Start a new project with technologies you are familiar with. Try new technologies on projects you are familiar with. Don't start a new project with new technologies.
Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
121–130 of 289 posts
Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
#122It's cathartic to read other people who have to go through this. I'm fighting red tape for my team as we build out a dashboard. Outlook is packed with 1–2 hour meetings for the next 3 months where so far I'm: * being asked to load test our system to make sure it can handle the load (of 3 people?) * being asked to integrate with various analytics platforms so we can alert some poor schmuck at 3 AM in case the API goes…
I feel your pain. Been there, done that, probably still have the t-shirt.
Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ll add to the list: - Ceremonial unit tests for every little thing. The whole system is buggy as hell and we don’t have any confidence that the unit tests are truly covering critical parts of the app. But alas, test coverage, the god damn Pope that can never be bemoaned. - I’m not making this one up: A/B testing for an internal enterprise app.
Test coverage is almost the perfect illustration of Goodhart’s law. Good programming practices do result in high test coverage, coverage is very easy to measure, but very easy to fake with useless “tests”. So, when the coverage is measured, the coverage goes up, but stops being meaningful.
High coverage isn't enough but, in my experience, it's a great place to start.
I've written an depressingly high quantity of code in my career that blows up literally the first time it runs. I'd much rather that happen in a unit test than in production.
Any test that exercises a given branch is better than nothing.
Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
#124Start a new project with technologies you are familiar with. Try new technologies on projects you are familiar with. Don't start a new project with new technologies.
Learning is fun though, don't forget to learn new stuff...
Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
#125Being a hedgehog is useful on the journey to domain mastery because sticking to frameworks saves you time and headache compared to not having any frameworks at all. The 3 stages of domain mastery: Stage 1 - No knowledge or structure to approach a domain (everything is hard, pitfalls are everywhere) Stage 2 - Frameworks that are useful to approach the domain (Map to avoid pitfall areas) Stage 3 - Detailed understandin…
This ist a great framework to think about domain mastery. Thank you!
Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
#126Being a hedgehog is useful on the journey to domain mastery because sticking to frameworks saves you time and headache compared to not having any frameworks at all. The 3 stages of domain mastery: Stage 1 - No knowledge or structure to approach a domain (everything is hard, pitfalls are everywhere) Stage 2 - Frameworks that are useful to approach the domain (Map to avoid pitfall areas) Stage 3 - Detailed understandin…
Also the social benefit of staying in stage 2 is strong. Stage 3 folks don’t mingle together easily, not just because there are less of them, but also because they have in some ways become themselves. It’s much easier for people to stick together when they believe in something together, whether it’s imperfect or not.
And then some stage 3 folks make a new stage 2 thing and the cycle continues. But I think people don’t want stage 3 attainment by giving up the social buffer (which is very reasonable, as being a social animal in most cases is better life path than a lonely scholar/innovator).
EDIT: I think what I am talking about applies better to spiritual/philosophical/psychological attainment, rather than technological. The effect is probably still there for less spiritual things like tech or writing, but probably less so.
Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
#127To me this article is less about not feeding them but more about smart expectation management.
Hear every one out and then prioritize their recommendations in a way that no one feels neglected or ignored. That roadmaap trick is really a good way.
Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> detailed domain mastery in contrast is difficult, time consuming, and highly contextualized In its defense, it's also extremely intellectually gratifying
Also: often good knowledge allows to see similiarities in other domains - feels like mastery/intuition/domain inteligence :) - it allows to instantly grasp new concepts in new domains. Works like isomorphism in math.
A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.
Stefan Banach
Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
#129It's cathartic to read other people who have to go through this. I'm fighting red tape for my team as we build out a dashboard. Outlook is packed with 1–2 hour meetings for the next 3 months where so far I'm: * being asked to load test our system to make sure it can handle the load (of 3 people?) * being asked to integrate with various analytics platforms so we can alert some poor schmuck at 3 AM in case the API goes…
I’ll add to the list: - Ceremonial unit tests for every little thing. The whole system is buggy as hell and we don’t have any confidence that the unit tests are truly covering critical parts of the app. But alas, test coverage, the god damn Pope that can never be bemoaned. - I’m not making this one up: A/B testing for an internal enterprise app.
I have seen bad unit test being introduced when engineering management starts enforcing a threshold (80% coverage). Often developers will scramble to test trivial methods, such getter and setters, but will not write any suitable tests that actually cover the business logic. It is even worse when management only enforce a 80% coverage for new changes. In those scenarios developers go out of their way to encapsulate changes in a separate class to avoid having to test the original codebase in a meaningful way.
Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also: often good knowledge allows to see similiarities in other domains - feels like mastery/intuition/domain inteligence :) - it allows to instantly grasp new concepts in new domains. Works like isomorphism in math.
A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies. Stefan Banach
Sounds like category theory.