Ban pull requests if they aren't a big change resulting from a RFC. Therefore most feature code should be shipped to master with feature flags.
I don't understand this. Care to elaborate?
Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
31–40 of 216 posts
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#32Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…
>I fear that I have such a large amount of contempt for those who don't share my view on this that it leaks out whatever I do. I even know, intellectually, that this is wrong - ignorance does not deserve contempt, but compassion, after all.
It can be annoying, but at the same time, it forces them to take a break to think about things they're currently working on. When you have nothing to think about and your current work is simple and you're waiting minutes, you tend to get bored and frustrated though.
And also remember that some people would simply rather get paid to do nothing, and a long BTD cycle helps that.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#33I am reminded of patio11's article "Don't call yourself a programmer".
I would say this comment section should be renamed "Don't make a big impact at work without clearly getting the credit for the value added"
Before you do any more impactful things at work to benefit someone else's equity, do the following
- set up an internal blog location where you can write up, each friday, what you and your team have achieved
- add simple videos of good stuff in action (screen casting is easy now and always stick your voice track on top)
- tell people, with links.
Stake your claim.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#34* implemented a more difficult rigorous screening test and process for new hire canidates
* reduced build times. Boss was angry at me spending time on it and it did take a while but after we started shipping weekly instead of quarterly...
* ignore my boss anytime he gets annoyed I automated legacy things. It bit me in the ass once, but paid out 10x several times.
* internal tools and automation scripts
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#35Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…
What are your main objections to BTD loops? Also, which alternatives do you suggest?
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#36I 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…
You’d love _The Unicorn Project_ if you haven’t read it. I highly recommend it, and it’s a story around roughly the same journey.
https://www.amazon.com/Unicorn-Project-Developers-Disruption...
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#37Three things: voting down a move to microservices, identifying a fundamental flaw in a core data-structure that is the high-level impetus for future refactorings, and encouraging people to be discontent with multi-minute long build-test-debug (BTD) loop. Unfortunately, I find very long BTD loops to be personally offensive though, to the point it makes me emotional, which harms my ability to make my case. Despite know…
I'd be interested to hear more voting down microservices. The title didn't actually specify, but I assume you felt it had a positive impact? :) When was this, and how does it look now?
Yes, I felt it had a positive impact. The system was already over-engineered for its purpose, something virtually every senior would admit if pressed. uServices would only add to that administrative overhead at design time, and massive operational complexity at runtime.
Having come off of a project that supported 400k registered and 100k active users on a single server, this project isn't yet at that scale and they were anticipating massive scale issues. This mistake was a real bonanza for an engineering team wanting to learn the latest tech; a massive failure for the product that really needs fast UX iterations to succeed.
If you want to talk more about it, you can email me.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#38Building a single webpage which submitted search forms to the different ticket systems and web based tools at the company.
Multiple usages:
Enter one keyword, and look it up in Wiki, Redmine, two extra ticket systems, mails with customers with fewer clicks.
Or enter a customername, and find him in any if these systems using other search forms.
Also offering short links to often used functions, like selfhosted password generator etc.
Saved me lots of clicks and copy and paste when debugging or investigating issues. The company had >1000 customers, product was an ecommerce software based on php/mysql
Received a small bonus when the bosses found out. I do not know if my former collegues still use it, I left the company.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#39Teaching tech concepts to non-technical people and visa versa.
I think a lot of the tensions that often exists between people from different backgrounds, especially when deadlines and budgets are tight, is lack of understanding what the other person is doing, what their job is.
So I started doing little talks and workshops around topics like, web applications, databases, what the different components of the system are and how they interact with each other, different types of "bugs", computational complexity, etc.
While, most of these weren't directly applicable to those peoples daily work, it helped them understand a bit better why for example task A takes much longer than B, although from a laypersons perspective they look the same. Also people appreciate learning new things when broken down to the appropriate level and removal of jargon.
Similarly I let interested tech people learn about things such as UX, product development, marketing, finance, legal, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?
#40If you by impact you mean noticeable, then often the things having the biggest impact on people and systems efficiency are also the less visible ones.