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thebent

955 karma · joined September 22, 2014

YC W16 co-founder of https://gitprime.com twitter @thebent
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thebent··on The Quietest Room in the World
> It's so quiet that nobody has been able to spend more than 45 minutes inside

Whoah.

thebent··on What Happens to Your Body on a Thru-Hike
@kevin488 The Adventure Cycling Association is the de facto source for bike touring routes and maps: https://www.adventurecycling.org/routes-and-maps/
thebent··on Affordable Care
Yes, the group insurance through a payroll processor is a great solution. That's what we do now.

The caveat is that it only works if you're collecting a paycheck, but not if you're bootstrapping from savings.

thebent··on Affordable Care
Yep, you nailed it. Had it not been for ACA, making the career leap to co-founder would have been incredibly difficult. Two years later, it's a honor to be able to provide insurance to our employees.
thebent··on Prolific Engineers Take Small Bites
My actual suggestion was to hop on with the product team/co-founder. This article is a narrative about something we found pretty interesting during product development.

Similarly, the offer here is to take a deeper look at what we're building and a (quite genuine) offer to incorporate any suggestions you might have into our roadmap.

thebent··on Prolific Engineers Take Small Bites
@trevyn We've got some things in that vein that are working in the app today — and are working toward even more. If you’d like, we could hop on a call and give you a tour of the app and show you where we’re headed?

Seems like you've given this some thought on how this should be done right; would love to include them in our product development discussions.

thebent··on Prolific Engineers Take Small Bites
Would love to better expose our data set. It’s a bit tricky however: we’re specifically interested in enterprise software engineering (the patterns of which differ radically from the open source world).

In order to dig into enterprise data, we sort of need to have a ToS that only allows us to talking abstractly about aggregate data.

Any thoughts on how we might navigate that?

thebent··on Prolific Engineers Take Small Bites
@trevyn Co-founder here.

You’re right: this post is a narrative about product development, and a strong correlation we found between two variables across 20 Million+ commits that we thought was fascinating and supports general 'kitchen logic' around best practices. The axes are not labeled, but if you like we can set you up with a demo account and walk through your data with you.

One other note: the typical common use case for the product has been stakeholder management; something we have doubled down on in product development. Any specific critique about how we can improve most welcome!

thebent··on What Makes a Senior Software Developer?
Highly recommend Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” on this topic

Correction, the Pink title I was referring to was "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us"

Pink does a great job unpacking research that demonstrates how this type of 'affect my pay' dynamic backfires for engineering.

thebent··on What Makes a Senior Software Developer?
“to affect my pay” ← totally agree with you here.

This is a big part of why we think engineering metrics are a tough nut to crack: there’s a fair bit of research that suggests tying KPIs to compensation is a huge anti-pattern for certain types of work (chiefly those involving lots of novel problem solving).

Highly recommend Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” on this topic; it’s pretty fascinating stuff.

thebent··on What Makes a Senior Software Developer?
@debaserab2 100% agree, well said.
thebent··on What Makes a Senior Software Developer?
@Bartweiss thanks for the feedback. The thing about “gaming the system”, is that it presumes an adversarial relationship between engineers and non-engineers. That’s pretty unfortunate, and it’s our view that a good portion of this is due to non-engineers not really understanding what happens software development.

But yeah, my co-founder has a pretty interesting take on gaming the system.

TL;DR: So, can you game the system? Absolutely. The point is to game the system: https://intercom.help/gitprime/general/cant-you-just-game-th...

thebent··on What Makes a Senior Software Developer?
@cbcoutinho appreciate that. i think this should work: https://blog.gitprime.com/rss.xml
thebent··on What Makes a Senior Software Developer?
@shandor — yeah, there's some secret sauce happening in that impact metric, but this post breaks it down so you get a sense of how it's calculated and how teams are using it: https://blog.gitprime.com/impact-a-better-way-to-measure-cod...
thebent··on What Makes a Senior Software Developer?
Ah nice, @Eiriksmal — 'once upon a time…' and 'pre-impact', sounds like this was a while ago now :) Encouraging to hear that this has been helpful for you.
thebent··on What Makes a Senior Software Developer?
Thanks for checking it out @gaastonsr — yeah, you make a great point. we've figured out some ways to account for that in the software itself.
thebent··on What Makes a Senior Software Developer?
"Every measure of a good developer is qualitative. That makes them all subjective."

^ This post scratches the surface on a timely and relevant question many teams face, but the author seems to throw hands up and say everything is subjective.

Our work suggests otherwise: https://blog.gitprime.com/check-in-frequency-and-codebase-im...

thebent··on McMansion Hell
The commentary is blistering.
thebent··on Peer pressure’s effects are perhaps more powerful than we thought (2014)
Yeah, have to agree with louprado here. The 'People around you control your mind' although a bit more entertaining and click baity is actually more accurate than 'peer' or 'pressure'.
thebent··on Year-long road trip where it's 70°F every day in North America
It's all about the elevation. You can drive for hours on the east coast and be in the same relative eco-system. Here in the west, you drive an hour and can move through several. Start in a scorching red-rock desert and move in elevation to an alpine meadow in a short drive. And the temps drop 3°F for every 1k feet you gain in elevation.
thebent··on Year-long road trip where it's 70°F every day in North America
But then you'd have to live in the SF Bay Area ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
thebent··on Year-long road trip where it's 70°F every day in North America
yesss… "It sucks here! Don't come! You'll hate it."
thebent··on Year-long road trip where it's 70°F every day in North America
Thanks for the conversion. Whoah, that's cold.
thebent··on Year-long road trip where it's 70°F every day in North America
Favorite part about this is June, July, August and September in Colorado. Summertime in the Rockies! Any startups needing an excuse to get away, come visit us :)
thebent··on Unexpected uses for binder clips in under 4 mins [video]
makes me want to run to the store and get some binder clips.