Viewing profile — michaelrpeskin

I said this in another comment a few weeks back - but, at least for me the "joy" of software development was describing what I wanted and getting it. That used to mean fighting wit…

I've also been doing this professionally for about 30 years, plus another 10 as a hobby/learning before then, so I think I have much of the same experience as you, and I do agree. …

Rather than "managerial" I tend to view it as more "professorial". Maybe it's my academic training (but I got out before I became a professor), but I tend to like to think about my…

I think the trouble is living wage means different things to different people. I look back to my time in grad school. My wife and I were lucky that we were able to get fellowships …

My (probably unpopular here) opinion is just the opposite. We need more of an apprenticeship model where you're not paid a bunch because you're still learning, and you probably bri…

What does the N in NP stand for? I'm a bit joking, but we've been working in deterministic computation for so long, we don't even think of there being another way. But seriously, I…

In my experience, I'm using LLMs as my abstraction to "junior engineer". A junior engineer isn't deterministic either. I find that if you treat the LLM output like a person's outpu…

Recently I did something similar to this on a small part of a project that has built up organically over a couple of years. One developer was getting the output of one program (tha…

Is more code really bad? For humans, yes we want thing abstracted, but sometimes it may make more sense to actually repeat yourself. If a machine is writing and maintaining the cod…

How much of "good engineering practices" exist because we're trying to make it easy for humans to work with the code? Pick your favorite GoF design pattern. Is that they best way t…

I agree with all of those statements - I always told my wife that I'd get our kids a underpowered manual so that they're always busy rowing gears and can't text and drive. But in t…

I was having almost this exact same discussion with a neighbor who's about my age and has kids about my kids' ages. I had recently sold my old truck, and now I only have one (very …

This works wonders. I did it accidentally. In March 2020 when my gym closed, I started working out every night in the garage. After a couple of weeks a neighbor who I only ever sai…

This may just be me, but I hold the opposite view. When I lived in a rural area with a few acres of property, I was much more social and engaged with my community. Now I live at th…

One of the things that the tracking taught me was to be allergic to subscriptions. I only have a few where significantly more convenient because I know I'll use it. Outside of our …

Yeah, I only read the abstract and looked at the plots, but this is what I hate about public health papers: They say the prevalence of virus is down. They don't say that the cancer…

25 years ago when my wife and I were poor grad students we had to do this. I tracked everything religiously and she cut coupons for the grocery store. We were generally positive ab…

Funny you bring this up, I was just talking about this to someone else in a different context. I'm a pretty old dude for programming, I've been hacking in the field since the early…

We did "free" lunch for all here a couple of years ago. The idea is great, execution is terrible. You can't get a la carte free, only the full "FDA approved" lunch is free. So if y…

Actually, I think it should be the inverse of that. A CS student should come into CS!01 after hacking for years as a teenager and know how to use something like Linux from a practi…

But I think he's the only one to have done it right. I've never seen velocity tracking correct for measured inaccuracy in each developer's estimates. I've tried so many times to im…

For extra fun, in C you can write i[a] since addition is commutative *(i+a) == *(a+i)

Yes. I do this a lot when writing linear algebra stuff. All the math texts write things in 1-based notation for matrices. The closer I can make the code match the paper I'm impleme…

Sorry, you're right. It's been so long since I used it, I forgot that it wasn't a .com domain.

One trick that I always fall back on is to make a dependency graph. In meetings I used to pull up yuml.com but now I use mermaid. You can just start typing text and arrows and it r…