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Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

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Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#151

Post by awinder »

atmosx wrote: post #137
awinder wrote: post #16

I worked for a company that had gone from selling on premise software to cloud, and going from build to production release took a while. Realistically you could expect 1-2 days if everything went well. This was definitely not problem #1 at the company but I really wanted to push to see how much time we could shave off. I got some like-minded teammates to put time into a new release pipeline process, and we built some…

Where you able to see error logs from slack or you used a link? Granted that usually traces are multiline, I expect them to be hard to read on slack but the again nothing beats lack of context switch.

We linked out to the logs, I kinda wanted to figure something else out for slack to embed them but it ended up not working out. But you’re right it’s kinda appealing

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#152

Post by Aeolun »

steev wrote: post #55
maest wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your main objections to BTD loops? Also, which alternatives do you suggest?

My main objection is it dramatically decreases your productivity. If building and testing takes 5-10mins (which is the case in our codebase) trying to fix a bug can take forever when you aren't exactly sure what the cause is. You don't want to try multiple fixes simultaneously because if something doesn't work you aren't sure which of the fixes (if any) might be causing the issue. Maybe a different way to look at it…

I would have less time to legitimately read Hackernews!

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#153

Post by glandium »

Considering a large portion of the people I meet at company all hands are thanking me for it, git-cinnabar, a git remote helper that allows to access Mercurial repositories and has decent performance for the Mozilla codebase compared to alternatives (to the exclusion of Mercurial proper).

Ironically, it's a tool I wrote and maintain by sheer selfishness (I grew sick of Mercurial), on my spare time.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#154

Post by winrid »

As a developer/manager thing: reading, learning to fully listen to someone until they are done, understanding that you want people to ask questions DURING your presentation, creating and enforcing a code review process, evangelizing unit tests, and REALLY caring and making sure that whatever I did actually worked and solved the right problems. Also, saying no.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#155

Post by geocrasher »

masonhensley wrote: post #143
geocrasher wrote: post #69

At my current employer I have done two things that I think have had a big impact. I didn't do them alone, and in some cases, I couldn't have done them alone. The first was to root out a customer-blaming culture that had festered for far too long in the company. I recognized how toxic it was, and how bad it was for customer service, when I arrived. Not long after that I became a supervisor and my manager (also a new h…

> opportunity to write new tools for front line support staff Any learnings you could share on success factors / features in the new internal tools?

I work in the web hosting industry, and front line folks often struggle with some Linux commands- grepping logs etc. So I built automated tools that generate reports based on search criteria. I know that's terribly vague, sorry. I also simplified an existing tool to produce less but more valuable output. They've gone over well so far.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#156

Post by thomk »

Calling on quiet (but attentive) members of my team to speak up in meetings where we need to make a decision.

There will be a pause in the conversation and (as if its my meeting) I'll say something like generic "Jim what do you think?" No matter what he says I acknowledge it and thank him.

A few things happen. 1. It removes the internal conflict Jim was having if he should speak up or not. 2. It gives him 'the floor' so he knows for a minute he will be heard. Others are probably wondering why I called on him and want to hear what he has to say. 3. His answer might not be directly related, however it often sets off a chain of conversation that often does lead to creative answers.

People actually do like to contribute. The way I look at it is we're not leaving this room until I feel like we have at least heard every idea good or bad. Those set of ideas are our collective intelligence at that moment and I fully intend on leveraging it.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#157

Post by zaphod4prez »

khalilravanna wrote: post #41

Mine is actually very similar to OP’s! I think regular discussion of code is such an impactful tool in an engineering organization. I think as a manager it’s often the small things that can have the biggest impact. At my current company I helped revive a meeting we have called Code Read. It’s basically a meeting where the engineers sit down and go over the commits from the last couple of days focusing on ones that im…

I would LOVE to hear a little more about this & anything you've learned about making these meetings effective. Would love to know how long do they last, how many ppl are in the meeting usually (wondering what the "right size" is), or if you got that idea from somewhere?

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#158

Post by jlokier »

Yoric wrote: post #57

Mmmh... I rewrote big chunks of Firefox's Session Restore to ensure that people stopped losing their data in case of crashes. Pretty big impact on both Firefox and, hopefully, the life of a few hundred million users. I rewrote the Firefox Shutdown so that it actually worked. I also introduced structured async programming, async testing, async exception reporting in our codebase. And yes, I do enjoy bragging :)

I lost Firefox sessions so many times last year! As I have a few thousand tabs over several windows, some being placeholders for things I regard as important, that sort of thing is really bothersome.

Every so often, after a system restart due to running out of battery on my laptop, I'd start Firefox and get the dreaded "only one window, home tab".

I was able to recover by going through backups, but it was a fiddly and manual process, and for a while last summer it happened annoyingly often. There were a couple of times I couldn't recover what I'd been working on the previous day.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#159

Post by Onawa »

jlokier wrote: post #158
Yoric wrote: post #57

Mmmh... I rewrote big chunks of Firefox's Session Restore to ensure that people stopped losing their data in case of crashes. Pretty big impact on both Firefox and, hopefully, the life of a few hundred million users. I rewrote the Firefox Shutdown so that it actually worked. I also introduced structured async programming, async testing, async exception reporting in our codebase. And yes, I do enjoy bragging :)

I lost Firefox sessions so many times last year! As I have a few thousand tabs over several windows, some being placeholders for things I regard as important, that sort of thing is really bothersome. Every so often, after a system restart due to running out of battery on my laptop, I'd start Firefox and get the dreaded "only one window, home tab". I was able to recover by going through backups, but it was a fiddly an…

Good lord, what possible workflow leads you to having that many open tabs without bookmarking them or using some other plugin that allows you better tab management? Seems like a recipe for disaster, especially since you said you end up having to dig through backups to restore state.

Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

#160

Post by tbrock »

code-is-code wrote: post #134

Doing API-first. Start with defining the swagger.json Then generate: - frontend-typings - frontend request services - backend routes and DTOs - database fields - use angular-jsonform for forms - use the swagger for frontend validation - use the swagger for backend validation - use the swagger to discuss api changes with the client This saves half of developing time and prevents 90% of your bugs

How though? All of the swagger open-api tooling is REALLY bad or abandonware. Did you write your own?
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