kstop

I got the impression it was a designer job. The work she did made sense in that context.

Then again there was the person (actually, over 6 years, 2) I interviewed who thought we were a completely different company in a different industry (we were a broadcaster, they'd confused us with a bank with a similar name). A bit of basic research is not a bad thing.

I'm more impressed with people (for web dev jobs anyway) who've taken the time to poke around on the site and figure out our technology choices, even at a pretty basic level.

A dick would have stuck it up on Pastebin or wherever it is the kids stick things these days.

Reason: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

So that's what - 30 million male users, 1 million female, and 11 million spam-and-scam bots?

This will make more sense if/when you have a customer-hosted solution. There's a lot more to packaging/integrating an application for a specific install than is usually included in the application source code, and people paying for SaaS solutions are usually doing so because they want to avoid all of that. At least if you have a packaged solution it shows that you've done some of that work in a reproducible fashion.

Plus, as a parting gift the code could be a bit of a booby trap, depending on how gnarly and idiomatic it is. Open-source applications can't get away with as many dirty hacks as closed-source ones. Not that I'm saying that your code is bad, but it represents an unknown for your customers!

Also why, after flirting with the idea for one hiring cycle, I stopped asking people if they had Stack Overflow accounts. Yes, if they had one, it provided useful information about their interests and communication ability. But it has a demographic skew that could have led me to rejecting other candidates unfairly.

That said, my own presence on Github is pretty anemic, so maybe that's another form of bias!

Agree 99%, but it's more "use Github" than "use git" as it's meant to be used. GH supports certain development modes very well, fork+push request being the best, but having zero support for ACLs on branches or files makes other dangerous. As the devs in question are finding out (and as I have found out previously on a much much smaller scale, so no schadenfreude here.).

(You could argue that stock git doesn't really support fancy permissions models either, but if you have access all the hooks you can implement them, or you can use gitolite or Gitlab.)

The oarfish warned us, but did we listen?

"Wait! Now it's $50 million! Now it's $23 million! Now it's zero!"

Apologies, I was so gobsmacked by the security implications that I found it hard to focus on anything else!

Think of it like a value proposition. Is the (dubious IMO) convenience of having Linkedin profiles in your email worth the cost of Linkedin having the content of your email? Even if they pinky-swear to never read it, don't forget that this proxy email server would be, overnight, one of the most valuable corporate espionage targets in the world.

(If yes, you should probably ditch reading email and do something more productive with your time, like picking up cans.)

Yes, if they contribute patches to make everyone's services more secure and error-free.

He probably has a very good understanding of the company's priorities and politics. Pay more attention to that. Politely disagree on the tech side when you think it's appropriate, make your arguments, and then implement based on what comes out of that.

On stuff like JSON vs. custom delimiters, that's old thinking - you can probably win that argument by finding out exactly why he thinks that way. Chances are that he's concerned about bandwidth overhead or something similar, or he's thinking about the effort of implementing it from scratch. You can argue against the former by doing some tests with your webserver's mod_gzip, and the latter by coding up a POC with a JSON library and showing him how easy it was.

Being mentored doesn't imply that you have to take everything they say as gold. Approaching their advice with a critical but respectful attitude is probably best.

Rebranding. Cubicles are for Dilbert.

Article mentions wanting to disable fast-forward merges. This should do it (in newer versions of git):

$ git config --global --add merge.ff false

I'd say it's more of a binary distinction. There are people I've worked with who had no notion of their own limits AND had superior ability. Those people would do surprising things as a matter of course, that others might be able to do with time and planning, but most likely would never come up with on their own.

When you find yourself greeted in the morning with things like "Hi, remember we had that chat about how to store timeseries data? I added an arbitrary-precision real type to the database last night and set it up", you are in the presence of one of those people.

(The other thing I've found about these people is that they are usually the opposite of rockstars. They tend to be quiet to the point of zen. Otherwise there are no worthwhile demographic indicators.)

I can't help but wonder if he's maybe exaggerating the security of .mil.

Good for you! Now go say the same thing publicly in Malaysia, & let us know how it works out for you.

It's Indiegogo, so a bit more Wild West in that regard. I'm pretty sure it's allowed.

In a previous workplace, there were multiple redundant management tiers on the technical side, and lots of managers were well-known for never really doing anything apart from attending meetings and finding creative ways to get out of doing performance evaluations. Which usually involved buttering up one of their employees and fobbing the work off on them. Some of them had only a couple of reports. I know of at least one who had none.

Then came the "solution." A program whereby managers had to spend 90 minutes a week on the floor talking to their employees. Work was actually supposed to stop while this happened. This got inserted into everybody's objectives.

I found this particularly galling because I'd locked horns with a couple of the worst offenders in some of the few meetings I'd managed to dodge, and because, managing a team of 15 devs, I already made 1-on-1 time available to them weekly and easily spent 90 mins a day with them doing actual work. (You just can't manage technical folk without some involvement and understanding of their daily challenges. There's a respect issue otherwise, on both sides.)

The program came and went. Nobody failed the objective, though after the first week the usual suspects just hid in their office or spent their 90 minutes playing with their phones. And when the next budget crunch came, management layers only increased (because they were all high performers going by their performance review) while people who did actual work got laid off.

Of all the stuff I saw in that corp, that one annoyed me the most (and it wasn't even the most serious - 7-figure vanity projects were a real problem).

My family's sign-making business back in Ireland got a lot of work out of UL and the Plassey Technological Park back in the day. It always did feel weird, like an alien had plonked them down on the edge of Limerick. Now I know that's at least partially true!

No denying that - Calgary's got real damage, we just have a lot of inconvenience by comparison. Also you have the better mayor - not that that's saying much.

Not the author, just thought it would be interesting to see how opinions shook out here.

And it has been! My own personal take is that this is bad policy. Calibrating price to demand is well and good, doing it automatically is clever, but not keeping an eye on it and overriding the algorithm in situations like this is dumb. There's no way the few hours of extra income will make up for the lost business over time.

Plus, Uber depends on a lack of regulation to operate. Doing stuff that only helps the argument for regulation, and makes them look bad in the public eye, could be suicidal for their business model.

...now made irrelevant by gait analysis.

Also catching on in celebrity baby photos: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/kim-karda...

er, no... /shifty_eyes

I'm being melodramatic is all. The Selenium FF driver lags a little behind Firefox releases (totally understandable).

Not a problem on my actual test boxes as I control the FF version on those, but it will lead to a week or so of devs (with FF auto-update set) complaining that tests are breaking locally. (Despite the fact that this situation and its remedy has been explained to them repeatedly.)

It is possible that S2.33 will work fine with FF22, making all this moot. And it's just a passing annoyance. I have nothing but love for both applications.

Looking forward to 25% of my automated functional tests failing for the next week!

Considering the source, I assumed it was about coffee.

"Tumblr’s industry of interactive advertising is less profitable than Yahoo’s display advertising industry."

Banner ads are the future, you guys! Forbes said it first!