w4tson

On the JVM you have the luxury of a third way which is Gradle. Convention over configuration, standardized builds but with flexibility if needed.

Flyway. It’s super light weight. Works out of the box with Spring Boot and you barely have to change your process. Just write sql scripts in a folder with a convention for the file name and away you go.

The Java migrations are fairly handy for calling web services etc

Good for standing up end-to-end tests too.

London, Community Fibre.

Very similar company and expanding all the time.

I tried their 1Gb service. It’s very impressive. £50 a month.

No affiliation

Kotlin for me too. It’s like the pinched the cool bits from other languages to boost java. Plus the power of java ecosystem. The tooling is amazing because obviously it’s Jetbrains’ baby. Gradle are on board as are the android team. Spring boot lot are going for it. It stands a good chance of getting a lot more mindshare than it has currently

Your examples meet the criteria perfectly. There is a stable fixed palette of colour a to choose from, a lot of practice on the part of the painter and immediate feedback when the paint hits the canvas.

Re: your points about business and not having the time to deliberate on every choice needed to be made. I agree, there isn’t time. Your business would fail long before you complete. However I think what K is saying is that the choices you make may or may not be intuition. And if they’re not, you might be way off, like people guessing the GPA average, you’d do better (maybe not wildly so) by taking the base rate

The second (and sometimes much harder) part of each days problem is only revealed when you complete the first part.

You make it sound so easy. Part 2 was the real gnarly bit.

Anyway I’m sure I won’t ever encounter that spiral as long as I live but if I do, I have code prepped for it :D

Me too, good to know ;)

Depending on your skills it may stretch you a lot. I did 2016 in rust and it was a battle, I knew relatively little beforehand.

2017 I solved in kotlin and got all the way to the end. I remember closing my laptop on Christmas Day and feeling elated/tired

For day 3 in 2017, the spiral. Were you just aware of this concept before hand?

Well I didn’t know. But now I do, so thanks.

I usually picture a JavaScript front end engineer who’s moved into backend NodeJS and picked up some DB knowledge along the way

Sure. UK crackpot David Irving has been denying the holocaust since the 80s. There’s a drama on Netflix about him called Denial

You might want to read up on your Aesop’s fables ;)

Good talk. I thought it was interesting what you said about student principle because I have a counterpoint to it. Which is that not carving out time day to day to tackle tech debt (via sand bagging) means the treacle gets thicker and harder to run through and the volume of bugs increases which leads to corners being cut to get features out at the old pace.

So the argument to over-estimate or sand bag, and fold in better solutions with the boy scout principle seems to me the best way to make a brown field site green again.

I’ve had one experience of this which totally worked. Time to implement features went from weeks to hours. I’m currently trying to apply the same method again with mixed results

Pretty sure it is. But if it was any less ridiculous I could have been convinced otherwise

Just curious, why not?

You got me there. It’s behind a paywall. I couldn’t read it. My opinion that 4 day week is a good thing for the UK still stands :)

Maybe people struggle because there’s always more work to do. And maybe people aren’t good at taking a break.

Also, the 2 day weekend is an arbitrary construct.

Plus think of all the millions more people volunteering, looking after their elderly loved ones, going to the park, spending money in shops.

I think a 4 day week makes perfect sense

That looks very cool. The demo says it’s 2-way collaboration. How does that work with the terminal? Or rather how do you stop your colleague from going rogue at your command line before you can hit stop

We tried both Mountebank and Wiremock and opted for Wiremock as it had more features we needed. We run thousands of tests every time a developer commits and we see no problems using the Java API.

We did run into an issue a small when we parallelized our tests. After a certain parallel factor we saw what looked like Wiremock not being able to keep up. However this might be FUD and we were running these tests all on one machine including a docker-composed test harness so there were a lot of moving parts

Overall Wiremock is excellent. I really rate the functionality to attach state to scenarios. You can model quite complex behaviour with this

80% Maintaining.

There was an article on HN. A while back about the value of maintainers over innovators. Keeping stuff ticking along is just as important and under valued (was the gist).

My fave: http://amiga.lychesis.net/game/ShadowOfTheBeast2/ShadowOfThe...

Loved the music too! That game was one of the first I ever played. It was dark, extremely difficult but with mind blowing graphics. Even though it forced you to watch a lot of the animated intro after each time you died I somehow never grew tired of it in the same way I did other games. It was other worldly

I second this. Going to conferences works. My mind is usually wired for months after with all the things I want to investigate, try out and build

36 I’m way more distracted than I thought

I finished Cal Newport’s Deep Work and even though I thought I could focus when I really needed to I realized that I’m kidding myself and I go to my phone habitually.

I’ve also stopped using slack/hipchat during a lot of the work day. When I get to the end of the day and see the hundreds of message counts it’s quite shocking.

What if people’s fears are generated or exaggerated by a unaccountable minority leveraging unregulated tools, mining illegal data mixed with psychology for profit, power or both?

Garbo is referenced in one of my favorite David Bowie songs “Quicksand”.

  “I'm the twisted name on Garbo's eyes
  Living proof of Churchill's lies, I'm destiny”

This makes sense to me. I wonder how much the secret sauce comes into play. For example blowing a good/great engineer is one thing. But worse if they can apply some of the seemingly unique techniques google used to do engineering.

I’m thinking of things like the build system, mono repo & the borg etc

Damien Hirst has dozens of technicians and they crank out paintings for him.

Yes! But it’s worse again. Because some bright spark comes along and says “hey there’s some commonality between these n services. I’ll make a shared library that will remove that duplicated code.

Then before you know it there are a dozen more shared libraries and you have the distributed monolith.

Then either have to Stand up every micro service every time integration test or make changes and hope for the best.