Viewing profile — andreimackenzie

This is spot on. Also, many orgs build to the needs of the business or whims of stakeholders rather than customer needs. Good product strategy and product discovery remain difficul…

Fair enough. I use plenty of disposable stuff in other contexts. The habitual part is what makes a difference for me with my local coffee shop. I usually walk over around midday wh…

My local Starbucks offers a 10 cents discount and extra loyalty points for bringing your own cup. I've started bringing an insulated one that keeps coffee hot for longer & doesn't …

The Cambridge, MA location still has an aisle of keyboards and mice outside of their packaging. It's very nice to be able to hold and feel those peripherals as part of the shopping…

From my experience: re-orgs and limiting backfills for attrition can lead to these awkward states. Someone starts off with a sensible number of directs, but it can devolve over tim…

> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory. This part doesn't make sense to me. Limiting bidders should drive the price down, because fewer ad…

I think it does because a researcher can pick up context about the quality of their sources through the course of web research. The BigCo chatbot AIs are marketed to represent that…

"Lack of obstacles" really resonates. If we're talking about software dev, it's fun to get into a flow state and solve problems. Whether you actually get to do that at a BigCo seem…

Most people don't decide about their own medical "needs." They trust doctors, who are by and large expert and professional, yet frequently discredited by insurance companies. Insur…

I would be surprised if they don't already do this. The question is how big a buffer to trade off for delay...

A lot of BigCo people's (myself included) perception of Java is tainted by the challenges of old, inherited code bases. Java has been ubiquitous for a long time, and it's not surpr…

Early-in-career folks are more vulnerable. Even before major family/life costs start to play a role, it can be difficult to save enough for a safety net after moving to an apartmen…

I've observed that the quality of third-party SDKs for Microsoft office formats improved substantially. The .xls format was notoriously fickle to process or produce from outside of…

Assuming the query language for the graph DB you have in mind is declarative like SQL, I recommend templated queries. I have found this technique scales pretty well for query compl…

Simplicity is a feature. Sure, how complicated can effective enums really be, but Go's general philosophy is to think hard (& sometimes for a long time) before adding every bell an…

About 10 years ago we set up a pretty slick integration from our office wifi controller to Google's account directory using WebDAV and Radius. It allowed us to have a WAP for insid…

Agree. The main benefit of environment variables is portability. They work pretty much the same way in every platform I have encountered. As soon as a system gets into files, it's …

Advertisers not spending as much

I wondered about this exact risk as I learned about the "overemployed" phenomenon. It feels like a matter of time before credit bureaus offer this as a service to the many corps th…

I've really enjoyed Golang for this reason. The powers that be take a cautious approach before adding major new stuff, even when the community complains loudly about lack of import…

How estimation is marketed matters, too. Don't let your stakeholders think of it as an over-estimate. It's an estimate that considers the needs of the full software development lif…

These are real problems, but there can also be mitigations, particularly when it comes to people scaling. In many orgs, engineering teams are divided by feature mandate, and manage…

Once ancient content no longer produces enough ad revenue for the companies storing it, I suspect they will support it only in paid tiers for users who really want it. Something li…

Honest and collaborative companies will be as open as they can about their cash burn rate and prospects for more funding. If this aspect of the business is not done well, it can ha…

I am getting an `alert(1)` when visiting this site. This smells like cross-site scripting. Beware.