I decreased required HDDs size by 20% in CI system by adding "-ntp" switch to all maven commands. It makes the maven stop printing "Downloading..." when it downloads artifacts. How I did it? I added alias mvn=mvn -ntp in .bashrc.
Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
161–170 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#162My general advice for anyone who has a little spare time at work and is looking for how to improve their company but doesn't know where to start is: Take out the garbage. By which I mean, everybody has a part of their job that they just don't like to do. It's a necessary chore, but not fun or interesting or exciting in any way. Look around you for that kind of work that's already being done by your management or your…
> Take out the garbage. I don't agree. You don't get promotions/pay hikes/bonuses for taking garbage out. Those are given to ppl who ship products directly bringing in tthe revenue. > I'll say this also applies to your first few weeks/months in a new codebase. I agree with this.
> You don't get promotions/pay hikes/bonuses for taking garbage out
Cleaning and streamlining processes and procedures can have huge effects on the company and get you noticed.
It starts with little things, Say you decrease compilation time by 30sec which could add up to hours a week. Or clean up documentation, making on boarding new devs easier.
Then one day you clean up something that has a huge impact on the company. Like a 40% reduction on server costs, by dynamic scaling... Then you're likely to get a promotion...
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#163My general advice for anyone who has a little spare time at work and is looking for how to improve their company but doesn't know where to start is: Take out the garbage. By which I mean, everybody has a part of their job that they just don't like to do. It's a necessary chore, but not fun or interesting or exciting in any way. Look around you for that kind of work that's already being done by your management or your…
> Take out the garbage. I don't agree. You don't get promotions/pay hikes/bonuses for taking garbage out. Those are given to ppl who ship products directly bringing in tthe revenue. > I'll say this also applies to your first few weeks/months in a new codebase. I agree with this.
I think one of the marks of a good manager is they look at who is doing the quiet background work and make sure they get credit for that organizationally.
I am not saying all managers do that, or even that I am good at doing this, but this seems like a core responsibility of managing a team
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#164I wrote a Copy/Paste stack tool. Pressing ctrl+c adds the current selection onto the stack and ctrl+v pastes off of the stack. You can toggle between LIFO and FIFO. It's been very helpful for our client-facing folks who have to copy a lot of user data.
The is pretty cool and inherently useful. How do users see what's currently on the stack?
It's an inelegant solution, but the app uses a context icon in the taskbar and when you click on it a window appears that shows the stack in a table view. This is all being done using WinForms. I'm hoping to find a better implementation to be honest.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#165I wrote a Copy/Paste stack tool. Pressing ctrl+c adds the current selection onto the stack and ctrl+v pastes off of the stack. You can toggle between LIFO and FIFO. It's been very helpful for our client-facing folks who have to copy a lot of user data.
Windows 10 has that built in (search for "save multiple clipboard items" in the start menu), and third party ones have been available for at least 19 years (ArsClip - http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/97/ ) Surely they have also been available on mac and Linux for as long? Can it possibly have been a good investment to write your own?
I had no idea this existed, thank you for sharing. As far as an investment of time goes, I just saw this as a challenge and I enjoyed working on it.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#166My experience is that you can often find low hanging fruit, relatively easy changes that will have high impact. For example, I've created checklists for some of the processes that we do often, especially when it involves coordinating with a customer. Creating the initial version maybe required a few hours, but since then has been used 100's of times to shave 1-2 weeks off of work and reduce errors/surprises. Another…
I read about a really cool way to move to having stuff automated - on here I think. You make a bash script as an interactive checklist (e.g. step 1 flip the floop then press Y to continue) and then you can automate steps one by one as time permits. You can also have a log of the steps being done then as well.
The primary benefit of automating small/ (mundane?) things is that it gets rid of a some of the cognitive load.
For example, I wrote some shell scripts, gradle/TC plugins, when my company moved to kubernetes/openshift. We did not have devops, paas standardization then. The scripts are now getting used in many projects in a couple of departments. And it was just word of mouth adaption. It is as not very fancy stuff nor is it a company wide standard. But it is useful and it hides/gets rid of complexity which new projects/developers no longer have to worry about. Danger area: trying to be too generic, parameterize everything, you end up with frameworks and processes. As a senior dev, I generally aim at solving my problem and if possible making the solution usable in the immediate vicinity. Keeping it minimal and simple makes it usable for others when the problem is not exact match.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a cautionary tale -- make sure that there is fundamental institutional support for the removal of said garbage. If cleaning up the garbage requires help from someone else within the institution, verify that they can and will help you before you begin. Source: I volunteered to remove some challenging/delicate garbage without sufficient institutional support. The lost productivity has had a marked impact on both my…
I'll second this with a personal anecdote as well. If you do want to do this, clear it explicitly with your manager/person doing your perf reviews... I had a non-technical manager who thought I was "avoiding" work by doing this instead of shipping new features and received a negative review because of it, even after explaining the situation.
> who thought I was "avoiding" work by doing this instead of shipping new features
Haha same. Mine thought these were unfinished tasks from my previous work and only have to do it now because i was slacking before.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Granted it's been about 10 years since I read it... In addition to what electrondood said. It helped me understand that there are some people who just want their technology to work. Not to understand it's qualities. John Sutherland (the character with the BMW). Many Apple users are like that. They want the defaults to work for them. They want to remain clueless and it "just works" ...
And I think getting to the end of the book, and seeing Pirsig descend into a pretty dark place in understanding quality being undefinable in any actionable way, I guess sometimes it's easier to just let go, and not understand something. A lot of times, understanding just makes us more miserable. Fantastic book, read it as a teenager and it deeply affected me.
A gross paraphrase I got was "I cant define quality, but I know it when I see it".
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#169There are a couple ways to approach this problem. One of them is to examine the outcomes that are crucial to the business and recursively working backwards to the components that drive that outcome for the business. Once you get to the root inputs, you will be able to identify which changes will create the greatest increase in your desired outcome.
For example, let's say your company is a SaaS business that is number 4 or 5 in its market and is looking to move up to number 1 or 2 position, then you may find that the key strategy to get there (just spitballing here) is to get to feature parity with the market leaders. If so, then you would need to launch more features faster.
How do you launch features faster? Well, could be improving the code quality so there is less rework, building better tools, hiring more devs, etc? So lets take one of those, eg improving code quality. How do you improve code quality? Well, maybe hire better devs, train the devs you have or improve your QA processes? If your devs are all rockstars, then it must be QA that sucks. So let's look into how to improve QA.... (etc)
Keeping working down this logical path and you will arrive at the most impactful changes you can make in your organization.
Re: Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?
#170Improve the culture. Processes, tech stack, productivity, these are just tasks. If there is a culture of continuous improvement then those tasks are always being improved. Better is not a destination, it is the journey.