splittingTimes

"bullshitting" was indeed a bad choice of words on my part and it's not how we see our candidates nor it's reflective of our rational why we choose this interview style. It was a mere reference to another post further above.

We try to make the candidates as comfortable as can be in a stressful interview scenario by having them talk us through some of their previous work. If that does not do it, i do not know what is. If you feel comfortable to code while others watch, good on you. I personally am not that kind of person.

We try to be mindful of their time by having a single interview with minimal mandatory preparation time and same day feedback.

We want to give them a chance to see how we as a team interact.

We ask candidates to prepare a 20min presentation about one or two interesting projects they worked on. The whole dev team (8 people) is present and we all discuss it in a friendly, genuinely interested manner on eye-level, trying to understand what the candidate has build by asking design choices or more details on certain aspects, how error paths were handled, which trade off considered, how was the collaboration in his old team etc. Typically goes for 45min. The candidate is encouraged to ask the team any questions about how we work, what our tools and processes are etc.

We get to know candidate and the candidate us.

60-75 min is all it takes.

Afterwards we sit together as a team and share our impression, could we see working with them, did anybody see red flags, etc. Maybe 15-30min conversation. Then we reach a go-nogo decision right there and now. No coding questions, no brainteasers or similar. Haven't seen a candidate yet that could bullshit their way through the presentation and crowd consensus decision.

Android Netrunner's mechanics and game design are really unique, flavorful and full of great world-building. I so wish it could have exerted the same pull like MTG, but somehow it could not create the same long term engagement that MTG does. Maybe the core set was already so strong that the expansions could not really add that much to it.

It's the anxiety inducing waterwheel

I started to follow this approach [1] 5 years ago and it is amazing how much clearer my own thoughts in communication have become.

1. Subjects with keywords. The subject clearly states the purpose of the email, and specifically, what you want them to do with your note. Keywords: ACTION, SIGN, INFO, DECISION, REQUEST, COORD

2. Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). Lead your emails with a short, staccato statement that declares the purpose of the email and action required. The BLUF should quickly answer the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why. An effective BLUF distills the most important information for the reader.

3. Be economical. Short emails are more effective than long ones, so try to fit all content in one pane, so the recipient doesn’t have to scroll. Use active voice, so it’s clear who is doing the action. If an email requires more explanation, you should list background information after the BLUF as bullet points so that recipients can quickly grasp your message. Link to attachments rather than attaching files. This will likely provide the most recent version of a file. Also, the site will verify that the recipient has the right security credentials to see the file, and you don’t inadvertently send a file to someone who isn’t permitted to view it.

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[1] https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-pre...

Per Wikipedia: "The Earth and most of the planets in the Solar System, as well as the Sun and other stars, all generate magnetic fields through the motion of electrically conducting fluids."

So how does a Neutron star generate these intense and even twisted magnetic fields?

What irritates me:

1. During NS formation the electrons are pressed into the protons, creating neutrons. So there is no electric charges left.

2. A NS is so dense, that the neutrons form a closest packing of equal sphereres. There is no room for movement of any kind of "layers" inside a NS.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field

Could not agree more. All the different people I met and environments/situations i encountered during my travels where quite a formative experience.

- if COVID and money allow travel to places with many different cultures in a small space (e.g. Europe, SE Asia)

- work at surf Camp. The number of people I met with extraordinary life storys/carrier choices and/or high achievers/corporate heavyweights was unexpected to me. Great for building a network.

- if money is an issue consider WOOFING, work at a permaculture farm or a diving school.

- try all kinds of different activities. I wish I would have started surfing and Swing dance not in my 30ies but 20ies instead. So go out there, learn dancing, surfing, climbing, self defense, archery, carving, diving, pottery, wood working, cooking, singing, sailing, horse riding, blues harp, build a permaculture garden/do guerilla gardening, build a race bike from parts. If you can do this in clubs/shared Workshops/schools/etc and get to know people, the better. Often out can work there (like in dance/diving/surf/climbing schools) in exchange for lessons.

John Campbell has a nice (but a bit lengthy) break down about it.

https://youtu.be/25-iJKPA1CA

Hi there. Thanks for being a loyal customer.

Yes, your "Cares Visual" Straumann software is just a branded version of our Dental Wings one. In terms of functionality there is no difference, but I think with your version you got by default access to the vast Straumann product portfolio (hundred of implant kits and materials), plus their validated (FDA approved) workflow and access to their centralized milling facilities.

> dont take advantage of a lot of the software that's available to me. I do crowns, bridges, and implants mainly.

Yes Cares Visual is very flexible and offers many different ways to do restorations. It can be daunting at times :).

> Most of the general dentists do take impressions, and send those along, which I pour in gypsum, and scan in the scanner. I do have one dentist that I do work for that uses an intraoral scanner.

That is what we see in Europe as well (I assume you are US based). Dentists are more conservative when it comes to switching to digital dentistry. But I think it is understandable. Having their patients safety in mind, they want to be sure before applying completely new technology. Your dentists uses a Trios IO scanner. Since Care Visual is an open system we can deal with input from many 3rd party devices (i.e. non Straumann).

What topics would interest you? Or do you have any feedback in particular? I am happy to take this conversation elsewhere. See my email in my profile.

How cool. He should try the new "Easy" CAD software we shipped with our latest major release in December. It is a breath of fresh air and much more streamlined & intuitive workflows compared to our classic CAD Software he is used to.

Reading your comment made me really happy. As a dev I am always excited to have contact with our customers. Other hate it, but I love giving 3rd level support.

Yeah. 3D printers still have not entered the industry to their full extend. It's mostly dental labs that use them. Here again you need the right materials and precision to use them as physical control models when doing the aesthetic restoration and planning. It is still very common that dentists take an impression (very you bite that gummy mass). It gets sent to the labs. The labs then create a plaster model from that to have a physical control model. They also use one of the above mentioned desktop 3D scanners to create the digital model used in the CAD application.

So our implant planning software coDiagnostiX actually used DICOM data coming from a CT-scan. You need the full bone/jaw information to make sure that the implant goes into a place where the bone is wide enough, had the right density and that you do not hit a nerve. Those are the clinical requirements. On top of that, the placement must allow for a proper aesthetic restoration design by the lab technician, too.

For the latter you then also need the intra-oral scan. The output of the IO scanner is a simple (but massive) 3D point cloud. The software then is meshing those points on the fly. Using the color information from the IO scanners camera, shaders are added to generate the right texture for teeth, gingiva, etc.

We have a module in the CAD Software that allows to Integrate the surgical and prosthetic workflows through real-time case data sharing between coDiagnostiX and DWOS CAD. The Real-time (or asynchronous) connectivity between lab technicians and implant-placing dentists enables better prosthetically-driven implant planning and immediate provisional design.

On a personal note, don't be afraid of the procedure. With those drill guides and today's planning solutions we made leaps in implantology. In the beginning the surgeons did it by hand and feeling. I shudder at the thought.

Sorry, no I did not, had to look it up. 30 years in the business is mighty impressive. The competition in the dental market is extrem, so that's a huge success your father build!!

We had a team that also build Lab management software but overtime we painfully became aware that an integrated billing service is a maintenance nightmare with yearly changes to tax laws, the myriad of different health care providers/insurance companies ever changing what treatments they subsidize to which extend on an monthly or even weekly basis. Multiply that with all the different countries we operate in, it became unsustainable.

So again, kudos to your father to prevail in this space.

It's great to hear that this little piece of technology inspired amazement. It is quite something.

Your observations is spot on:

Indeed, the environment is far from ideal. 2-3 years ago dentists had to apply a powder onto the patients teeth to make just the scan of the teeth work. Now the software has matured to work powderless. The scan has to work for a wide variety of surfaces and vis-a-vis refractive indices like teeth, metal implants, ceramic or gold inlays, gingiva, orthodontic engagers. The very high end models even detect tooth decay / caries.

The stitching is another challenge. Again, in the past the scanner would loose his reference on the mouth and it was fiddly to get it back to continue from the last scanned part. The team working on this was brilliant to overcome this problem and now it is a smooth experience

Finally, accuracy is something all devices on the market having a hard time with. They are operating on the limit of what is possible. Small partial scans are no problem. But when you scan a full arch, you must ensure the deviation does not exceed 30-50 microns over that full arch. Otherwise, if the dentist plans to do a big bridge that spans several teeth a lower accuracy will lead to miniscule deviations and twists in the designed and later produced bridge, that the patient will recognize it and feels that it "just does not fit right".

Our mouth is super sensitive in this regard because of the high number of nerves/sensors. Our tongue operates like a magnifying glass. When you have a small hair in your mouth or between your teeth you will feel that right away.

Our company sells HW and SW for the dental sector.

We have a desktop app that processes DICOM data to do implant treatment planning (where to place an implant in the patient jaw). Output is a STL file to print a drill guide for the oral surgeon to perform a guided surgery.

Our desktop scanners for dental labs and our intra-oral scanners for dentists generate 3D meshes of the patients oral situation.

Those meshes are the input data for the CAD/CAM Software my team builds. It is a desktop app for the digital design of dental restorations. The GUI is in javaFX and 3D visualization is done with OpenGL 4.5.

Once the restorative Design is done, that app can generate many different output formats. Labs will feed the design files their local milling machine or 3D printer. Dentists can send it to centralized milling facilities of their choice to produce the crown or bridge or what have you.

Some impressions can be seen here:

https://youtu.be/5THQMr5SAH0

Hi John,

A bit off topic, but if I would like to introduce such a handbook on my team as well, what technology does it use? It looks and feels so much fresher, clean and responsive than a simple wiki. I see it is markdown files with some CSS, but what engine do you use to build and render the handbook.

Is there a repo that holds the template to set up such a handbook?

Cheers and congrats. Always admired how you kept all your employees engaged with the handbook to not have it deteriorate, but thrive.

But what did this mean? As in "customer relation" but the customers are devs?

The Libor - interest rates scandal is only one in a long list of documented manipulations in the last 5-10 years

ISDAfix - swaps

Platts - oil prices

WM/Reuters - FX

High-Frequency Trading - equities

Commodities - Gold, Silver Stock indices

Are all rigged. With that history, how can we give that new system the benefit of a doubt. It will be gamed as well.

Is it possible to employ any of those API calls in Java? How would the equivalents look here?

Not to take a away anything that SG-1 meant to so many people, but I personally would rank other series a bit higher. Back then I was not that much of a fan for these kind of comedic elements in SciFi. But I thoroughly enjoyed The Orville last year. Maybe I give SG-1 a spin.

Can you recommend other SciFi series from back in the day?

Babylon5 has the best story arc on the macro and micro level from my personal opinion.

There were also other series like "Space - above and beyond" or "Dark Skies" that only got a single season despite incredible potential to paint a really deep and unique universe.

I stumbled over Gene Roddenberry's "Earth - Final conflict" and am inclined to binch it.

The most engaged discussions happened when we had a huge wall that the team (devs+PO) had filled over time with many post-its to concretize the user story map. We would sit together on couch and look at the story map and update it together, noting where we find new unknown requirements, where we did not finish a feature, where bugs were found, etcs.

In terms of estimation we ran fast-estinmation games. Time boxed to 15min we meet after lunch break and do the following:

We have post-its on the wall indicating columns for the story points. We have a stack of print outs of the tickets to estimate. (Sometimes we spend 10min in the beginning and read all tickets) The game goes like this:

1. First dev picks a ticket, reads out the short summary of the issue and files it under one SP column.

2. Next dev can either pick a new ticket of the stack and place it on the wall OR can move an existing ticket into another column.

3. Rinse repeat until the stack is empty and no more tickets are moved between the columns.

If a ticket has been moved more than three times it gets flagged and set a side to be discussed in more detail in a separate session.

This is really a fast way to get rough estimate (which is really all you need) and it keeps every dev active.

AVOID meetings where everybody sits around the table and the scrum master has an excel sheet or JIRA open on the screen and tries to fill out fields with the estimates.

AVOID discussions if a ticket is a 2 or 3 or 5 or 8. Pick one and move on. Do discuss when one is 2 and the other is 8.

AVOID having long meetings where you do all things together (prio, clarify, estimate). Instead do a fast estimation first, even with some details missing, but with a rough understanding what is wanted in the tickets. With these estimates the PO can do the Prio (business value vs effort). Then you know what to work on next. For those tickets do the clarification and technical detail discussions inside small groups of the dev team.

AVOID forcing every team member into these meetings. Not all have to be present to do a fast estimation session or any other SCRUM artifact. Some people feel more owner ship for a feature/product other just want to know which tickets they can crush next. I always tell my team, if anyone feels

- he cannot contribute to a meeting,

- the agenda is not relevant/interesting for her/his current work

- he/her trusts the group to come to a sensible decision without her input.

- other urgent work needs to be done

- is in a state of coding flow

Then don't join the meeting. It is also totally fine to leave in the middle of a meeting when you do not get sometime out of it. Encourage your team to do that. It reduces frustrations a lot.

Soudns good. What fiction can you recommend for Solarpunk?

At that age I can only recommend to you to read fiction as well. Classic literature and philosophy will enrich your mind.

Instead of tech/science books, let me throw something else at you:

Jacque Fresco "The Best That Money Can't Buy" [1].

Robert Steele "Open-Source Everything Manifesto" [2]. Do not be mislead by the title. Open-source here is all-encompassing, software is only a tiny fraction of the spectrum.

David Graeber "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology" [3]

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[1] https://www.amazon.de/Best-That-Money-Cant-Buy-ebook/dp/B077...

[2] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Robert-David-Steele/dp/1583944435

[3] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/David-Graeber-ebook/dp/B00MAPBIYA

No, no. You did not mislead. Somehow I mixed up and actually wanted to comment on another comment. Sorry for the confusion.

That's great. I'll be watching you. Can we request topics? Cheers mate

I will watch you :). Can we request topics?

It is not only the fact to be able to write all over it (although it is a huge one), but there is something about the haptics and spatial distribution of information on paper that makes me remember content better. For example I know a certain formula was on the lower right hand side of one of the last pages of an article. On the other page was a graph.

That way I retain and find information much easier.

With digital content it is all a blur on the same mini screen of my smart phone.

IBM did research back in the 90s on perceptually-based colormaps and how to best represent various types of data within the color dimensions of luminescence, saturation and hue [1]. For example, they found that,

(1) Hue was not a good dimension for encoding magnitude information, i.e. rainbow color maps are bad.

(2) The mechanisms in human vision responsible for high spatial frequency information processing are luminance channels. If the data to be represented have high spatial frequency, use a color map which has a strong luminance variation across the data range.

(3) For interval and ratio data, both luminance- and saturation-varying color maps should produce the effect of having equal steps in data value correspond to equal perceptual steps, but the first will be most effective for high spatial frequency data variations and the second will be most effective for low spatial frequency variations.

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[1] the original link got removed from IBMs website. Back in the day it was under

https://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/lloydt/color/color.HTM

A pdf copy is here:

https://github.com/frankMilde/interesting-reads/blob/master/...

OMG, this brings back memories. I miss Quinn so much on OS X. With its lovely community I spend endless hours over the years with this addicitive game (play). As cool as Tetr.io is, out of the box it does not compare to the smoothness of the Quinn experience. But maybe there are more tweaks to the game options to come closer to Quinn.

But I will never know as I cannot allow myself to be drawn back into that black hole of Tetris addiction.

In Germany you have basically two education/preparation for work life tracks after secondary school ends. One is the very intellectual heavy university education.

The other is a dual education system of apprenticeship for Craftsman/manual work. For three years You go to school two to three days a week and work at a real craft business. That way you get the theory and it's practical application. After your exam you are a certified handy man in your profession with the relevant skills to work professionally. This solves the mentioned ambiguity of real work.

University education was associated with staying in higher education or R&D. But the creation of vast PhD programs had created a wave of PhD that cannot be absorbed by the University and research institutions. So it bleeds into "normal" work life.

The software profession would benefit from a dual apprenticeship system. But company's are not willing to take on the responsibility and train their talent that way. At least not in Germany.