ragona

16 ms·

121.
by ragona 7y ago
The thing that fascinates me about the narrative around the tech industry is that it’s one of the few where salaries have not been utterly flat since the 70s as adjusted for inflation. We make a lot more than many other workers, but mostly
122.
by ragona 7y ago
“When I was working at X on Y, we had a test suite that had become difficult to maintain. Some of this was due to particularly non-idiomatic code using stacked decorators, so I replaced that with more understandable setup and teardown funct
123.
by ragona 7y ago
Heh, I like the way Rust proceeds as a language, with regular releases and improvements. I hope Go can make quality of life improvements with similar speed.
124.
by ragona 7y ago
Update: The JS on this site frequently crashes on a fully updated Linux Firefox browser. It's neat so I honestly would have paid, but it just freezes up during some of the later exercises.
125.
by ragona 7y ago
Oh hey that's super helpful, thanks.
126.
by ragona 7y ago
I'm not sure that's true. Surely organizing lunatics is approximately as hard as organizing any hobby group, and low friction is a huge deal in creating and retaining a community. If it's easier to create and maintain groups
127.
by ragona 7y ago
Agreed! The intersection of coding and communicating is really interesting. That is my personal bar for a really phenomenal programmer — someone who can produce code that communicates ideally to both humans and computers. And this gets hard
128.
by ragona 7y ago
This falls into the category of a much wider undervalued engineering skill -- communicating well. The best engineers tend to be excellent communicators. There is a whole group of extremely talented programmers who just don't understand
129.
by ragona 7y ago
I disagree -- there are many situations in which your writing must display both a very detailed understanding of a system, AND a very detailed understanding of your audience.
130.
by ragona 7y ago
If you search for "amazon narrative writing style" you'll find all kinds of articles. The way that I personally explain this to new Amazonians is that I want their documents to tell a story. Now, I'm in engineering so th
131.
by ragona 7y ago
Correct. US companies don’t have to give any paid time off. It’s as bad as it sounds.
132.
by ragona 7y ago
I completely agree! I’m not sure how to define the horizon, so I’m not sure whether we’ve passed it. It’s not clear to me exactly how effective advertising is, and its effectiveness also clearly oscillates over time and between demographics
133.
by ragona 7y ago
I wonder about this often. I contend that we are getting better at extracting money from people. Is there some sort of line we will cross at which point the majority of people are psychologically unprepared to resist spending their money in
134.
by ragona 7y ago
This reminds me of one of my favorite internal wiki posts at the megacorp I work at. A particularly senior engineer (who was known for being witty and quick with puns) had written an article titled something along the lines of, “How to lie
135.
by ragona 7y ago
I just figured there would be some fancy battle tool!
136.
by ragona 7y ago
Yeah, when I first encountered the field I was quite confused. I’d interview developers who had worked for years, but only knew about really weirdly narrow areas of SAP or whatever and definitely couldn’t display the kinds of skills that we
137.
by ragona 7y ago
I'm pretty disappointed with all of the brand new 3-6 story buildings on Capitol Hill. I get that we have a bunch of rich people whose views might have been impacted if the number of stories wasn't capped so low, but the hill is n
138.
by ragona 7y ago
The area I see these firms get a ton of work is in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) work. TONS of companies run their HR / Finance / Sales / etc departments on things like Salesforce and Oracle and whatever, and there are h
139.
by ragona 7y ago
> Effectively all military missions are planned in PowerPoint Wait... really??
140.
by ragona 8y ago
I live in Seattle. I used to live in California. I’ve spent a lot of time in SF and have quite a few friends who live there.
141.
by ragona 8y ago
I'd say the reports of San Francisco being a dystopian hellhole are rather exaggerated. It's a lovely city. We get similar complaints about Seattle, and I can confirm that it is also not nearly as interesting as the sensationalize
142.
by ragona 8y ago
Agreed. I'd also add that there is frankly risk to your resume by working on a failed product that no one has heard of. (Or perhaps it's even worse if it's a failure that people HAVE heard of!) Working at a BigCo at least giv
143.
by ragona 8y ago
I particularly like that they have a role called "Loyalty Advocate" that requires experience "working in a channel sales model." If that's not a sales gig I don't know what is. edit: To be fair to the author th
144.
by ragona 8y ago
Yeah, I had to jump through the same hoops. They're really odd, and they seem like low hanging fruit in terms of improving the customer experience for BitLocker.
145.
by ragona 8y ago
Ahhh, I was very concerned until I got to the part about pre-boot verification. That is definitely a critical part of full disk encryption, and should really be the default. (Although I’ll admit that it’s really annoying sometimes.)
146.
by ragona 8y ago
The definition of “micro” appears to be hugely variable! If you’d asked me I’d say that sure, my last team definitely built microservices. A team of around 10 engineers built and maintained something like 3 services for a product launch, ea
147.
by ragona 8y ago
Oh that is excellent news, thanks for the tip! I spent a bit of time trying to get Alpine working for a Python application with a relatively complicated set of dependencies, and Alpine was really not cooperative so I think I gave up and wen
148.
by ragona 8y ago
Yeah, agreed. I do this in Rust a lot too, and I picked it up while writing a lot of Python.
149.
by ragona 8y ago
> A long function is easier to understand than an exploded one. This is a pretty controversial position, and quite situational in my opinion. I absolutely agree that having to hop all over the source to understand something is frustratin
150.
by ragona 8y ago
I think this kind of learning is great. One of the benefits of this type of exercise is that tackle certain types of problems that are not that common in day-to-day coding, and you do it over and over, so you become quite comfortable with a

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