BjoernKW

82 ms·

781.
Water Cooler Talk Is Toxic(bjoernkw.com)
2 points by BjoernKW 8y ago|1 comments
782.
by BjoernKW 8y ago
The kind of technical debt otherwise known as premature optimisation. If you don't even know yet that your app has to scale - and in which way - preparing for that contingency is a waste of resources.
783.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
> that it is easy to parse correctly While that's not exactly correct - CSV can be quite hard to parse if you want to cover each and every variation and edge case - for all practical intents and purposes that statement is true in my
784.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
Roger Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating is a classic.
785.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
In terms of portability and installed base Python or Perl probably are the best choices. They come installed with most UNIX, BSD or UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux.
786.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
It's actually quite simple. If you don't want to do business with someone from another country you certainly don't have to comply with other countries' laws. If on the other hand you do sell a product or service to busin
787.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
Just because something isn't easily enforceable it doesn't become legal or ethical. A small company absolutely can get by with shoebox accounting, too, it's just not particularly advisable to do so. The same applies to comple
788.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
GDPR requires companies to use “state-of-the-art measures” to protect personal data, which is intentionally vague because the state of the art obviously changes over time. However, who will decide what the state of the art actually is at an
789.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
I agree in that the major benefit of GDPR for small companies is that you have to review and perhaps revise your processes accordingly. However, the documentation still is required. You can create some of that later or just in case you&#x27
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by BjoernKW 9y ago
That's not correct. As soon as you want to do business with someone currently located in the EU (doesn't even have to be an EU citizen), GDPR applies, no matter where your company is located.
791.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
This has nothing to do with over-engineered infrastructure. As soon as your side project processes and / or stores user data GDPR applies to you. Good luck with providing the requisite documentation and data processing agreements if au
792.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
Yes, compliance is the goal. However, the rules are vague enough to be interpreted in other ways as well. If some authority decides to make an example of pesky local startups for whatever reason there is little that prevents them from doing
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by BjoernKW 9y ago
While I understand the sentiment this might be risky. Creating the required documentation after the fact should your project take off might not be possible in every case.
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by BjoernKW 9y ago
By design or not: Pain is a useful input. There are medical conditions that inhibit pain perception. People suffering from such conditions have to be especially careful because their bodies won’t tell them when there’s something amiss (like
795.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
Some currently spend a lot of their time on servicing and properly orchestrating Docker and related infrastructure (the actual product they're working on, mark you, isn't Docker-related ...). On a much more positive note though a
796.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
I don’t think it’s particularly widely used but in my opinion using antivirus software is a matter of good hygiene, even if the system you run isn’t prone to being infected by viruses. For example, I occasionally receive Office documents or
797.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
Additional, often unnecessary, complexity and the tendency to use it indiscriminately even if it's not pertinent to solving the problem at hand. I've seen teams spending an inordinate amount of time just for servicing Docker and i
798.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
For the software industry ( for other industries or use cases that might certainly be different) I think it is. It’s just one possible indicator but an indicator it is. If I come across or meet a new person from this industry and that perso
799.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
Being trusted by your peers is different from trying to win shallow popularity contests. That kind of aversion towards self-promotion might be a reason why we arrived at absurd phenomena like homework assignments for interviewing processes
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by BjoernKW 9y ago
Even if that were the case, which I don’t think it is because the underlying problem is something else, the current predominant interviewing process does little to alleviate that problem as well. I don’t think we can magically solve inequal
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by BjoernKW 9y ago
No, he didn’t. I said ‘network of trust’, not ‘cronyism’. - People starring your GitHub repository. - Someone following you on Twitter. - Someone linking to a blog post you wrote. - Someone recommending you to someone else because you did a
802.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
That’s whataboutism. Is there racial or gender-based inequality? Yes, unfortunately there is. Should we therefore resign and stop trusting each other altogether? No, we shouldn’t. We should rather try and extend our trust to others. Inequal
803.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
An informal network of trust (which in fact already exists, it's just that many companies and many engineers don't use it), i.e. personal references, referrals, open source contributions, a project portfolio. Many participants in
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by BjoernKW 9y ago
I'm very much in favour of cutting down on pointless meetings and processes for processes' sake. However, I think that "just wanting to code" can be an organizational anti-pattern as well. Code doesn't exist in a v
805.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
The problem of getting paid seems to come up a lot here. Is this more of a process or a cashflow problem? Many companies optimise their cashflow by paying as late as possible without incurring additional fees. Some are even as intentionally
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by BjoernKW 9y ago
> The problem is: hardly anybody except me seems to care about them. I'm not so sure. Being able to solve hard mathematical problems probably is a niche problem but that doesn't mean you're the only one experiencing it. Fo
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by BjoernKW 9y ago
You often hear or read things like "The job market is broken.", "Job search is broken.", "The interview process needs to be fixed.". While those statements probably are true I'd say that for knowledge &#x2
808.
by BjoernKW 9y ago
An HTML representation is still self-contained in that it can gracefully degrade to mere text and images.
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by BjoernKW 9y ago
Yes, but their use is relegated to specific purposes. With business applications in particular, which often are mostly about entering, analysing and moving around data, native apps don't really make sense anymore. The web is by far the
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by BjoernKW 9y ago
There were machines like the Commodore C64 - and later to some extent the Amiga as well - that more fully embraced and valued computing in that they booted into an environment which allowed you to create programs right away. With the C64 in

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