manyxcxi

Pretty much same, the Wink integration lets us turn on/off lights and do other things like “Turn on Movie Theater” which dims certain lights and turns off all others. We use Alexa to play music when we just want something going in the background as well. Additionally we use timers and the grocery list.

Wife uses the daily news rundown.

Kids ask Alexa questions (what’s the fastest bird), have it make fart sounds, and that’s about it.

I got a pair of buzzers to play the quiz game, it was so horribly janky they’ve been used twice. I scan the the apps list and nothing strikes and as worth even trying.

Except you’re implying that they are doing better in the first place...

Look, I’m pretty much an obsessive workaholic myself (getting better now that we’ve got kids) and I was making about 5x of what my wife was making when I met her. She’s got a 4 year degree from a nice private university and I went to state university.

She is absolutely every bit as smart and hard working as I am, but she never wanted a career in an office.

In our first few years together I helped her with her resume, suggested all the work she was doing would absolutely qualify her for making at least twice as much as she was making and she just didn’t want to play the game. She wanted to be a mom, and didn’t even want to play the game until motherhood showed up.

If she did what I do every day (at now almost 20x what she was making when I met her) she’d jump out a window.

Conversely I wouldn’t take double the pay I’m making to stay home with the kids, I love ‘em, but jeez- I don’t know how my wife does it.

She would definitely not consider herself doing better if we swapped places. And I think that’s the key. Man or woman, some people just don’t have the same goals, and running a company and making lots of money don’t necessarily play any part in what they aspire to do.

Serious question: what games would you fine folks recommend to get my kids started with modding? The oldest loves Minecraft, Zelda BoTW, and Smash Bros on the switch.

I’ve built a Raspberry Pi Retropie NES clone and they’re all over super bomberman, and old school Pokémon.

The last game I modded was OpenTTD before my kids were born.

I’ve seen people suggest this and then the horror on other engineers faces that follows. In my opinion, the difference between a good eng/dev and a great one is that they recognize when the effort is too big to chew in one bite, too unknown to reason about clearly without a plan, and/or too many gotchas already exist in the codebase to make it easy.

The great developers I’ve known would pull back and think about the problem longer, draft up some plans and noodle on it with colleagues and I love that foresight.

The problem with a policy like this is that you’re slowing everything down for the sake of the few that might need it. Your team leads should be able to determine which ones should require the investigation and keep the team moving efficiently.

CloudFlare makes their money differently than Google though. Google wants figure out how to most efficiently put other people’s ads in front of me, and to sell my attention for the most value. Even if they have absolutely no ulterior motives (evil or otherwise), Google’s business is one such that they have every motive to abuse my privacy for their own gain.

CloudFlare doesn’t make their money off of brokering my attention, they have a decent track record of doing the ‘right’ things (or at least not the ‘wrong’ things), and they’ve made some decently pro-privacy statements in the past.

It seems that everyone wants to collect data on everything and figure out how to sell it off, so I’m not putting it out of the realm of possibility that CloudFlare could do shady stuff and abuse my privacy as well- but their general line of business doesn’t require it the way Google’s does.

All things otherwise equal, I’m gonna trust the company who’s business isn’t selling my profile a bit more for most things. I used to use Google DNS a lot, now I use CloudFlare’s. I trust them both more than Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon with respect to technical competency and security at the very least.

Contact is in the profile, reach out and I’ll make the time.

> you also had a good client

I had a fantastic client. I don’t know if it’s because the rigging industry is full of “holy sh, we gotta think on our feet” situations or what, but for a seemingly “low tech” client they grasped on to an iterative and flexible approach so much better than most clients I’ve ever had from the tech industry.

> Watch them work.

This x1000! I took on a freelance project for a heavy machinery hauling company. They were a year into transitioning away from some customized off the shelf Enterprise scheduling and dispatch system into some custom built software by an “Enterprise” consulting company.

They were originally bringing me in to audit what the team that was building it but that pretty much changed on the day I submitted my proposal...

In the proposal I wrote to my then prospective client I allocated a couple of days of onsite interviews with “lower than management” people that would be using the system or it’s outputs, and a week of shadowing people in all roles that would be directly using the system. The project sponsor (to his credit) didn’t ask me why I would need to do that, he started laughing and exclaimed that I was the only person to ever even recommend this approach.

We ended up re-writing the proposal into multiple phases where I just interviewed and assessed, documented their current processes, provided business process workflows and suggested ways their current workflow could be optimized, irrespective of any one technological solution. A crappy process, then automated, is still crappy.

I wound up spending 6 weeks before even proposing anything that had to do with technology.

My implementation proposal was set in phases that would bring related functions to light in a way that their teams could begin using them right away and we could collect feedback and iterate while producing the next set of features as well. It was their first ‘agile’ project or contract and the fear was quelled when after the first month I had put more useful software in their dispatchers hands than the “Enterprise” team had in a year.

From day one interviews to “finished” project we spent about 6 months and that system still lives 9 years later- though it has been modernized and upgraded every so often in the intervening time, it is still one of my proudest projects even though it was one of the least “sexy” I’ve ever done.

I specifically chose Ecobee for two reasons:

1. It works like a programmable thermostat when there’s no network

2. The additional remote sensors (our original thermostat wiring is in a crappy spot for keeping the house at even temps)

I’ve suffered through internet outages (some of my own making) on very hot and cold days and my thermostat keeps humming along on it’s programmed schedule for AC and heat.

I’ve even got an “exotic” config with only reading sensors in certain rooms at certain times of day (like ignoring downstairs when we’re all upstairs sleeping), a cycle of warming up before wake up times, a cycle of cooling down after bed times. This has all just worked for 3 years, through storms, snow, ice, and internet outages.

The Twitter user seems unreasonable in their assignment of blame here. Yeah, they had a crappy time- but a little self reflection here might be better than the lashing out.

They installed their HVAC controller in a spot they can’t access 24/7? What would they do without an Ecobee or similar? What’s up with their default schedule being so wonky that the heat shut off or wasn’t running hard enough?

Obviously, it’s best if Ecobee doesn’t have to take their servers offline but it really seems like a combination of user error and bad timing.

I had the same issue, sent an email to support and they moved us to a different node/cluster/whatever immediately. I’ve never had another problem on a free or paid tier.

To anyone wondering about carbon buildup on direct injection, my best (although generically broad and not 100% perfectly accurate) explanation is this:

Traditional fuel injection systems spray a fine mist of fuel in such a way that it washes over the valve(s) from the top of the engine cylinder, which has an added effect of “cleaning” off some carbon/particulate build up that naturally occurs. Direct injection variants typically inject the fuel mist more directly in the cylinder, in a tighter time frame to the piston reaching its optimal position in the firing cycle, with the injector(s) generally placed in a position where they are not wasting as much fuel bathing valves and such, which can lead to carbon buildups that wouldn’t normally occur with more standard fuel injection systems.

To those that know much better than me, I apologize for butchering the explanation and do feel free to correct my poor explanation- no offense will be taken.

I have an F-150 EcoBoost and have been a lifelong gearhead. I was worried about carbon buildup on direct injection and spent some time researching the motor before buying (I bought a used 2015 in 2018, so lots of factory bulletins and long term maintenance feedback). It seems to not be too bad of an issue _but_ an additional mitigation step can be taken by installing a two stage oil separator inline to help capture the materials before they build up. It’s popular enough that there are direct fit products for many makes/models of autos with DI, as well as universal fit. I however, have seen no conclusive long term studies to the actual effectiveness of them long term.

That being said, I could see how it would be effective and after installing my collector kit I have seen no obvious negative consequences. Fuel mileage, perceived performance, objective dyno performance have all been the same or slightly (very slightly) better.

Yes, I did spend time (1 month) collecting before and after data, and I have access to a rear wheel dyno to collect as objective data as I could.

TL;DR I know what I should be doing, do mostly the right things, but still am obese.

—

Speaking as an obese person that knows the dangers and generally does the right thing re: diet and excercise- it’s crazy hard.

I entered freshman year of HS 6’2” 275lb, graduated Senior year 6’3” 290lb. I’m 36 now and my weight has pretty much been in that same window my entire life.

I played very high level high school athletics (4 sport varsity, all star teams, etc.), still play competitive “A” league rec sports all year every year, and still do cardio and weight lifting 3-5 days a week. I hike at least 6 miles a week rain or shine with my bow and hunting pack in the woods outside my house for practice. I’m very strong and shockingly flexible- but I still have the physique of a beer league bowler (of which I also am).

I don’t drink soda or eat fast food for the most part, and my diet throughout the week is mostly veggies and proteins. My diet is definitely not perfect and I must be consistently eating more than I output, but...

The weight will melt away until I get to 275 and then my body turns into an always hungry eating machine. Or If I have pizza (or something carby) for lunch I’ll be craving carb food the rest of the day.

My will power is strong, but there is no such thing as just one bite. It’s zero bites or all the bites and it’s a crazy pull. It’s also infuriating because this is the one part in my life where I’ve never been able to just will it so. Sports, work, kids, outdoor adventuring: I have never faced a situation that I couldn’t just grit my teeth and make it through.

Not the weight though. There are too many little unconscious failures that stack up through a day or week that will hinder progress. The conscious ones take a toll even more because now you get to think about “I shouldn’t have...” the rest of the day.

It’s a weird deal, luckily it doesn’t take an emotional toll on me like I’ve heard it takes others. It’s a thing, it’s my thing I try and work on (that and being generally nicer), I just keep plugging and monitor the hell out of my health. BP, glucose, A1C, cholesterols, etc. all paint a picture of a man healthier than I look on a BMI chart.

It’s name recognition. Whenever I have to help a company, friend, or family that doesn’t really know “tech”, their domain is, without fail, hosted by GoDaddy.

Amen, I know exactly how you feel. I historically have had zero patience for incompetence or bullshit. My temper generally flashes and goes away pretty quickly, as in I can get pissed at you and use some crappy tone/attitude and then work through it or be over it in the same 30 second span.

This can flash with my kids, but frankly I’m surprised at how much patience I naturally have with them. I work on it, as I mentioned before, but the level of empathy I have is many multiples of what I was capable of before my first child was born- and this might be one the best gifts (as of yet) that fatherhood has bestowed upon me. It’s made me a better person all around.

I too good around and wrestle with my kids, it’s pretty much my favorite thing to do with them, but there is nothing that can make me see red (literally and figuratively) like taking an adorable little foot to the nose, eye, and/or balls. My dad would get mad, as is my natural inclination, and I still remember how shitty I would feel. It takes everything I can muster not to get mad when it happens, but I usually just drop to the ground (only sometimes is it voluntary) and put on a show (only partially exaggerated) of daddy being hurt.

This has had unanticipated consequences, like them thinking it’s funny that if you hit dad in the groin, you can make mom laugh and jump on him while watching tears roll down his cheek. So we nipped that with the same “if it’s on purpose you’re in trouble” method.

Recent anecdote to add: I replaced our third TV in 18 months yesterday. Our middle previously killed it on accident with a super soaker he brought in the house to get his brother with. The second time he was using his plastic sword to fight the pirates on TV at grandmas, and this time he was swinging the wooden fishing pole he got as a Christmas present, it left his hands and took out the display panel.

The TV is mounted 6’ high and he wasn’t being malicious. Other than at grandmas he wasn’t even trying to interact with th TV. So how the hell can I punish him for (really expensive) accidents? I told him it takes two weeks for me to work to be able to afford to fix it. He’s got to do a couple extra basic chores in the morning and night, and I had him give me ideas for how we could prevent it in the future. Most of which involved force fields and elaborate structures and didn’t address not using the living room as a jungle gym, but still...

Now that I’m thinking of it, I need to call my parents and apologize for my entire childhood. Again.

This is the approach I (try, and try and try and try) to take with my kids (6,4,2). I repeatedly tell them I will never be mad at them for mistakes, but they have to help fix them- whatever that may be. I also tell them I will get mad if they do it on purpose and/or I’ve instructed them not to do said thing that caused whatever issue. I try very hard to be explicit with instruction. Saying “be careful” doesn’t mean a whole lot, but saying “pour the water slowly and with two hands” can lead to a good result. Or “don’t jump off the couch because [insert reasons]”.

Frankly, they’re young and even when they’ve done something on purpose or are being bratty I try to coach them up again, sometimes I lose it and get mad- but I never use derision or name calling.

Losing it is usually just “Why? WHY?! Why did you just pull the step stool out and use the Christmas tree as a punching bag after I told you to stay back because it will fall over?!”

I use my logic brain to try and rationalize myself into a calm state, “well you told them to be careful with the jug of water, you didn’t say don’t pour it all over the dining room table”.

Man, they find some awesome ways to make a disaster sometimes...

To agree with you and wilsonnb3 at the same time- I highly value OWNING the things I buy and am also willing to pay extra for the privilege of convenience.

When I buy movies I generally buy the Blu-Ray with digital download. If it’s a kid’s movie I usually just buy the digital download. I almost never pull out the Blu-Rays, but I know I’ve got them. They usually come with the DVD as well, for even more compatability in a pinch.

When I buy books I generally buy the Kindle version first. I generally only take time to read on planes, trains, and travel/vacation. I’m good for maybe one a month. If I really like the book, I’ll buy a hardbound copy for my library.

Music is the part where I have internal consistency issues. I love music. I love all kinds of music. Motown, classic rock, hard rock, EDM/Electronic in general, classical, folk, rap. I have music on ALL the time. Probably 6-8 hours a day on average. I own no music. I pay for Apple Music because it’s convenient to share a subscription with my wife. I last bought physical album in probably 2008-ish. I buy an album or two on Apple Music a year. Where I really spend my music money is concerts. I’ll pay hundreds of dollars without thinking twice to see my favorite artists up close and in person.

So yeah, I agree that all the convenient ways of purchasing media are nothing but a long term lease and I would not consider anything I’ve bought through those channels as something I own. But if I flip it around and consider that I’m paying some third party to host a copy of the content in a convenient way, I feel okay about it.

Kids get FaceTime and video calls way easier than voice only. My kids (2,4,6) are completely uninterested in a voice only call, but when I FaceTime them we can have 15-20 minutes of interaction.

When it’s voice only my kids will still try and show a picture to the phone, etc. and when we tell them it’s just voice and the person can’t see them they just ask why not.

I’ll add my own memories to the anecdote: when I was a kid my dad’s family would call from overseas. Even though my Arabic was passable, my grandma wouldn’t get more than a hello, I love you, and I miss you out of me. Why? The sound quality sucked, the timing was off, and I couldn’t really picture my grandma in my mind while talking. If there had been FaceTime in 1988 it wouldve been a different story. In 2005 my Arabic was WAY worse but our conversations way more expressive even with crappy video.

I travel a few days a month, those 15 minutes of FaceTime when I get back to the hotel probably do more for me than them.

I’ve been complaining about this for a few years as well. When I went to buy a new TV last year my options were so horrifically limited that I gave up, bought a highly regarded model and have purposefully never connected it to any networks.

It’s getting worse, we couldn’t even find a new fridge with the options we wanted that wasn’t ‘smart’. I wound up taking apart my LG fridge to disable the WiFi module after we bought it. Not connecting it to the WiFi wasn’t enough, the damn thing broadcasts it’s own wireless network and I got sick and tired of seeing it. Shocker, there was no way to turn it off.

I laughed, likely too hard, at this. We’ve got three kids under 6 and our current living room furniture does in fact allow crumbs to fall through and I was praising them just yesterday for that accidental function.

They’re a pretty nice leather love seat and couch we purchased new about 8 years ago. The leather has been a god send for spills and no stains, etc.

Unfortunately our roomba ALWAYS gets stuck on them. If we get one full run a week it’s a minor miracle. So on this very day I finally hit the garage, pulled out the welder and grinder and am giving my couch and loveseat a 1” lift.

Interestingly, I had a similar bite in Portland growing up. I assume the hobo spider got me in bed, but I definitely needed medical intervention, and a little over 20 years later I’ve got a nice silver dollar size scar on my butt cheek.

That’s also how I came to learn that even though I had grown up assuming Oregon had brown recluses, what we really have is hobo spiders with a similarly necrotic bite. Eastern Oregon has some, but it would be a real shock to find one in the Willamette Valley.

You can always send a cardboard one from ShipADick[0], their newsletter is hilarious as well.

[0] http://shipadick.com

I’d like to find something friendlier than Jenkins, but the trade offs with the other CIs have made them not worth it or just plain not possible.

If you want or need to host your CI internally, a lot of the shiny new ones are off the table. Additionally, paying per user or per job for our CI is really unpalatable. We host our Jenkins on a few different nodes in our VPC and use them for WAY more than just building and deploying code. Content and database migrations, temporary stack creation and tear down, etc. We have code we build once and ship to multiple environments with different configurations and content, so we have different pipelines that run based off the commit branches, etc. We push to our private Docker, Maven, and npm registries, and auto-deploy via bastion nodes where necessary. On top of that it’s hooked in to our LDAP for auth, which is usually an ‘enterprise’ option that jacks up the price a ridiculous amount.

There’s not much out there that’s mostly batteries included that can handle what we’re doing. Where possible, it would be nice for a team or company to have a Jenkins focused person (back in ye olden days it would’ve been an SCM or build engineer position) because the UI and configuration can definitely be complex.

If you don’t need the complexity, services like BitBucket Pipelines, Travis, DeployBot, and their ilk are certainly much more friendly and likely less error prone. Jenkins definitely still has a valuable place in my book, though.

I think you’re looking at it wrong, but I’m still just as annoyed.

We’re giving the developer money for a bucket of features. It should be okay if a new feature comes along that I have to pay for it (upgrade cost). By paying when I did I was signaling that the old features were worth the price, expecting it to be free forever and include new features after that seems a bit unreasonable.

However, I get quite upset when I don’t have the option any longer to stay with my old bucket of features because they want to put me on the monthly fee treadmill.

IntelliJ gets this better than most. You have to pay every year, the year you stop paying is the year you’re frozen at. Fallback perpetual licensing I think is the term they used.

I love Tower for Mac, I’m happy with my current bucket of features and don’t wish to hop in the recurring revenue treadmill. I’ll be quite disappointed if they make it hard for me to stay on my current version.

We use Sonatype Nexus OSS to host private as well as mirror public Maven, npm, and Docker repositories. It took a small amount of fiddling but in less than a day we were up and running, using our LDAP for auth, and it’s been pretty much trouble free from the get go. In fact, we even use it to host our own completely custom internal package system (based on Ivy) for our content packages and database modules. It’s been a huge boon to us.

Artifactory is another competitor but last I checked npm and Docker registries required the paid version.

Since we use a lot of Java we use Flyway. It’s got different ways to use it, one of them being straight command line- so you don’t have to be a Java shop to use it.

I like Flyway over some others I’ve tried (like Liquibase) because it supports straight up, plain ol’ SQL code for migrations and uses very simple file naming conventions to define versions and repeat operations.

The advantage we have being a Java shop is that we can also write our migrations in Java code, or mix and match. I’ve only ever done Java based migrations sparingly, all involved a big migration that involved sorting and sanity checking a lot of existing data.

For PHP/Laravel I’ve really liked Blueprint.

Although I like Flyway better than Liquibase, Liquibase can do a lot that Flyway can’t and is certainly worth looking at.

I like the control of migrating my DDL by hand instead of the code first approach, and then having some ORM randomly changing data on boot.

We use Spring Boot w/ Hibernate and JPA a fair bit. We always turn off the code that would have the code manipulate our DDL, and we do write a lot of queries by hand, but we still get a lot of auto-magical stuff for free.

Just because it’s LED doesn’t mean it doesn’t use any power at all, so it’s still a waste of energy.

Every light in our house is LED and I still teach my kids about not wasting energy and turning things off when not in use.

Maybe it’s because I grew up with incandescent bulbs, but I can’t stand the thought of random lights being left on for no good reason, even if it costs 40 cents a year to keep lit.

EDIT- ADDITIONAL THOUGHT

I was going to add that it’s not like I went around my house adding lights that didn’t exist, but as I think about it... The house I grew up in was built in the early 70’s and every room had a single ceiling light that had two bulbs in it. The hallways had 1 or two ceiling lights.

My current house, built two years ago has 8 can lights in the living room, 6 cans in the kitchen and 3 pendants over the island, 8 in the dining room, etc... So maybe you’re on to something with the thought of putting in a lot more lights than we used to.

This sounds like the rantings of someone who has had some pretty bad managers and has never managed anyone else.

My schooling was Computer Engineering, my career started as a Software Engineer and has wound all the way up to Director level. I’ve been on both sides of this equation for a long time.

Your typical “just a manager” has to spin so many plates and babysit so many people that most real “engineer types” would loathe the job and frankly, not be very good at it. I struggled mightily as a team manager where there were a lot of competing priorities, personal issues, and directions that I needed to follow. As I got higher up the chain of command the job got easier, I had less direction I had to conform to, I was thinking architecturally and in longer terms– and I didn’t have daily interpersonal drama to deal with.

Management isn’t for everyone, engineer or not. It’s a lot like parenting: Most people are just making it up as they go, trying their best, and the best ones generally put others before themselves.

Put the idea that Engineers should be these lone wolf rockstars that just to get to do what they want, regardless of corporate objectives or market positioning is ludicrous.

As an engineer, I can confirm that we’re just as short sighted and dismissive of other people’s work as they are to us.

Like your son, I’ve also been tested to have an IQ of 160. Like you, I certainly don’t feel like I’m a genius in any particular facet of life.

I’ve known a few people that I’m absolutely sure were geniuses (or near it), the big difference between them and myself (that I could tell at least) is that they picked one thing or area and just kept getting better and smarter in that specialty. I get so _bored_ with just one thing. I’m highly creative, as I feel they are, but I just like building things.

Software, wood working, cars, motorcycles, robotics. I’m nearly as handy with a wrench and a welder as I am with a keyboard and a compiler. I feel like everything I look at I break into sub-components and constantly run optimizations in my head. It’s twisted and I’m constantly annoyed by people’s general lack of attention to my perceived detail. My wife is a huge fan of my ability to tell her shoes doing things wrong as well.

Maybe the people I regard as way beyond my capacity have the same quantity of innate intelligence, they’ve just applied it all to one area whereas I’ve spread mine around like finger painting on a wall. I just couldn’t do it. I can get interested in literally anything, there’s just too much cool stuff to learn.

It got so bad with the AMZN delivery company that we finally requested they ship to us with anyone but them.

- Delivery dates constantly getting pushed back 1-3 days (why even have prime?).

- Delivery notifications for packages that were never delivered, and not even attempted to be. Someone is almost always home and we have a security camera on all approaches to the house, they don’t even try.

- Completely lost packages.

- Our stuff getting delivered to the neighbors, and vice versa.

Amazon’s delivery has been an unmitigated disaster in our neighborhood.

I don’t recall ever encountering an explicit “you can not exceed a vacation longer than X” policy- but most places I’ve ever worked have had a policy that generally sums up to “if you’re going to be taking a long vacation we need to review/plan around it a little differently than the typical process”

I took a month off for hunting and camping a few years back (possibly a decade ago) and what it amounted to was: go document the little things that no one knows you do to keep the ship afloat and cross train this guy in how to do it.