51–60 of 279 posts
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> Anyone can write a rough command line tool that monitors the clipboard and prints to stdout. There's a good chance that this will solve 95% of all needs. Most of the features suggested in the article beyond the original premise are unnecessary.
Except it isn’t supposed to log things that aren’t urls being pasted into the browser.
Was curious if I could pull this off, and managed to get a Mac version "working" at an "acceptable" (there isn't even a quit button yet) level to serve as a starting place. Was embarrassed by the quality, since it's just 5-6 snippets (of various style) pasted together...but I might as well share it anyway to prove the point: https://github.com/owenfi/clipboardcopies The article does strike me as "scope creep" or miss…
> A few students came to me asking if I had any ideas for a software project that they could work on outside of class. > I explained an idea for a utility that I had been wanting: A desktop program that monitors my clipboard for URLs and logs them automatically. I think this person misunderstood the students, the student wanted a project to practice programming, not a project to practice project management. The progr…
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They are studying to become professional programmers. I think the enterprise perspective is correct, you don't want grad students with a hobbyist mindset.
I doubt you find many grad students who spends their free time writing enterprise projects. If this was a class project, sure, but this was for something they would do on their free time for fun.
In some ways, school can be more insidious in its demands than enterprise.
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> Anyone can write a rough command line tool that monitors the clipboard and prints to stdout. There's a good chance that this will solve 95% of all needs. Most of the features suggested in the article beyond the original premise are unnecessary.
>There's a good chance that this will solve 95% of all needs. Most of the features suggested in the article beyond the original premise are unnecessary. The teacher is the client. The client is the one who will better estimate what is necessary or not. If you own a company and someone wants to contract you for work, you start explaining how what the client says it needs is not necessary and how he can manage with les…
Sometimes, yes, it is necessary to coach a client. It takes trust, but it isn't unheard of.
> A few students came to me asking if I had any ideas for a software project that they could work on outside of class. > I explained an idea for a utility that I had been wanting: A desktop program that monitors my clipboard for URLs and logs them automatically. I think this person misunderstood the students, the student wanted a project to practice programming, not a project to practice project management. The progr…
I've often felt the difference between a junior developer and a senior developer is that a junior developer believes anything that isn't in-the-seat, headphones on, IDE cranking isn't "real development".
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I'm sorry but I gotta call this out; this is just peak HN arrogance. All we have is an article relating an anecdote and the reaction to it is to second-guess the author's actions/interpretation of events. Surely, the author has more context of what was actually happening, what was actually being asked for? The actual words used were already vague enough ("ideas for a software project"). The answer to that would alway…
But the author gave a project idea where most of the project was figuring out UX concerns of non existing users. It is a horrible project no matter how you view it. If you do UX then you need users to actually test what you write on. If you don't do UX then this project is very easy. Sure these students might not have done it in 4 hours, but not because they would get stuck on whatever the author talked about, but be…
Most things about software dev are never taught to college students. This is actually an excellent project to teach students beyond programming for computers and building things for humans. Not thinking about UX is what leads to most software projects failing because we are fundamentally different from computers (do I even need to explain this?)
I wish I had teachers teaching me stuff like this in my software dev classes instead of the usual stuff. I wouldn't have had to waste years trying and failing to learn this
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There's an old saying that you can tell developer maturity by the units of time they use for estimating code. Only brand-new developers (and Sith?) estimate things in hours. Experienced devs estimate in days, but senior developers won't give you a number in increments smaller than weeks. Also, any manager who trusts an estimate from a new employee or especially a new developer is an ass. They should have known better…
Only brand-new developers (and Sith?) estimate things in hours. Experienced devs estimate in days, but senior developers won't give you a number in increments smaller than weeks That just reflects the size and complexity of stories they're asked to estimate.
In any reasonably complex application even the smallest task will likely not be available to anyone in under a week anyway. Need to change a button? Sure, that's an hour or two to change it and ensure it didn't break some other scenario. Maybe that takes another day or so to verify with team X or dev Y in a PR. Wait for tests and processing for release to QA environment. Maybe another roundtrip if something is found, at which point you might be working on another button. Then it sits for a while until it can catch a production push.
I'm also assuming that the senior dev is working in a fairly large machine. If it's a startup then sure, anything goes depending on what shortcuts are in place.
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But the author gave a project idea where most of the project was figuring out UX concerns of non existing users. It is a horrible project no matter how you view it. If you do UX then you need users to actually test what you write on. If you don't do UX then this project is very easy. Sure these students might not have done it in 4 hours, but not because they would get stuck on whatever the author talked about, but be…
I think I have to agree about the "peak HN arrogance" bit Most things about software dev are never taught to college students. This is actually an excellent project to teach students beyond programming for computers and building things for humans. Not thinking about UX is what leads to most software projects failing because we are fundamentally different from computers (do I even need to explain this?) I wish I had t…
I think this would be a great class project with the teacher acting as a fictive user. I think it is a horrible hobby project to suggest.
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I've often felt the difference between a junior developer and a senior developer is that a junior developer believes anything that isn't in-the-seat, headphones on, IDE cranking isn't "real development".
But you need some level of technical skills before you should start worrying about user concerns, so junior engineers should first and foremost think about the technical parts while the seniors who are more skilled can take a bigger picture view.