donw

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871.
Food in the Age of Sail(ageofsail.wordpress.com)
1 points by donw 10y ago|0 comments
872.
by donw 10y ago
I feel much the same way, and will admit to finding myself... well, frustrated isn't quite the right word, but it will have to do, with what feels like an increasingly large number of people that treat the world as if everything in it
873.
by donw 10y ago
Max Howell, creator of Homebrew, expressed this quite nicely: "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off." This is not to say that computer s
874.
by donw 10y ago
Funnily enough, I am rather intimately familiar with legal billing. Many, many years ago, I worked for a company that did semi-automated audits of legal invoices for global-scale clients. The number of times we caught lawyers billing full-p
875.
by donw 10y ago
A few very important additions to this: 1. Appropriately communicate the snag to your client: you've run into an unorthodox problem, and will need a few days to investigate the problem, but you will keep them updated on progress. 2. If
876.
by donw 10y ago
While problem-solving is fine, I am not a fan of algorithms questions. Not because algorithms are unimportant, but because being able to code a heapsort from memory is, from a skills perspective, effectively useless. As the creator of Homeb
877.
by donw 10y ago
The real key is problem-solving ability: can a prospective hire get a grip on a real-world problem, and then break things down into solvable components. Real-world problem solving is often very different than the very clean-cut computer-s
878.
by donw 10y ago
Agreed. The working approach is: Use Hibernate (or any other ORM) so that you only need to write the SQL that matters. There is nothing wrong with using a tool to make your life easier, and there is a lot of necessary-but-borderline-boile
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by donw 10y ago
In my experience, most problems boil down to "management". If management is clear, supportive, and attentive, then things are good. As a leader, doing this is not easy. There is often a thin line between being attentive, and being
880.
by donw 10y ago
How deliciously Nihilistic.
881.
by donw 10y ago
That is broadly true -- used houses have negative value here in Japan, as you need to first tear the thing down so that you can build whatever it is that you want. In Japan, things shake. A lot. Earthquake damage adds up pretty quickly, and
882.
by donw 10y ago
The good news is, you'll only end up there if you are guilty of the sin of writing unreadable code.
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by donw 10y ago
For years, I advocated for developing inside of VMs or containers. Even wrote a very handy shell tool for managing the process. But a few years ago, I stopped, and just switched to developing on my local machine. Working in VMs or container
884.
by donw 10y ago
Honestly, I see this as an antipattern, not because it generates extra layers, but because a Dockerfile isn't the right place to write a provisioning script. When building apps, I keep a small number of shell scripts that live in a `bi
885.
Leap Second(en.wikipedia.org)
1 points by donw 10y ago|0 comments
886.
by donw 10y ago
> Engineering in the real world is maybe 30% calculations and typical "sciency" work, the other 70% is documentation and communicating to people. This is why I spend at least time coaching public speaking skills when building e
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by donw 10y ago
I'm going to stick my neck out as a potential Luddite here, but outside of playing music, and some general "answering questions", I don't see a use case for things like the Echo or Dot. Being able to ask for timers, or u
888.
by donw 10y ago
Although the comparison isn't perfect, you can think of jQuery as PHP in the late 90s and early 00s. PHP made web development accessible to the masses. Because PHP is embedded in the HTML itself, it is way easier to work with than Pe
889.
by donw 10y ago
I spent some number of years as a consultant helping startup founders do exactly that, and would be happy to chat directly about your situation -- email is in the profile if you're interested. In terms of general must-have knowledge, I
890.
by donw 10y ago
Yeah. Don't suppose anybody has the equivalent of an actual "cookbook"? It would be a great resource for helping to skill up product owners on A/B and multivariant testing when they don't have a math-heavy backgroun
891.
by donw 10y ago
I believe the ACLU works in a similar fashion.
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by donw 10y ago
That link includes kids killed during murder-suicides, gang violence, and so on -- which is a pretty far cry from negligent parents -- and it is criminal negligence to leave a weapon unsecured, whether children are present or not. The most
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by donw 10y ago
Assuming linear scalability, size that up to a 100kg power source, and you've got enough power to run radio repeaters that could outlast civilization.
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by donw 10y ago
So you come into work on Monday thinking that everything will be peachy-keen, and get an all-hands email telling you that any employee that can not prove that they voted for the "correct" candidate will forced to resign. Any syste
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by donw 10y ago
Disclaimer: I'm the Engineering Director for Skyscanner's Japan office. During my interview process, I had an hour session with Gareth, and since joining the company in February, have had several opportunities to work with him dir
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by donw 10y ago
Also worked at Pivotal, and this is definitely true. The number of meetings is must lower than in other firms (in my experience), but meetings are still a part of life. Breakfast, though, is such an amazing operational hack that I'm
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by donw 10y ago
These books apply to pretty much any type of product: "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick will teach you how to figure out what your customers really want, because it is almost certainly not what they are asking for. "How to Ma
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by donw 10y ago
Well, a good first step would be an education system that encouraged a culture of curiosity and respectful questioning, rather than just "obey".
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by donw 10y ago
> 1. News "aggregator" sites that pull from both sides of the spectrum -- though people would probably just pick and choose which articles they read and which they raged over (assuming they didn't just revert back to CNN&#
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by donw 10y ago
This is why I read both, although it gets painful at times, and that goes for both sides. If you can not understand somebody, if you can not speak and understand their language, if you can not use words they way they do, then you have no ch

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