Viewing profile — Timberwolf

You get an interesting collision between two expectations on licensing in a modding community for an open source game. Modding communities have historically leaned on self-penned b…

It's been a long time but I'm sure I remember something along similar themes being one of the essays in the back of the SimCity 2000 manual. Which now makes me all nostalgic for th…

Sorry, jargon: Individual Contributor, meaning someone who works on things directly and doesn't do any management.

Companies really struggle with this, and in both directions. Startups and scale-ups tend to overcompensate to the point management hires get interviewed as super-ICs, where they'll…

I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield. A lot of the work of an EM is wading into the slurry pit with a shovel so your …

One thing which really resonated: "But will you do the boring but necessary browser testing to figure out if what you’re describing is always true, or just most of the time? And wi…

What I like about the '70s stuff is almost everything uses standard parts you can get from any reasonable factor, and the few unique components are usually still simple enough that…

I spent four years at an organisation rife with this. I found two major routes for getting to work on hard problems. The first was joining initiatives that were in such utter disar…

This is a consistent bugbear of mine, and I think a big factor in the resurgence of vinyl. I find it frustrating I can take a recording from a format with limited dynamic range and…

I thought similar. To me what Buzzfeed are calling the "old Internet" here is something I very much remember bemoaning as the "new Internet" in which dedicated protocols such as NN…

My experience working for the 800lb gorilla incumbent was that we didn't take competition seriously at all. Even stuff competitors did that would be trivial for us to replicate got…

The problem with such regulations is they tend to be written by the same kinds of people - those who still assume that having meaningful SQL characters in a password is insecure, o…

They're a great example of the unintended consequences of regulation. I'm sure the original intent was not to have a huge banner where the options for managing what the site tracks…

I loved this feature in Windows 7, because all it did there was an exact substring match over the items in the Start menu. As a result, it was instant . The Windows 10 one where it…

Every once in a while I'll catch myself trying to read web content in the tiny window between the sidebar ads, the floating video, the cookie control panel and the "other content y…

I'm fascinated by how many of the things they identified as helpful to new users were later reverted. Looking at my Windows 10 desktop all of the work they did to find a solution w…

> not the VPs, not the CEO This is the biggest problem where I've seen companies try to do this. The C-level and senior management team make a big fuss about how the company is hav…

There are some categories of product I'm no longer willing to buy from Amazon: power cables, replacement chargers and batteries being the biggest offenders. They're such a minefiel…

I tend to swap between two modes. If I'm working with well-known tools and a problem I understand reasonably well, I'll approach it in ultra-strict test-first style, where my "red"…

Totally agree. In my experience "that's just X it does that sometimes" have been symptoms of some of the scariest bugs in the system we've been working on. A couple of examples: - …

If you take "the idea is to give people a chance to share how they really feel in a vulnerable, one-to-one setting" and replace "one-to-one" with "small group" then this feels very…

Something I've noticed about the culture of "work through midnight if that's what it takes" is how much work gets thrown away. I worked at a few places with this culture (startup a…

Someone (I think possibly John Cutler) made a good point about this, which is that by now the early and middle adopters of classical manifesto-style "Agile" have absorbed it so tho…

I think LinkedIn suffers from people treating it as an extension of a CV or prospectus, which probably isn't an unfair assumption on their part. Which means not introspecting failu…

In this context, the rationale was little more than this being the last version in which "John" had done significant day-to-day programming, and therefore felt informed enough to i…