michaelvkpdx

17 ms·

31.
by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
Replacing staring at screens with experiencing life. Teaching our youth how to learn for themselves from experience, rather than Wikipedia and Facebook and social media du jour. Talking to people in person rather than through screens and wi
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
Intro articles like this do a lot to reveal biases and misunderstandings. Like with Java. The article says "Java= enterprise" but I can tell you the best user experiences I ever saw delivered over the web were those done with Java
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
"something incredible will emerge for the right-brained bourgeoisie and literati." Yes, a real quantum computer. As long as we're dealing with 1's and 0's, there's an insurmountable barrier for those who would
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
You're living in a pretty isolated world, my friend. I'd say 90% of my friends would be the audience for this. I've been coding 20 years, most of my friends are successful, grad-degree educated people in a variety of fields,
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
As goes the recruitment, so goes the employment. If you wanted to work for an organization where everyone likes to show off their skills to one another in the interviews, you'd have gotten the job, and you'd be one of them. The be
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
This wouldn't be happening if we had a true estate tax in this country, and if we didn't allow corporations to sit on piles of money while laborers slave away. We in the USA are wealthy enough as a society that we all could thrive
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
Corporations weren't citizens in 1776. It only took us 100 years or so to fuck that piece of it up. Nothing in the original Constitution or Declaration requires capitalism.
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
Fire this guy and dismantle the FBI. Does anyone remember why we fought the Revolutionary War, why we follow the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? This joker should lose his job. He does not represent the values of this coun
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
Sounds like this dude works for Her Majesty's Secret Service, not the USA. He should be fired for this.
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
One of many incredible books from the 70's, when science and humanities were interconnected and writers were exploring the edges of possibility. Then Reagan came around, fear was restored, and corporations took ovet education. So muc
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
Try eating "pure information". Or building shelter out of it. I hope this drags on forever. It's fun watching pigs in mud, aka lawyers in the Valley.
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by michaelvkpdx 11y ago
Good post, but since learning how to be kind isn't on Google's list of things you need to know before becoming an engineer, it's not an important skill. Right, HN?
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
All professional programmers should continually read Martin Fowler's "Refactoring", in the same way English professors read Shakespeare. "Refactoring" does not mean "previous programmer was an idiot". Ofte
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
One more thing- pairing is an active process, in the moment, while code review is reflective. During coding, you are exercising a lot of "instinctive" skills, and in a pairing environment, you are pressured to act. Code review hap
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
100% pairing might sound good in the short-term, but you're going to fry your developers. You'll also limit the productivity of your developers, who may be inclined to take more risks when working solo than when working as a team.
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Great beginner tips! I think your suggested rate calculation (15% above salary divided by 2080) undervalues the rate. Your overhead as an independent includes additional employment taxes, retirement contributions, hardware, software, utilit
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Brilliant blog. Thank you for writing this. Optimization is important! You don't have to tune everything to the fastest possible speed. But remember, in web programming, you may be writing a function that is called 10 or 100 or 500 tim
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
"Then what will you do, if you don't want to tell Big Brother where you are going?" RMS is right on again, as always. The problem is that the younger generation wants Big Brother to know everything, and that is sad and scary.
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Typical self-service from yet another rich VC. Founders don't want to do anything to improve US society as a whole. Investment in education? Retraining workers whose skills have become dated? No- that's expensive and doesn't
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
This is so screamingly correct. Let's go see the startups hire some old COBOL (or now, VB) programmers and train them on the new stacks, before we listen to anymore of this "there's not enough programmers in the USA" gar
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
It will never be in the best interests of the United States to admit anyone into the country to please the desires of the stock market or of large corporations or of wealthy venture capitalists. There is nothing, other than a modicum of edu
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
No- you're thinking of the railroad builders (1860's-1870's). By 1900, when the railroads were into their big boom, most of the imported construction workers had either become citizens or given birth to the next generation, w
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Part of the reality of founding a company in the United States, and taking advantage of the freedoms and protections being in the USA offers, is that you have to work with the USA labor force. If you don't like it- well, go internation
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Thank you for this. I am going to search this one out.
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Pragmatic Programmer is pretty good, but even better are Steve McConnell's books from the late 90's, "Rapid Development" and "Code Complete". They're both big and both published by Microsoft. Two strikes,
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
"The Circle", by Dave Eggers. Narrowly edging "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore" by Robin Sloan. I've been in tech a long time. I came up in the early 90's when the Internet was a tool for collaboration, m
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Cannabis testing for hiring engineers- can corporations supersede the law?
2 points by michaelvkpdx 12y ago|3 comments
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Java doesn't suck, not at all. I still find it to be the most productive language for developing systems big and small, mostly because it's well-understood, the pitfalls and traps are well-known, and the community is extensive and
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Downvoted to -3 for suggesting that software engineering can cause brain cancer?
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by michaelvkpdx 12y ago
I'm sad for Steven and for all the other software engineers who tell similar stories. I don't have math or numbers on this- does anyone?- but I can tell from personal experience that just about every time some software engineer my

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