141–150 of 265 posts
Started an open source project Miranda IM. Even though I didn't work on it long, it's cool to see the project is still active 18 years later. I continued to use it for a long time, but I no longer use any instant messaging which is kind of sad in itself.
Two years ago I joined the USDS and started working with the VA. One of my projects was to help fix the system Veterans use to schedule online appointments. The problems were many and ranged from poor technical solutions up to senior managers not wanting to green light a small release without a few months of meetings. Over two months of some of the most intense work I have ever done ( most of it non technical ) we re…
It all comes down to this. Well done. It's so easy to get stuck in the weeds and forget the real goal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would contend those fixes -do- add to the bottom line. Making a user's job take less time frees them to do other things. Those other things may have value; that value is only captured because of the time saved due to your effort. Even if that time becomes effectively 'free' time for the user, that increase in happiness and morale makes them more likely to be more productive in other areas, less likely to leave the…
Sounds theoretical. Salary is fixed and if there’s a supply of alternative workers and resource scarcity mentality then allowing employees free time makes them more valuable to and easier to engage by competitors. Qualatative arguments go out the window when the shoe strings tighten in my experience. My ideals agree and I’ve banged my head trying to maintain boundaries with my managers, now 5 jobs in. Experience is w…
https://github.com/o1lab/xmysql
This has been a fun project that I worked on last year. I started to learn backend but felt the process of creating rest apis can be improved. And I started to work on Xmysql. It is written in nodejs.
Sadly just my blog at https://blog.claisne.io . It's not much but seeing users visiting on google analytics is quite rewarding !
Mostly everyone else was doing old school CGI, one process per request, with the obvious cost and performance issues. Corba based, and antiquted looking now, but it was impressive back then.
We had our warts, but the revenue/cost ratio was crazy. It was nice to be a hero for a couple of years.
I've been lucky a few times over since then to be on interesting projects, but that was the last time I felt like I was on a world-leading team.
Big thanks to Netscape for NSAPI. Very prescient.
Raising my son. Playing music with my friends. Building a home and relationships with my partners. Building my body and mind through long term studies of various branches of philosophical and intellectual inquiry. Caring for specific peoples' specific needs. That all might sound hippy-dippy or unrealistic, but because of the history of our economy we tend to value only monetarily compensated public labor as "work", w…
Raising my son. Playing music with my friends. Building a home and relationships with my partners. Building my body and mind through long term studies of various branches of philosophical and intellectual inquiry. Caring for specific peoples' specific needs. That all might sound hippy-dippy or unrealistic, but because of the history of our economy we tend to value only monetarily compensated public labor as "work", w…
Working for my wife in her startup.
how do you separate work from the relationship? in the startup she's the boss, in marriage you are ideally equals.
I make the technical decisions, she makes the sales decicisions and we both compromise on product with her with the final decision.
I spent 15+ years in the Medical Device industry and that's probably been the most fulfilling job.
Why?
Medical Device software is extremely process-heavy, progress is slow and methodical and it can be absolutely soul-crushing if you look at it the wrong way. But:
Sometimes you hear from an ex-patient how you saved her life.
Sometimes you get to fix a problem that affected your own child.
Sometimes you take pride during a doctor visit in knowing your blood is going to be analyzed on a machine you designed and coded for.
Sometimes you simply enjoy the fact that you're putting out a very well-engineered and solid product.
And it's fun: most of my software career has been controlling things that move. When I hit Start on the debugger and several dozen motors spring to life at once, clicking and whirring in their orchestrated sets of motions, it's an amazing feeling.