kalleth

6 ms·

1.
by kalleth 3y ago
Hah, much more boring than that. Mostly working as a rails engineer and billing a day rate. They hired me, the company name just went on the paperwork :)
2.
by kalleth 3y ago
Honestly, it didn't have an impact at all. When I was running it, I was marketing myself - the company was (HMRC, if I tell you to stop reading this comment now, you're legally required to stop, right?) mostly a vehicle for billin
3.
by kalleth 3y ago
One of these was mine! Very funny to keep seeing my old consulting company come up in comments whenever this hits HN :) I never did bother with actually making it an SQL injection; it was meant to be an in-joke between me and whoever at the
4.
by kalleth 5y ago
In most startups? You're mostly correct. But you still have some risks here, yes, with a super low probability, but a company-killing impact. In some industries - banking, finance, anything regulated, or really (I'd argue) anywher
5.
by kalleth 5y ago
I'd be surprised if they needed backups for a few hours of downtime with (reportedly) complete recovery where no data was corrupted. There are industries where this would be required, and it's possible I guess, but neither of th
6.
by kalleth 5y ago
If you don't have the spec, then you likely don't have a deadline, or a "project", really -- and something like this would be the wrong choice for an approach to follow. I'd say leaving the overall roadmap (which
7.
by kalleth 5y ago
This is where the ideal meets the annoying reality of The Enterprise (tm). I can't talk in too much detail, but in general, the deadline date was fixed through commercial contracts signed at a high enough level that engineering didn&
8.
by kalleth 5y ago
Thanks! And I couldn't possibly comment on which company that could be... Hope you're doing well too!
9.
by kalleth 5y ago
Well phrased, thank you! I didn't think of it in this way, but yes, that kind of phasing makes sense.
10.
by kalleth 5y ago
I've never worked for a US tech company, so I wouldn't know, sorry!
11.
by kalleth 5y ago
Depends how much of a perfectionist I'm feeling. For the initial development, a sharpie, index cards, and a whiteboard wall - or Lucidchart, because it's basically an in-browser whiteboard/drawing tool. Once the project is on
12.
by kalleth 5y ago
In the early stages of my career, or in startup life? Absolutely not. Very little relevance; XP/SCRUM were both covered together in a single 50 minute lecture, the rest of the PM aspects were tackling paperwork-generation methodologies
13.
by kalleth 5y ago
That's really tough, and I'm sorry you had to deal with it. I was lucky in that I was dealing (in both cases where I've run similar flows to this) with above-board exec teams who wanted the best quality information I could gi
14.
by kalleth 5y ago
Insightful, thank you! The entire project management industry doesn't have that great a "hit rate" -- consider the budget overruns for the last few Olympics, or for Crossrail. I'm just not sure why software projects are
15.
by kalleth 5y ago
I have, yes - or I'd feel a bit like a charlatan writing about it! The problem with the real world examples is the business domain, which was hyper complex and the specific "pieces" of work I described wouldn't have been
16.
by kalleth 5y ago
I think I would have popped a monocle too, had that been the real example and estimate from a team! I tried to think up an accessible example that didn't require too much context on the part of the reader, so obviously, as you correctl
17.
by kalleth 5y ago
Author here. I've been lucky enough in my career to hold some senior positions, and I thought I'd give a step-by-step on an approach I took with an "enterprise-scale" software project, and how I stole some techniques fro
18.
Planning and estimating large-scale software projects(tomrussell.co.uk)
328 points by kalleth 5y ago|136 comments
19.
by kalleth 6y ago
I did read the article. I understand the desire to "do something", but the certification and testing process for something like this is how you find out if this actually improves patient outcomes or not. Sometimes "doing noth
20.
by kalleth 6y ago
> the choice is between an unaffordable certified solution and not having any monitoring. No, this isn't _necessarily_ the choice. Without a "false sense of security" that an imperfect monitoring system might instil, you h
21.
by kalleth 6y ago
I apologise for this comment, you've done some great coding, but this scares the shit out of me. There's a reason medical certifications are so hard to get, and medical software is so expensive. You're storing patient informa
22.
by kalleth 8y ago
Interesting. Yes, this is certainly a possibility (and far worse for people who are impacted).
23.
by kalleth 8y ago
No
24.
by kalleth 8y ago
Have just checked; we're seeing both Visa and Visa Debit having problems.
25.
by kalleth 8y ago
No failures on Mastercard or Amex. Occasionally a spike up to 10% failure rate of all our card transactions (sorry, misunderstood your Q). ~80% of our transactions are VISA of some sort.
26.
by kalleth 8y ago
I'm British, and we have both Visa Debit and Visa Credit in the UK. I haven't yet looked into whether it's Visa Debit or Visa Credit or both which is experiencing issues.
27.
by kalleth 8y ago
To be fair I can't comment on POS/in-person transaction rates. All I have visibility into is online purchases with VISA cards on our site.
28.
by kalleth 8y ago
It isn't down. I work for a large e-commerce company and we're seeing ~10% decline rates, at most, on VISA cards only, and that's intermittent. Overall average decline rate is more like 1-3% when you factor in the intermitten
29.
by kalleth 8y ago
When I look to run user testing, I need to set some demographics on the kind of people performing my testing, to make sure the context of the feedback I receive is actionable and relevant. For example, if I was making a site targeted at Cal
30.
by kalleth 9y ago
You can absolutely use this for work. My windows workflow involves a Virtualbox VM, with ~/ in the guest mounted as Z: on the windows host. Use gvim installed direct on windows (so long as you don't need super complex plugins whic

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