Viewing profile — ellius

I wasn't imagining a full rewrite, more like a "holding area" that could defer some of the load. Again I may be totally wrong about this—I have never written a COBOL system, and if…

I'm a younger engineer, so I say this with a degree of humility, but is trying to modify these monstrous legacy systems on the fly during a worldwide catastrophe really the most re…

This reminds me of the article "COBOL and Legacy Code as a Systemic Risk." Like the pandemic itself, this was a foreseeable risk: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/07/cobol-and-…

If that's the case, that's what should have been made clear. OP clearly doesn't think that's what happened.

Yeah whatever happened here, the communication from this person's leadership was bad. I'm not trying to vilify them—maybe they had their reasons—but OP is clearly confused about wh…

This is the thesis of Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies." He argues, correctly I think, that you can find intellectual strands going back to Heraclitus and Plato which rev…

"East of Eden." Steinbeck draws beautiful vignettes of human life and emotion, and I think the book's main idea about human motivation is largely correct and explains a wide variet…

Seconded, this is a really excellent book.

I think that's a good example because it shows individual objects instead of curves on a graph, which for many people doesn't translate to reality.

I think that's exactly the issue. People can't picture it. You can show them a curve on a graph, but that doesn't translate for people without a mathematical/scientific background …

If there are two "mental tools" I wish we could teach every person, they are exponential growth and statistical thinking. Neither is intuitive, but they would help people understan…

You're right, this is really the deeper principle. I'm talking more "useful rules of thumb" as people are trying to build intuition for why passive voice might be useful. But at th…

He also freely admits at the end of the essay that he's sure he committed many of the sins he's preaching against. I suspect he'd also freely admit that there are reasons to use th…

This is a great example of where to use the passive voice. Austen reverses the sentence structure to pack the punch at the end. In general, 2 good principles are: 1. Put the punch …

You'll find that even in the hard sciences, which are more objective many times over than the social sciences. Any complex field is going to generate controversy. That doesn't mean…

"Money Stuff" is excellent. I also recommend the FT. Their Alphaville section is very good. One of my favorite classic Levine articles is "Regulators Want to Slow Runs on Derivativ…

I saw this design on /r/security and thought it was a good idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22343786 It seems like if we want to solve this problem we need to somehow mod…

"The War of Art," if anyone needs a source.

My most recent team ran a version of XP, and I found IPM (iteration planning meeting) to be one of the most effective and important things we did. We had a very good back and forth…

There is only one physical bookstore I go to anymore, and it's for exactly the same reason. The walls are positively stuffed with books. Nothing can beat Amazon for speedy search. …

Any of those frameworks that you endorse particularly?

As an addendum to this, I would frame the problem as "complexity," one aspect or symptom of which is requirements volatility. Complexity comes from two sources in software projects…

It really isn't that surprising either. People want to write off the notion that some people are massively better than others at solving problems, but it's completely obvious that'…

Sure, but what do you count as a "component"? It varies by language, framework, platform, and pattern.