Reminds me of this post: https://lucasfcosta.com/2021/09/20/monte-carlo-forecasts.htm...
“This project will only take 2 hours”
61–70 of 279 posts
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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 less than he demands?
Absolutely, you don't just build the first thing that the client asks for. And certainly not as a single main deliverable.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sounds like a good way to ensure your juniors never grow.
Why wouldn't they grow? Once a junior has good technical skills they can start worrying about user concerns and therefore grow in other areas. I see no reason why this would limit them in any way.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> But the author gave a project idea where most of the project was figuring out UX concerns of non existing users.
> If you do UX then you need users to actually test what you write on.
No offense to azhenley but why do you expect any different? They asked a CS professor for a project idea. How many CS professors have project ideas that come with UX case-studies? How many CS professors have the resources to guide students to coordinate actual UX tests outside of a research grant?
It's an outside-of-class project. It doesn't need a compelling use-case.
> It is a horrible project no matter how you view it.
Too harsh, this has yet pedagogical value. Because, you know, they are students. Bulk (if not all) of the work you typically do at school teaches you things even if they are not portfolio-worthy.
> Building out a lot of UX features without users is an anti pattern, better write a bare bones implementation first and then work from there.
I agree with the thought but, again, this isn't real-world software engineering. I feel I can't emphasize this enough. Maybe these students have been writing from-stdlib-up CLI tools ever since and their teacher thought it's time to expose them to APIs other than stdlib. Who knows.
Might as well raise pitchforks that finding the most valuable customer for Northwind Traders (LLC) is counter-productive because the database is outdated. Better gather data first, why not normalize the schema while you are at it, so you can stream it to the cloud and get a better analysis than plain SQL. (Calm down, Northwind is a sample database for education purposes.)
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#65This post ignores the fact that an answer to questions about development time depends on the technology used, i.e., the tooling, programming language and platform/supported operating systems and, first and foremost, how familiar the developers are with these. I believe the student who said it's going to take them 2 hours. For example, I can guarantee you that I would have been able to finish this project in less than an hour back in the time when I was fluent with Realbasic. Today, it would probably take me 4 hours in Go + Fyne because I'm not yet familiar with Fyne. It would take me the same amount of time in Gtk because the framework is kind of complicated and the docs are sometimes a bit obscure (though overall excellent). If you add testing, documentation, and deployment then it's going to take at least 10 x the original time. That wasn't part of the original description, though.
The example just goes to show that if your original spec is incomplete, doesn't specify the quality, testing, and documentation requirements, and you pile up feature after feature (like cloud uploading), then it's going to take much longer. I'm sure the student knew that, however.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#66Reminds me of how some companies give take-home assignments to job candidates.
> Here's a task that takes a day to do sloppily and at least two days for you to show your best work. We want to be respectful of your time so please don't spend more than 2 hours on it.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#67> 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…
Really, I think it was more about showing off how much smarter and knowledgable than their students they are. "My students think it'll only take this long but I've got a bunch of requirements that I never mentioned that make this harder. For example, the no logging feature, that wouldn't get used. Encryption feature, pointless. Syncing with the cloud? Jesus, at this point you're talking about a fully fledge product t…
Agreed. Very annoying and condescending post. Typical of a high priest (or academics as we like to call them these days).
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>
The teacher is the client. The client is the one who will better estimate what is necessary or not.
If you work in a consulting company, it is "good practice" to "convince" the client that he needs a lot more features so that you can sell him more man-days.
On the other hand, if you get payed a fixed price, incentives are turned around.
Incentives matter.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#69Interestingly, humans tend to underestimate complexity even when it's right under their noses. In music world you can see it everywhere with your average band attempting cover versions of popular songs. It's the reason the results often sound nothing like the originals: melodies vastly simplified, textural sounds are omitted, harmonizing melodies absent, rhythm parts dumbed down, timbres approximated. "Yeah, it's a simple song with 4 chords, we can rehearse it in a day or two".
When your ear develops, you can hear that the real simple song is an outlier.
Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”
#70Was 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…
I can write an OS in just 2 hours. Just a few lines of code which can be booted straight on the hardware an sit there doing nothing. It is an OS? It is. It is useful? It is not.
It is very useful if you want to learn how to program OSes.