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What is being expressed here is not a new problem. The challenge with solving it is that there isn't an easy set of steps that works every time. Someone's experience with the challenges of getting time with SMEs is highly dependent on the culture of the org, incentives, structure of the engagement, personality of the SME, actual workload, SMEs situation/feelings/stress, etc.

You can solve or mitigate these problems, but it takes experience and expertise that most coming from more pure software development backgrounds may not have. From experience, someone coming in with some consulting experience will tackle the situation differently.

Writing stuff down isn't always the best approach. Having a written record may be a good end goal. It may be better to have the small implementation soak up that experience through co-location with the experts. That way they are close by for interviews (probably too formal) but more likely sit and observe as the experts work. OP can then focus on building relationships between the experts and dev team. On this foundation you can add in more formality.

As part of the relationship management, OP will have to help the experts free time by working with their management. Without details of the company, we can't give real examples, but it might include supporting their requests for contractor support or giving their leadership political help.

When you can't come to some sort of co-location situation, you have seriously undermined your ability to execute the project. You will not have a true picture of the situation. Getting PMs or user experience people to engage with the experts will be lower value and require more clarifications. Developers can be low threat to the experts versus other types of people you can bring in.

I think there are variations of this. Yes, your experts need to give an amount of time to the effort. Making them a PM, in any sense of the word, is a step beyond contributing their expertise and can be avoided.

What you need is someone with significant dev experience, but enough outside exposure to step into the PM role. Ideally, it'd be someone with interest in user experience research, or a personality that connect outside of a dev team. They should be able to perform this role in a mechanical fashion to avoid a dedicated PM.

Doing this will be effective enough until things are at the point where a dedicated PM can be justified. If there is a struggle with the user experience aspects and getting knowledge out of the experts, you can get expertise from an agency on a short-term basis.

Adding a pure PM is going to significantly slow you down unless are one of the rare switchers who flip between dev, PM, and dev manager roles. People don't know what to make of these people, but they exist, especially in the freelance contract world. People will only full-time experience tend to look down on them because they can't understand it.

I think you forgot to include the Flash link.

Within the customer service industry, they'd claim a great "deflection rate". That's a metric that all of these large companies hold around any kind of help/support channel that may involve humans because people are a cost. It's often covered by some kind of satisfaction metric based off post-issue surveys, but fundamentally, if you just go away that's success.

There are often complaints here about what amounts to bean counting affecting other aspects of business. Customer service at larger scale is costly so attracts a section of very analytical leaders. They don't get, or ever prioritize, the human elements. It's only when satisfaction numbers are bad, or another exec outside of customer service takes action, that things improve.

The scale part kills the customer. You can have great support at one size. Once you grow then leadership, structure, and the culture change. These analytical leaders don't want to carry over the culture and structure because it comes at a cost. It really needs force and support from outside of customer support leadership to maintain it.

Having dealt with the operational side of SAML implementations, as well as implementation of the spec, it would be nice if tools like this generated docs for customer setup that are app specific. This would go from initial setup to certificate updates to configuring custom attributes supported by the SP.

I found it interesting that this was the focus when users of Vercel etc. have probably decided against k8s already. For me, a k8s comparison would make sense if this was a platform for running containers/VMs in a more traditional server model.

I'm a little confused about which DAM use cases this solves today, and which ones are next. Devs often do not understand the details or complexity of the use cases you are dealing with and can't work out how to slot this project in.

If you are looking to drive revenue eventually from this project I'd think about the compliance and asset usage angles. It may be cheap and easy to implement reporting features which will get you adoption. My experience with DAM has been that people will try to avoid integrating with a DAM, so it's hard to achieve the vision of everyone using it by opting in. If you are reporting on who's using old assets, assets are reused inappropriately, who needs to be contacted to replace something etc. it will be much easier to get adoption. Then push on the other parts of the DAM vision.

It's worth pointing out that this same lockout situation can and has happened in many more cases than listed here. It happens that the timing coincides with a specific service use, but the problem of people getting locked out of their life because Google blocked access to their account is an old one. Unfortunately, your point will be forgotten by many once this episode passes, and we'll be back to ignoring how much control has been ceded.

>> Another nice thing about having a catch-all on own domain is that you can sign up to each service with a unique email address

This is true when services support sign-up with a password and you are an advanced user. I'm not sure that this is easy for many vulnerable people that need this. The advice you may need to add is that you should use these unique email addresses to create burner accounts on login providers (Microsoft accounts, Google accounts, etc.) because that's how you have to access some services.

I think that is a good default. A small number of sites seem to execute sticky elements that help with long content, but only add it if you are going to test it.

And so much of the SEO voodoo is then codified into templates which get reused over and over again.

Would be nice to be able to compare results between dates.

The term MVP was cover for shoving poor quality software out on the market long before AI became involved. This is unfortunate, but inevitable when the term was popularized. AI is incredibly easy to tack on now, so people are doing that too.

I don't think there is much vision or editorial control. Anyone with an idea can seemingly produce content for these platforms and it almost always falls short.

How do you position this video content versus documentation? Anecdotally, younger audiences may have a preference at times, but I think it's more about the use case and preparation. I've seen really good video content and bad. Same applies to docs, or any content.

>> Another often missed opportunity is building SPAs as offline-first.

You are going to get so many blank stares at many shops building web apps when suggesting things like this. This kind of consideration doesn't even enter into the minds of many developers in 2024. Few of the available resources in 2024 address it that well for developers coming up in the industry.

Back in the early-2000s, I recall these kinds of things being an active discussion point even with work placement students. Now that focus seems to have shifted to developer experience with less consideration on the user. Should developer experience ever weigh higher than user experience?

It seems like a better fit for high-end apps that want to adopt the native framework for Windows and macOS. Developers of these apps will often accept some of the quirks with manual bindings to get the performance they need while trying to maximize code sharing and minimizing divergence for as much of the shared code as possible. This is not going to be accepted by most developers on the Windows platform, but they seem out of sorts with their current options anyway.

Is that how they are handling any of the Swift UI work for Arc (their browser)? I think they are 100% focused on bringing the Swift compiler etc. over and leaving all UX to the Windows UI (WinUI lib?) so that they have a native experience on macOS and Windows.

Convenience is a big reason. People look at me when I use rakes in the garden. Just to save some time I ended up getting a cordless leaf blower but my wife thought she might find it fun too. The area we have to clear was never going to support the maintenance of a gas-powered blower.

Separately, I was tired of the stand up vacuums for smaller jobs so got a corded stick vacuum. It's still a bit of a hassle even though I use it frequently to avoid messes getting out of control with the kids and pets. I know that if it was cordless it would get much more proactive usage by others. The design of the corded vac could be improved to make it easier but there is little incentive to do that.

>> That’s an awfully uncharitable projection.

I took this to mean my father-in-law, but not a paid business or situation where these things are a necessity. He is a lawyer who's worked remote since 2000 only leaves home for necessities and outside hobbies, but has all kinds of equipment including a tractor and snow plow. Of course, he has a ride-on mower and enough other equipment to start a landscaping business.

If you rewind 10 years to a time before waves of big tech layoffs and the market for engineers was very much in favor, you'll find your answer. The explosive growth in hiring coupled with FOMO-driven risk taking resulted in many projects which were essentially resumeware for engineers. This environment permitted people to escape strategic thinking and any consequences.

Imagine having to deal with multiple data stores for your daily development but then go on-call for a week and have to deal with twice as many plus the inevitable lack of runbooks etc.? I personally have a big tech experience with the same data store proliferation in an organization with pretty solid RDBMS use. In the last 3-4 years we've been undoing the damage and migrating data. Toil for engineers is lower and uptimes are better.

Does the BBC still have people in place doing experiments and R&D? I recall at one point they were researching/experimenting with audio codecs. I imagine this has taken a hit with funding cuts and general short-sightedness back home.

>> The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul.

This really struck me because I'm realizing it is soul destroying but have gotten competent, and even good at it. I was involved in my family's small business and some of my own startup attempts and consulting, so I remember those feelings.

C++ Builder fan from my early career. Did they add designer/XAML support for C++ and then kill it? Do you have to do C++ dev with code only now?

That's not what people say when the daily poster in r/dotnet asks what framework they should use for a GUI app.

How do you get it on macOS?

It has in the past for me, but I haven't run it since 2021.

Absolutely at takeoff, but the emphasis is often missing for the remainder of your time onboard. It's noticeable when crew add extra reminders.

I've never looked for stats on these incidents involving clear air turbulence. The impression I got as a European was that this was a transatlantic and transpacific problem. It's obviously not, but those were the incidents reported on.

Can you be specific about the cost of building these?

I've run into many situations where something was deemed costly, is found out later, and the team ultimately has implement it all while hoping no one groks that is was predicted. "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39472693) is related.

Fluent Python and Effective Python are good books. The former is huge and is really multiple books in one.

I think it would be improved by focusing on specific elements or patterns. These look pretty but there are deficient elements in some of the designs. With more guidance (the job of the site, but it's too minimalist right now) you can spot the elements which do stand out.

I struggled with what you describe and art/design more generally. I started photography as a tech person and naturally gravitated to being a gear head. Now I still shoot with my ancient Canon EOS 7d and it's much more relaxing. I only got there by doing everything by making hard break from looking at the technical aspects, avoiding certain forums, finding photo walks without gearheads, etc.

With time I started to appreciate other elements of design and be able to put things together without the feelings that existed before. I'm not sure if there is a particular psychological description of this. There is definitely an element of my anxiety at play though.

The 10px and margins get to me too. I'm probably better at articulating my views now with designers that results in productive outcomes. If designers only have the ear of the CEO though it's a lost cause.