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Meanwhile in an agile dev team.... "can you optimize it in the next sprint?"
by pkaye 6y ago
Meanwhile in an agile dev team.... "can you optimize it in the next sprint?"
- booleandilemma 6y ago“so you don’t have anything to demo, then?”
- bigiain 6y agoInterestingly, I demoed and shipped a wayfinding solution for a mobile app earlier this year, where I just brute forced the shortest paths between all pairs ~200 "intersections" in the area of interest for this event, and just stored the answers in a KV store based on the intersections (then does some cheesy last 20m stuff to route you to and from the nearest intersections to your location and destination). In a limited-enough space (like an event), this works out just fine. I'm glad I'm not the guy who needs to solve GoogleMap's routing problems though. I wonder if they have a huge BigTable store of every street intersection pair on the planet and a recalculated best route between them? I _hope_ they do something smarter than my "works in my constrained requirements space" brute-force hack...
- exikyut 6y agoWhen my local public transport (bus+train) did a major-ish route overhaul, routing directions on Maps glitched out for a couple days and showed large "black spots" (maybe 5-15mi in size?) where regions of generally accurate/useful routing were slapstuck together with large straight lines that cut diagonally through backyards, houses, major highways, etc (and sadly didn't account for runway room so weren't even flyable). So in a scenario where you were zoomed out enough to see 2-3 towns, you'd get a complex route shape in one part of the map, another complex route shape in another part of the map, then one single "nope I can't do this" giant line connecting the two regions. The giant line often connected to the complex shapes at awkward angles, eg 60-70°. Unfortunately IIRC most of the screenshots I took show my actual address/immediate surrounding area etc, so they'd be fairly heavily censored. If anyone [is actually reading this and] is especially interested, I can try braving my scary not-organized screenshot archive and try and find them.
- aidenn0 6y agoRoute-finding is much simpler than traveling salesperson. The hard part for real-world directions is getting the cost-function right. Older map systems used to make some very questionable assumptions that made them quite inaccurate (one example; assume all highway miles are equal; some were 55MPH and have traffic lights, railroad crossings and stop-signs others were 65 with no at-grade intersections -- today even higher speed limits are seen as the lingering effects of the national speed-limit have worn off).
- adelpozo 6y agoAs someone that sees 65 as an overly cautious limit and not precisely born in the US, what do you mean by the effects have worn off?
- aidenn0 6y agoUp until around 1990 or so 55MPH was the maximum speed limit; this was originally to conserve fuel. Up until 1995 55MPH was the maximum except for roads very far from population centers. Even after 1995, many states were very slow to raise the speed limit (I lived near the Maryland/Virginia boarder and remember Maryland did well before Virginia), and when they did raise the speed limit it was by small amounts. Today, you can drive from Los Angeles to New York and not hit any significant stretches of freeway with speedlimits under 65, and west of the Mississipi river, you will spend most of it at 70mph or higher. On top of that, the actual speed that will get you pulled over can be much higher (In CA you are very unlikely to get pulled over for single-digit MPH speeding on a freeway, making a 65 speed limit a de-facto 74; in the northeast US it's not uncommon to get pulled over for going just 5MPH over the posted limit).
- simcup 6y agochuckles in german Edit: to add value to the conversation: in germany I find googles estimates on long car trips quite accurate. And I'm actually a very erratic driver, sometimes taking every hole in traffic I can to get ahead, just slowing down to speed limit+20km/h where there is a speed trap, sometimes just cruising 80km/h on open autobahn getting overtaken by cargo trucks
- 0xfaded 6y agoCheck out google-ortools which does just this.
- petepete 6y ago"This sounds like a ten-pointer."
- dvirsky 6y ago"Well, let's not risk going live with the new version for such a small improvement. You know, premature optimizations are the root of all evil!"
- robohoe 6y agoLately it feels like agile is where innovation goes to die :(
- doctor_eval 6y agoI agree. It’s sad. Agile principles are awesome, but by the time you run them through many company’s implementations of Scrum or SAFe or (God forbid) Jira, you may as well just do waterfall. I don’t think waterfall is necessarily bad, that agile is always right, or that there aren’t other good practices. But practicing waterfall and calling it “agile” is rarely going to end well for anyone.
- ayyy 6y agoAh, not to worry. Modern agile is just waterfall, but with shorter timelines to maximize overhead costs and minimize productivity. It makes sense when you realize that we pay employees for days to elapse.
- donkeyd 6y agoTwo weeks ago I heard a colleague say: "I'm a scrum master in a waterfall project". That was my last week at that IT consulting company and really confirmed my choice to switch to a career with more purpose.
- cardinalfang 6y agoIs that a euphemism for unemployed?
- pjmlp 6y agoWaterfall is actually agile, if one bothers to read the original paper properly, regardless of its bad name.
- cyberdrunk 6y agoThe whole idea of waterfall as I know it is to have large-ish iterations (typically a couple months), which comprise of analysis, dev and testing stages. Is this different from what you have in mind?
- vicda 6y agoOk boss. We'll keep a cache of the best known route for the most common queries or fallback onto the existing algo.
- k3liutZu 6y agoJust do a PoC, and we'll improve it later.