bguthrie

8 ms·

31.
by bguthrie 12y ago
A day rate means a day's worth of your time, not necessarily of your code, and a standard workday normalizes to 8 hours. Don't sweat time on keys and be as productive as you'd normally be. If you'd normally take periodic
32.
by bguthrie 12y ago
This is a wonderful piece of computer science history, and is of interest less for its nominal topic (recursion) than for the insight it gives into an early slice of languages research. Well worth a full read.
33.
by bguthrie 12y ago
Strategically, how did you approach the rewrite? It sounds like you had a significant amount of frontend code; replacing everything at once can be risky. Did you choose specific pages and work your way in, or scrap everything and work your
34.
by bguthrie 12y ago
That's a great tip––thanks, I'll do that.
35.
by bguthrie 12y ago
My bike was just stolen yesterday. I never wrote down the serial number, and now I'm part of the problem. Next time I'll be doing that, and registering with this service. Thanks for fighting the good fight.
36.
by bguthrie 12y ago
Neither myself or the author presented a controlled study; they are both individualized experiences that may or may not be relevant to one's own project. I'm simply trying to say that the OP isn't gospel. That said, for the f
37.
by bguthrie 12y ago
No, what this article states is that the author hates to register, and for their particular app, not registering may have made a difference in its adoption rate. That doesn't say much about the implications of registration for yo
38.
by bguthrie 12y ago
People tend to reserve pair-programming for tasks they perceive as being unusual, complex, or otherwise needing extra review. Personally, I've found it can be helpful even when you simply need to stay on task. When you both have the sa
39.
by bguthrie 12y ago
I think this is a good assessment. I'm a little more bearish, though I love the language. I rode the Rails train in the past and recently embarked on a real web project with Compojure. At first it felt like a very mixed bag. There are
40.
by bguthrie 12y ago
Congrats to the ThoughtWorks team! Go is a great product, and its open-sourcing is a very welcome move.
41.
by bguthrie 12y ago
ThoughtWorks first released the commercial product that would become Go in 2008. It was rebranded later, shortly after the public announcement of Golang. Yes, it was a confusing move, but at the time there was no reason to believe that a pr
42.
by bguthrie 13y ago
Think about what it means to the HN culture to have a subject that normally would have been flagged out of existence as overtly political suddenly be featured front and center It means that a bunch of people who once thought they were som
43.
by bguthrie 13y ago
At most organizations I've worked at that use an open floor plan for programmers, we pair-programmed aggressively. Subjectively, a good pair more than offsets the distractive drawbacks of an open floor plan. If instead you hand each
44.
by bguthrie 13y ago
Gist of the thing: As a Rails developer, I've become tired of messing with ruby versions, gem dependencies, bundle installations, deploy-time asset precompilation on my servers, etc. ... Basically, what I wanted was a
45.
by bguthrie 13y ago
Actually I think Hack might've just surpassed it.
46.
by bguthrie 13y ago
NS is a common prefix for Apple-derived ObjectiveC classes. In that context it stands for NextStep, which Apple acquired many years ago. The NSHipster blog is a reference to this usage of NS. I understand that it has extremely negative conn
47.
by bguthrie 13y ago
Unit tests may be written before or after the production code in question has been written. They provide no guarantee of the correctness of the final code, but they may find small things. Corrective unit tests as you've described the
48.
by bguthrie 13y ago
Another term for this is "snowflake server"––every one's a little bit different. Good for skiing, bad for a data center. http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html
49.
by bguthrie 13y ago
I think one thing that this post touches on is the effectiveness of Java as a programming language for large projects. I agree that Java has its uses, but I've always thought that this was one of the weaker ones. Java's poor syn
50.
by bguthrie 13y ago
I wish I knew what to tell you, except that I count myself among the people who like to hear the things you say. Please don't retreat––your voice is important. No one should have to be thick-skinned enough to endure that kind of abuse.
51.
by bguthrie 13y ago
Ugh, fixed. Thanks!
52.
by bguthrie 13y ago
I think what both pieces miss is the behavior that asymmetric anonymity seems to encourage. The ability to lambast public figures from behind a screen of anonymity seems to bring out the abusive worst in people, and the target has nowhere
53.
by bguthrie 13y ago
I've had to quit a couple of jobs due to the fact that staying there maintaining the same old code base ... would have been what resulted in my burnout. Agreed––though if this is a problem for you, try consulting. B
54.
by bguthrie 13y ago
In the world of grand political change, three or four years is nothing. Don't give up hope yet. The Demand Progress folks are committed and have a good sense of what it takes to bring about political change in a democracy. Please suppo
55.
by bguthrie 13y ago
I have built many systems that were meant to be used seriously. Never once has my lack of understanding of graphics cards, for example, come back to bite me. Every system is built on abstractions. You can argue about the value of understand
56.
by bguthrie 13y ago
Obligatory link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem "The Scunthorpe problem occurs when a spam filter or search engine blocks e-mails, forum posts or search results because their text contains a strin
57.
by bguthrie 13y ago
Aaron was an intensely private person. I am fairly certain that "zero privacy" was not a goal that he valued.
58.
by bguthrie 13y ago
I do not view the Abelson report––a document that declares the organization that commissioned and published it largely blameless––as the last word on the matter. Whether or not they were asked has no bearing on whether it would have made an
59.
by bguthrie 13y ago
You're underestimating the importance of that paper trail. Knowing that they could have such a capability is not the same thing as knowing that they are actively exercising it , laid out in helpfully blunt Powerpoint. Yes, if you we
60.
by bguthrie 13y ago
I agree––I've found this tremendously exciting. Thanks @swannodette for the code and the writeup.

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