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mopoke

1,268 karma · joined December 22, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/andykelk; my proof: https://keybase.io/andykelk/sigs/-ZzgWdbNPUgit6xP_2-mvXFhH_MuvH8dv7EPaEukf0c ]
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mopoke··on Ask.com has closed
It's been a while but I also worked there at the same time. I was in the original group who set up the UK operations around the turn of the millennium.

And you recommended the Introduction to Algorithms book to me...

mopoke··on Windows: Microsoft broke the only thing that mattered
Probably a bit of both.

The overuse of "genuine" and "genuinely" in some sections screams LLM text to me.

mopoke··on Webtop – Alpine,Ubuntu,Fedora,and Arch containers containing full desktop envs
And, of course, I decided to see what happened if I fired up firefox in webtop and loaded webtop in it. Oops.
mopoke··on Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more
Take a look at the Supernote.
mopoke··on [dead]
Lots of upstream connection errors.
mopoke··on SOC2: The screenshots will continue until security improves
> SOC2 is the best-known infosec certification, and the only one routinely demanded by customers

Maybe in the US. For the rest of the world, ISO27001 is arguably better known.

mopoke··on Incomprehensible job titles are an elitist affectation
Maybe, just maybe, it's a reaction to all that's wrong with job titles - https://stackstreet.com/4-problems-with-job-titles/
mopoke··on LinkedIn called me a white supremacist because I happen to share a name with one
As an aside, is it too early for my brain or is the "representing your organization" option contradictory?

http://imgur.com/8sBidJ7

"Choose if we can show your profile information on your employer's pages" shows "Yes" but the text below "Hide my picture and profile information from showing up in this section of a job detail page?" says "Yes". So is it showing or hiding that?

mopoke··on Ask HN: How to Be a Good Technical Lead?
In my experience, a good technical lead won't give commandments from on high. A good technical lead will consult and facilitate a discussion and mediate conflict. They will also be directive when the time is right, but only after having listened and weighed the arguments. They will also be able to explain the rationale behind those decisions.
mopoke··on Ask HN: How to Be a Good Technical Lead?
I get asked this a fair bit so I started to collect a few of my favourite links together in a blog post: http://www.andykelk.net/leadership/the-big-list-of-managemen...

Specifically to new tech lead roles, I'd recommend "Peopleware" and "Behind Closed Doors"

And a couple of articles specific to your situation: http://firstround.com/review/this-90-day-plan-turns-engineer... and https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/08/developer-turned-mana...

mopoke··on Portia, an open-source visual web scraper
I wrote a blog post on my experiences using CasperJS to parse a single page site which used angular. http://www.andykelk.net/tech/web-scraping-with-casperjs
mopoke··on Ask HN: How do you manage passwords in teams?
We use SimpleSafe (https://www.simplesafe.net/) which is self-hosted and pretty simple to set up.
mopoke··on Younited - all your content 100% alive
For the last 2:

"Younited is created and hosted by F-Secure in Finland."

mopoke··on Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
Looks like a DNS failure, so adding 199.59.148.12 to your hosts file gives you working t.co links again.
mopoke··on What Amazon's Decision Means for Digital Media
But a lot (most?) cable/satellite stations show ads. So I'm paying for the content with my wallet AND paying by sitting through ads.
mopoke··on Google Chrome is detecting malware on The Verge
Same on feedly.com.
mopoke··on Ask PG: What caused the downtime?
Great minds think alike :-) https://twitter.com/andykelk/status/230131954975133696
mopoke··on Jetpack 2 - by the creator of the original Jetpack
Awww, I was disappointed. An updated version of Jetpac (or Atic Atac) would be great.
mopoke··on Google I/O 2012
Europe's a piece of cake. Try Asia...
mopoke··on Build Lego onto a Google Map (in Google Chrome)
I had the same until I forced Chrome to allow webGL.
mopoke··on Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6
Trying to get a trial account for Adobe Digital Publishing Suite was nigh-on impossible. The stated time was "5 working days". Unfortunately the exact time we needed it was over the long thanksgiving break in the States.

Even after 5 working days we never got access and have to resort to using the Adobe reseller's account to actually try out the software.

mopoke··on How to make a site really freaking fast
The pingdom tests only check the HTML delivery, don't they? So the full page does not load in 1 or 2 seconds.
mopoke··on Stopwatch with only CSS3 - No javascript
Cloudflare is just the CDN in front of the site, it's not the web host. The source IP (direct.thecodeplayer.com) is in ServInt's netblock (http://www.servint.net/).
mopoke··on Behind the scenes at Adioso - Part 2: Stunts
Although Lonely Planet are now run primarily from the UK - they let most of their Australian team go.
mopoke··on Calibre and Project Gutenberg: Liberate Your eReader.
I don't mean to sound the whiny open source guy but...
mopoke··on You're crap and paid too much for the little work you actually do
Do you think? I'm not sure. Speaking as a developer who is now a manager, they're certainly not skills that came naturally but I think I have learned them and practice them fairly well.

Maybe I'll never be the natural that some people are but, with hard work and forcing myself out of my comfort zone, I am doing a good enough job.

mopoke··on You're crap and paid too much for the little work you actually do
But there's no reason a good developer can't be a good manager. They may not have the skills in their current role, but everyone should be able to acquire those skills.

I see no problem with developers becoming managers in theory. But something goes wrong in that transition. Management skills are just like learning any other skill. Skill-learning is something that developers (or the good ones) typically excel at. So why can't developers learn management skills?

mopoke··on You're crap and paid too much for the little work you actually do
Even the best engineer on the team should understand how the business works though. There's more to being a good engineer in a business than understanding the technical side.

I tend to see people on three paths - they're an engineer and they want to keep coding and getting rewarded for that; or they're an engineer who wants to manage process and people; or they're an engineer who wants to focus more on architecture and design. The person you want to "manage" is the second one - they've a working knowledge of how the tech works but they're actively developing their leadership skills.

Leadership skills are no different from any other skills - they can be learned. In some cases people show more of a "natural" skill in that area but that doesn't meant that it can't still be learned - it'll take you out of your comfort zone but you don't tend to advance unless you do that.

mopoke··on We’re hiring a Lead Visual Designer
You're missing the strike through on "and Lead Visual Designer" in the last line.
mopoke··on You're crap and paid too much for the little work you actually do
Bear in mind that this from The Register whose audience is much more skewed towards those working in large corporates, BOFHs and PFYs than the typical audience here.

For me the key sentence to the whole article is "Your boss has no idea if you’re good at your job." Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology? There seems to be this idea that IT folks are "special" and don't understand business and, because it's always been that way, there's no need to change. If you work for a business, it's not OK to be a not have a clue how a business works.

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