Viewing profile — bvirb

When we (the engineering team I work on) started using agents more seriously we were worried about this: that we'd speed up coding time but slow down review time and just end up in…

Very much agree for the type of software I've worked on my whole career. I've seen way more time and energy wasted by people trying to predict the future than fixing bugs. In pract…

We attempt to address this problem at work with an extra caveat to never add code "in the wrong direction" -- so it's fine (usually preferable) to have a partial implementation, as…

Accurate, saw restroom use tick up 1

We've been using Elasticsearch + PG and it's pretty nice and fast, but it adds a whole layer of extra stuff to deal with when your data is in PG but then also needs to be indexed i…

Is there some way to normalize the amount spent on education per student with the need per student? NYC is also the most expensive place to live in the US, so conceivably the amoun…

I think it's possible that your numbers of amount spent per pupil don't take into account the total benefit to that pupil towards their education. If Norway say also helps comparat…

I started out freelancing and eventually built a consulting firm w/ a partner, I left around 50 people because selling time for money just never got fun. Took a business partner, a…

Recent spending in CA (Sep 1-now) looks like it's heavily landlord associations running ads against prop 33, which would allow for new rent controls. https://adstransparency.google…

The argument would be that the marketing done by the label(s) she has signed with is a big part of why she has 7.5M monthly Spotify listeners (and the related fame is why so many p…

In a similar boat (small team, have to balance new stuff, maintenance, customer requests, bugs, etc). We ended up with a system where we break work up into things that take about a…

> Going from 10 to 10,000 qualified candidates for a position allows a far more productive match Yeah going from 10 to 10k qualified candidates means wages go down. As companies ge…

10yo+ B2B SaaS company we're still on Heroku. I think the value prop is particularly good for B2B SaaS and probably less so for consumer products. Our margin per customer is so muc…

We came up with a rule “no single use abstractions” so any abstraction with a single caller gets absorbed by its caller. We eventually had to say except across MVC boundaries (the …

What a fun thread. I've always heard this as one of The Great Filters related to the Fermi paradox. FWIW the wikipedia for the Fermi paradox even mentions that: > The most commonly…

Years ago I was driving home and saw a Corona beer billboard and distinctly remember thinking that I would love a Pacifico. So it kinda worked on me.

If you can afford to and you have a team dynamic where "everyone makes mistakes" you can give them more responsibility -- like other people being stuck until they actually fix the …

I’ve had the same experience mostly writing web apps in Ruby, which locks similarly to Python. Multi-threading is always needed to saturate IO, network, etc, never CPU, so GIL isn’…

Hmm well if I understand you correctly that's what I was saying as well: Things go wrong when the DB trusts the application layer (rather than doing its own validation) -- e.g. the…

I think someone mentions this every time nuclear power comes up. It seems to me nobody is completely sure what the future will hold yet, except that we need to decarbonize energy p…

FWIW I think I agree with you if you consider "critical processing of data" data validations (IME via constraints, checks, triggers, etc...). I think where things can really go wro…

I've recently dealt with multiple companies who started using IBM Aspera (which as a vendor to them means we have to use it too) only for it to work miserably. I've also seen a cou…

That sounds like Virgin America 20 years ago and I think it worked out well for them and for consumers. They had really cheap, reasonable flights, and they forced everyone else to …

I had this experience after the Equifax hack a while ago when something like 100M+ people's info was stolen. Until I froze my credit I was getting phone calls every few days asking…

We have some tests like that. We're injecting a stub to generate the error condition and then testing the output. The test code runs in the same thread as the server so we can temp…