dasmoth

37 ms·

331.
by dasmoth 9y ago
I once had a manager ask me to email him a progress report every day; This seems to have become very nearly normalised in the guise of daily stand ups. Some would argue it's less intrusive if it's for "the team" rathe
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by dasmoth 9y ago
"Textbook" was possibly more a nervous tic than a statement of fact -- I've not read a lot of management textbooks... However, whenever I see generalist managers at work, there always seems to be massive emphasis on schedul
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Agreed. And I'm increasingly tending to think that the stuck-thinking-about-the-tricky-stuff phase is the part of the game I find most satisfying. A lot of textbook management techniques seem hellbent on trying to force steady product
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Haskell expressions can indeed be pretty terse (and you get some powerful stuff from fairly standard libraries). But balanced somewhat by type signature lines, data types you might not bother defining in a dynamic language, etc. For me, Ha
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Software quality isn't the easiest thing to define. In some cases, it means "no bugs", and it certainly looks to me as though the places turning out really-low-defect-rate code for, e.g., aerospace applications are doing a f
336.
by dasmoth 9y ago
I do find it remarkable the extent to which knowledge workers are discouraged from sitting and thinking about stuff. We seem to have a generation of managers who've more-or-less entirely conflated "work" and "collaborat
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by dasmoth 9y ago
* Gardening (vegetables especially, with a slight eye on moving towards self-sufficiency over time -- although ideally we need a little more land) * Cycling * Brewing The combination of parenthood and my current job seems to have cut into h
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by dasmoth 9y ago
I think an aspect of the problem is that most tools in this space actually get sold to project managers (and secondarily, process-oriented senior engineers), not hackers who just want to shut the door, quit Slack, and build stuff. I think
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Sounds like you could be talking about PAN. Here's an article by the same author: http://thespacereview.com/article/3095/1
340.
by dasmoth 9y ago
Honestly I thought by now we would be interacting on a much higher and richer level with the machine Smalltalk took some steps in this direction, and saw a degree of commercial use in the 90s. For the matter, fire up a REPL from your fav
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by dasmoth 9y ago
React without flux/redux/whatever and state distributed though the component tree instead is a thing. It's not the right solution for every problem, anything like, but with a bit of thought about where it makes sense to keep
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by dasmoth 9y ago
In particular, software development by medium-to-large teams engaging in fairly fine-grained collaboration. I can see why the students he mentions are not necessarily buying this stuff.
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by dasmoth 9y ago
I can certainly understand that preference, even though I don't share it. I will, however, say that, when phrases like "humans are social animals" get deployed, it's quite easy to read them as implied criticism of those
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Too many people think that what works for them must be ideal, and should work for everyone. Agreed. I honestly think that most people will not thrive in a fully remote, work-from-home environment. That may well be true. But there'
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Interesting analogy and one I'll give some thought to. I can't really see copywriters doing the kinds of "team rituals" (daily standups, etc.) that are de rigueur in parts of the software world -- but maybe I'm wr
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Numerous studies show this not to be the case. It's bad for your mental health and it's bad for your work. Care to cite some? (Although I'd argue that averages shouldn't matter here, it ought to be about what works for
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by dasmoth 9y ago
In the ideal case, i.e. if we factor out the employers, what we do is not so different from what novelists do. I very much agree with this as an ideal case. The voices saying "software should always be written by a team" are ver
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by dasmoth 9y ago
That's certainly a way of working, and if that's what you've agreed too then certainly you should be as available as possible. There are more asynchronous ways to do things, and not always restricted to contractor-style arran
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Yes it does. I think I probably have an impossible idea pretty much every day. But a week or two back, I was actually moderately proud about suggesting a human-powered ekranoplan to some coworkers. Proud enough to do a web-search... and f
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by dasmoth 9y ago
While there was clearly a mismatch of expectations here, I don't think working in an asynchronous manner is necessarily unprofessional. And there's really not enough information in the original article to see how the mismatched e
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Stick to your little part of the app I agree this is good advise when it's feasible, but a lot of the current management trend (collective code ownership, everyone working off a single "backlog", etc.) can make it quite har
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by dasmoth 9y ago
It sounds like he was still solo in the basement when he got his first big order. That's good enough for me. I don't know if a literal basement was involved, but Plentyoffish was solo for about four years and had a fair few users
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by dasmoth 9y ago
The consensus here is that "professional" code is more maintainable than "academic". That's probably the ideal, but not entirely sure it holds up in practice. In particular, approaches which put a lot of emphasis
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by dasmoth 9y ago
or the codebase from a previous position That was a little startling. Other than open source companies, how many employers would be happy to know their code is being shown off to potential future employers?
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by dasmoth 9y ago
There are many variations on "living in cities". Some of them involve single-family dwellings and lots of private space. It actually seems to be those models which are most strongly under attack right now.
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by dasmoth 9y ago
This is an incredibly "urbanist" piece. No mention at all of companies moving to less-populous locations, let alone alternatives such as remote work. It's hard not to be left with the impression that the author isn't g
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by dasmoth 9y ago
I've spent quite a while working in spaces where the space is devoted to a team. If people are having quiet, focused discussions about what we're all focused on, I rarely find that distracting. The thing that drives me bonkers is
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Delta IV Heavy is comparable to the (upcoming) Falcon Heavy (though again, due to the capabilities of Centaur, DIVH will be able to fly missions that FH cannot). The Delta Cryogenic Second Stage is not a Centaur. Yes, it uses the same pr
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Any tricks that helped you achieve this? For me, the appeal of non-standard hours is that it's dramatically easier to focus when my coworkers aren't around (and to some extent, this is true even when remote). Truth be told, the o
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by dasmoth 9y ago
Yet another reason not to force multiple people into a single room.

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