morganherlocker

Source, for those interested[1]. The bill was proposed in 1897 in the Indiana state legislature.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

> Bosses who always say yes are more pleasant in the short term to their superiors, but they will be better off in the long term to have someone who pushes back on requests which are too unreasonable.

This applies to engineers equally so. The ability to manage expectations is one of the most important skills one can possess. It also happens to be a particularly difficult skill to master, which is why, for example, just about every developer's first freelance project is a fixed bid scope creep nightmare that they end of walking away from or making $5/hour.

For me, issues are the most important part. I might set up a script to run daily that would import my issue list into a local csv.

> If asynchronous code is harder to reason about, why would we elect to live in a world where it is the default?

Because if you do not make it the default, then most libraries you use will make the choice for you by going sync.

In trello's case they have a browser app, ios, and android. Having one well designed api makes these easier to build and maintain. It appears to be working pretty well for them. I use trello in browser, on an iphone, and on an ipad, and they all work together very seamlessly.

I recently switched to this approach and it works very well. No more "I want to push out this quick fix, but I have to wrap up this other thing first so I don't break the build".

With github it is especially nice. I push to a remote branch, which I can see when I go to the project page. When I click merge it shows whether or not the TravisCI build passed. If it looks good, then I click to auto-merge and it's all set. It is possible to even automate away that part as well and have the whole thing merge and deploy on push if the build passes, but I am not quite ready to take the plunge yet with that (too easy to botch a production release IMHO).

A bit unrelated, but this reminded me of when I did a full install (as opposed to a partial install and running the rest from the CD-ROM) of SC as a kid, which made my father extremely angry. "You used a whole 95 megabytes!"

I say this fully aware that the cycle will continue one day when I get angry at my future child for installing Flight Sim 27, taking up 1.5 terabytes of precious HD space. And of course, they will remember it one day and laugh because a 100PB SSD will be a $10 purchase at the gas station.

I have interviewed people with 10+ years of experience who failed fizzbuzz (in their language of choice, unlimited time, googling encouraged). There really are people out there who do not meet even the lowest of bars, despite having years of experience on paper.

turf - geospatial analysis engine written in node.js. The goal is to provide a high level gis scripting api similar to arcpy (but much faster and open source). Anyone interested in maps or stats might find it interesting.

https://github.com/morganherlocker/turf

If you do not have expertise in computational geometry or geospatial analysis:

1) I would be happy to share whatever knowledge I have and tee up a few easier issues to work on

2) Feature requests, testing, design (hoping to get a dedicated site up and running), and help with docs are also extremely valuable.

Heavy computation algorithms. My main focus is on geospatial analysis, and to test certain things, you are going to end up with some 1000ms+ tests. Get 10 or 20 of those, and you have a problem.

This is probably not best practice, but I often disable tests that take a really long time. An alternative would be to have a 'full suite' and a 'fast suite'. The fast subset could be used locally for most development, but then you run the full superset when you are ready to release. A 5 minute release is no big deal, but if it takes 5 minutes to run a standard dev test, then people are not going to test as much.

It varies from project to project, but my flow nowadays is something like this:

1. Describe the behavior of the function in a readme with a code example.

2. Create a test that is mostly just a copy/paste from the readme code.

3. Write the actual function until it passes the first test.

4. Write a few more tests for any edge cases I can think of.

5. Get the function to pass again.

6. Encounter another edge case, goto 4.

It seems to work pretty well for me anyway. I think a lot of the debate really centers around unit tests vs integration tests (no one serious I know of is arguing for no testing, or all manual testing).

In my experience, you get the most bang for your buck with mostly unit tests in library code, and mostly integration tests in applications. Despite the difference in use cases, I think both sides talk past each other most of the time.

Unit tests all over the place in an application code tends to be a waste, because the tendency is to test the libraries your application is using. Integration tests in library code is often terrible, because they are usually slower and tightly coupled to external libs.

While not suitable for production operations, my go to has been a random one man vps shop. I have used him for years, because it is the cheapest plan I have seen. I pay $20/year per server, which makes it an easy decision to add another one whenever an idea comes up.

> He may be in an introvert but he's a damn good writer!

Along with what I would imagine is a sizable chunk of the best writers. Writing is rarely a social activity.

> jk jk on IE. Honestly, I am not sure what Microsoft has done lately..

.Net/C# is pretty dominant on the east coast. I see far more .Net shops than Java anyway. This leads me to believe that server licensing and Azure might be even bigger profit centers in the future. It is not consumer driven, but finance, insurance, HR, accounting, etc. are serious markets with deep pockets. .Net displaced many systems that were 40+ years old (COBOL, RPG/AS400, etc.), so I am doubtful that there are many contenders that could swoop in and steal the market anytime soon.

Correct, they use mapbox, which uses Open Street Map under the hood.

Too late. The cat is already out of the bag and everyone is already doing all of this anyway, except awkwardly holding their phone up to their face at the same time.

I don't think people hate google for offering proprietary mapping, but nobody wants to be subjected to unnecessary leverage.

For example, I wanted to use google in a commercial application, but only for backend services like geocoding and place search. I wanted to pay them for these services, but they refused the business because I did not want to display the data on a google map and use the google js api.

That is the sort of thing a company with lots of leverage can do. I wanted to pay full price or more to use a feature (10s of thousands per year), but due to a monopoly on the data, they can turn me away. Sorry, but I already have to deal with one Comcast.

Could it be forked and rebranded like iceweasel?

It seems like this should extend to many other roles as well. If someone in the EPA has investments in energy or manufacturing, for example. If someone in the FCC has investments in tech or media conglomerates. Pretty much anyone who has access to information about changing regulations, enforcement, etc. before the public.

Congress has been known to have above average returns on stock investments, making the congressional salary increases we quibble over look like chump change, if they are using their unique knowledge of policy direction to the fullest.

If the OS is Windows, as it often is in these environments, C# seems to strike the best balance between safety, ease of recruitment, and flexibility. I have not used it in several years, but I still look back and miss awesome elements of the language like linq, the selection of super polished UI frameworks, Visual Studio, the ability to use dynamics when you needed to, the lack of drama in the community, and the ease of finding answers to obscure questions on SO. Of course, I left the platform for a lot of the same reasons, but in the context of being increasingly involved with OSS. That said, the positives still hold true for the enterprise space you are describing.

One of the best uses of d3 I have seen is a visualization of biblical contradictions. [1]

[1] http://bibviz.com/

A couple that I did not see on the list but also come to mind:

- Windows Workflow Foundation (used for building .Net based service flows) [1]

- ArcGIS Model Builder (used for geospatial processing automation) [2]

- Sextante (open source geospatial processing that plugs into QGIS) [3]

- GRASS GIS Modeler (open source geospatial processing that plugs into GRASS GIS) [4]

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/jj684582.aspx

[2] http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//0...

[3] http://sextantegis.com/

[4] http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/wxGUI.Modeler.html

Some amount of innovation seems inevitable for any successful startup. Most of us could build a site in a weekend that does image sharing, but it would take some serious innovation to scale the site up to a billion users without blowing the bank on infrastructure. Doing the same thing people have been doing, but at 1/10 the cost is clearly innovative.

Whether its scale, raw idea, business model, speed, quality, or whatever; there has to be something new to get any significant traction. Are all types of innovation equal? Of course not, but all types provide some sort of value. Throw open source into the mix and you start to see the network effect in play where even "useless idea" startups provide value (although the creators may not get much return on it) in the form of assisting more useful ideas come to fruition.

It would be interesting to create some sort of crowdsourced database for these types of anecdotes that could then be sifted through and corroborated. Something like that might bring a bit more transparency to the "deal" we all make with these types of services. I get the whole argument of "well you wanted to use the free service, so now they get to monetize your data", but what services collect and how the data is used is extremely opaque.

This is common in many industries as well. Practically every car model gets awarded "Best XYZ 2014!". I have definitely noticed the trend with companies in my area, of which 5 seem to all hold the title of "Best Place to Work".

I suppose that is its own form of decentralization.

Note that this is not the same fleet as (also a deployment tool): https://github.com/substack/fleet

I used to be pretty heavily involved with the meta of p.se early on. The policy you suggest is exactly what SO users really wanted, but p.se rejected the idea because it would mean that they would become a dumping ground for bad SO questions. It actually became a bit of a dumping ground before implementing some very aggressive moderation.

You seem to be conflating programming languages with technology.