect take out of the others. The top actors will end up with "natural takes only" clauses in their contracts.

It has pretty big implications for film awards as well. Can an actor get an award if their performance was altered? What does good directing mean if they don't have to get the actors to perform as well as it ends up on the screen?

Understanding the problem domain, i.e. what the customers really want and need rather than just what they specifically ask for, will help any software engineer do their job better. Only then can you suggest alternative solutions that solve the real needs vs. patching one requested item after another that are all half measures to solving the real problems.

Many tasks are poorly defined or aren't solving the real problems the customer has. This is the classic problem of a customer asking for something very specific then complaining when it doesn't solve their problem. There are a lot of developers who deliver exactly what is asked for in this way. They would be better served by taking a few minutes to make sure they understand how it serves the customers' actual needs, not just completing another ticket.

> I've been in meetings that start with 15 minutes of silent reading, then 45 minutes of discussion. No PowerPoint presenting.

I wish this could happen where I am. No one wants to bother reading anything ahead of the meeting to be prepared for a discussion. Then the same people don't have the patience to let the group review the material during the meeting before starting the discussion.

Where I am from cities cannot legally cross county boundaries. But the people who live just across the county line still have a postal address with the name of the city because doing anything else would not make sense on a practical level. In fact I'm not sure if they are technically in a city at all.

  if (/some-pattern/) { ...

This isn't really unique when you consider perl.

  while (<>) {
    if (/pattern/) {

This does the same. Awk simply has the implicit loop.

Well money does significantly increase happiness, up to a point. The hard part as an individual is recognizing when you have hit that point. If you can realize it, then as your income grows you can avoid increasing spending which means you can save more and spend less years working. Working just to make and spend more money that doesn't substantially increase happiness.

How do you decide what to watch?

How do you become aware of new shows you would be interested in?

For me this is one of the benefits of Netflix's recommendation service. While I feel like the quality of the recommendations has gone down over the years, it still has value. I tend to watch 1-2 shows at a time until I have watched the entirely of them. When I finish one I want to find another to watch, but don't always know what I want to watch next. So for me "I want to watch something but i don't know what" is the exact problem I have on a regular basis.

People still look at me strangely when they say "hey have you seen that new ad for X" and I tell them I avoid advertisements. Likewise when I change the radio station the moment an ad break starts. I think the idea of ads as a negative influence has not penetrated very far in US society.