Viewing profile — akeefer

This post kind of misses the main point of services like Wealthfront. You're paying 0.25% in exchange for automatic rebalancing, asset class diversification, and tax optimization. …

Sure, you can call that structure the design, or the architecture, or whatever you like. Either way, it's a fair question. As a point of semantics: TDD generally stands for "test-d…

I think this is a great explanation of a lot of the obvious pitfalls with "basic" TDD, and why so many people end up putting in a lot of effort with TDD without getting much return…

I'm not sure that people who use relational databases would be surprised that there can be data-level race conditions. For example, if you write code like: 1) User requests transfe…

Fundamentally, what matters is the set of invariants you want to preserve, and it's usually the case that some number can be preserved for you by the database and some can't and ha…

While I agree that it's a hard problem, I'm not sure I'd agree that it's a hard problem to notice. It's such a common problem for anyone dealing with a relational database that I (…

While I appreciate how thorough the article is, it's a bit of a strawman. Pretty much everyone who makes use of a relational database in a professional capacity has to be aware of …

This is kind of conflating two different things. One thing is conventions around things like where curly braces go, naming conventions for classes and methods and different types o…

I haven't read it myself, but http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Estimating-Planning-Mike-Cohn/dp... looks a good description of the story points/relative estimation techniques. They're r…

There are two serious problems with this post, and it really saddens me that I see these sorts of posts so frequently here, with so many concurring voices. First of all, cost absol…

The only thing I've ever seen work (and I've seen it work well) is to avoid estimating based on time. Instead, you estimate things relatively and then empirically measure how long …

Apple is what it is because they tightly control the end-to-end user experience, from the hardware to the software. You can't maintain that and open up the hardware ecosystem; it's…

I'm not sure that's the right question to ask. More important, in my view, is the reverse side of that luck equation: if you assume that input A leads deterministically to outcome …

Your presumption is that there are jobs available; according to the bureau of labor statistics, as of March 2012 there were 3.4 unemployed people for every job opening (roughly dou…

Wait a minute: you say that our expenses versus income is too high, but then also say that higher taxes won't solve anything? Unless you're arguing that higher taxes won't increase…

Within the JVM, object references are strictly separate from integers. Object references are stored within a structure they call an OOP, short for "ordinary object pointers", and t…

The problem with all these debates about "optimal" office layouts is that they're all a series of non-repeatable experiments: someone can always say "Sure, you were successful doin…

At Guidewire we've worked in an open-plan office for basically the whole life of the company (roughly 10 years), and it's worked really well for us (by whatever metric you like: su…

I'd be curious to hear why you're so anti-IDE: do you have extensive experience working in Java with a good IDE like IntelliJ? I've heard this "IDE's are to help mediocre programme…

Sure, but that's not what I was arguing against; my point is that just because that's how market works it doesn't mean you can't say there's not a "shortage" of some skill. If the …

It's true that many people who say "there's a shortage" are really saying "I can't find a top 1% engineer who will work 60 hours a week for $80k a year in Silicon Valley." Well, du…

To your points: 1) Sure, but effectively all income is multiple-taxed. Suppose I run my own business, and am paid by a consumer with their money that they earned as wages. If I tur…

That's a great, succinct way to put it. It pretty much exactly matches my experience, too: out of every 10 things I estimate, a couple go a little faster, most of them are within 1…

That's a fair point; there's no simple way that I know of to do that in any language (though many languages avoid having both constructs), and the general solution is to write para…