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“This project will only take 2 hours”

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Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#171

Post by redbell »

jeroenhd wrote: post #109
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The programming parts of this would take 2-4 hours This is, literally, the error that the entire article works on dispelling. Anyone can write a rough command line tool that monitors the clipboard and prints to stdout. Writing a usable GUI application is a lot more work. That’s not project management, that’s coding work. The ratio of project management work to coding isn’t 10:1 or even 100:1 like you’re suggesting.

Honestly, I'm a bit rusty but I feel like I could've done this project in C# with WinForms in a bit over 2 hours. Not all the advanced features asked for, but the minimal viable product. It's a shame that Microsoft is shifting away from the old, reliable WinForms for their new UWP system because making a quick and dirty implementation of many or these requirements would actually take very little time for many moderat…

Fortunately, UWP was deprecated recently. https://www.thurrott.com/dev/258377/microsoft-officially-dep...

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#172

Post by tremon »

rightbyte wrote: post #144
jeroenhd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm a bit rusty but I feel like I could've done this project in C# with WinForms in a bit over 2 hours. Not all the advanced features asked for, but the minimal viable product. It's a shame that Microsoft is shifting away from the old, reliable WinForms for their new UWP system because making a quick and dirty implementation of many or these requirements would actually take very little time for many moderat…

> VB6, despite its stupid programming language, is still the golden standard for a GUI application design I think the reason is that many programmers have an urge to do things in a stupidly hard and complex way to look competent. Real programmers do not use GUI drag and drop design tools.

That's right, they use butterflies (or emacs).

Why shouldn't you design a GUI using a visual interface? Do you also write SVG's in notepad?

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#173

Post by marcosdumay »

tcmart14 wrote: post #126
jiggawatts wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vaguely remember a rant some famous Linux developer went on about how setting up printing in Linux requires a dozen parameters, half of which are arcane nonsense that the printer manufacturer themselves probably doesn't know how to set up correctly. Meanwhile, on an Apple or Windows computer it can be literally just plug and print. The difference is that hiding those arcane input parameters takes work , and a lot o…

I have not experience this fool-proof plug and play on windows or mac os. I just last year replaced a printer because it wasn't working with my wife's Macbook Pro, it worked one day and just dropped of the face of the earth the next (was able to print over USB from my linux laptop still). The printers were I work constantly have issues working with the windows PCs. Moral of the story, printers are a necessary evil an…

Printers used to rum much better on Windows back in the day when the manufacturers developed drivers with the intention to make them run well. I've never seen any one doing the just "plug, install driver, run", except for shared printers maintained by a contractor. But they used to run better than Linux.

Nowadays the main advantage of Linux is that it won't install the manufacturer's driver. Anyway, the arcane settings aren't required anymore.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#174

Post by TrackerFF »

jeroenhd wrote: post #109
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The programming parts of this would take 2-4 hours This is, literally, the error that the entire article works on dispelling. Anyone can write a rough command line tool that monitors the clipboard and prints to stdout. Writing a usable GUI application is a lot more work. That’s not project management, that’s coding work. The ratio of project management work to coding isn’t 10:1 or even 100:1 like you’re suggesting.

Honestly, I'm a bit rusty but I feel like I could've done this project in C# with WinForms in a bit over 2 hours. Not all the advanced features asked for, but the minimal viable product. It's a shame that Microsoft is shifting away from the old, reliable WinForms for their new UWP system because making a quick and dirty implementation of many or these requirements would actually take very little time for many moderat…

Only one way to find out.

1. download or use some screen recording software

2. Push record

3. Start coding

4. Upload your video to some site (youtube, etc.) when you're finished - or just live stream it.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#175

Post by tremon »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #35
strken wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessary coding work for someone who intends to use the project themselves and can run tail -f /var/some-log-from-a-clipboard-daemon | grep big-tld-regex They asked for a project idea and he gave them a product idea.

I would be quite happy with this, actually. I wouldn't even bother with the tld regex and just settle for "http" The part I'm missing is what to tail?

There is nothing to tail, because (FAFAIK) there are no clipboard events in Linux (well, in X). The best you can do is poll xclip every X ms, so you'd get:

  while sleep .2 ; do xclip -o ; done | uniq | grep -E 'https?:'
but that is pretty wasteful of resources. Luckily processes are cheap on Linux :)

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#177

Post by jrochkind1 »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #72

I've gone down this rabbitole before, and yes, there are things that take two hours, and there are things that take a lot more. The problem is the scope - ie. are you trying to do what you said you'll do (miniature software to log urls), or are you adding 100s of requirements to the scope (gui, filters, privacy,...). We had a bunch of .xml files containing some data, and someone wanted a .csv file... sure, an hour ma…

You seem to be complaining that users/stakeholders have actual needs that may not be captured by their initial naive statement of the problem/solution/requirements.

Indeed, they almost always do. Most users/stakeholders aren't good at technical specification of a solution that will meet their problem. It's part of our job to elucidate that in interaction with them.

And then, even when you are good at technical specification, sometimes it's hard even for domain-expert developers to fully understand the problem up front, without iterating. This is one of the useful observations attributed to "agile" (but of course not unique to it).

These are some of the reasons that projects often take longer than initially estimated, sure. You can complain about them, or complain about users being bad at specifying their problem/solution, but it's just a fact of reality, complaining about these facts won't make them go away, and part of doing a professional job is dealing with them.

Which means being very careful about assuming a feature/task is "easy", and remembering to do more investigation of the problem/domain/requirements than just taking a naive "easy" mission from stakeholders at face value -- which is what OP is about.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#178

Post by jrochkind1 »

shireboy wrote: post #145

I’d point out this isn’t a problem with estimation per se but with requirement gathering. The students didn’t press him for more specific requirements before offering an estimate. The real challenge though comes when the customer doesn’t know their requirements. They legitimately think they “just want a simple app to record urls”, but actually want all the other things listed. The thing that sets good developers apar…

> The real challenge though comes when the customer doesn’t know their requirements

Which, of course, is true 80-90% of the time.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#179

Post by throwthere »

The overall gist matched my novice programming experience— you underestimate all the features and edge cases you’ll need to cover, at least I do. Butttt I don’t like the example. The base url recording is a two hour task for a given os. If you want regex then use grep. If you want timestamps use local epoch time and get on with your life. Format with csv. Forgo the icon, just put it in a daemon/service/whateveryou can stop/start. If you want context in the csv add in a curl get and grep out the title. Boom, you now have a product a cs professor can use to save URLs.

Re: “This project will only take 2 hours”

#180

Post by bluedino »

I was handed a chart from our shipping manager. It had columns for each state, and shipping prices based on quantity. This was a simple project to turn into a table and then lookup the needed value. When the manager needed to update the prices, they could just update the table.

I noticed the 3rd column for quantity was "3 or more". I should have ran at that point. The next page of the spreadsheet added exceptions for certain item #'s, certain zip codes (each borough of NYC for example). It was still manageable but it was way past the two hour point.

Sadly, when this was originally put on the AS/400 it was 4,000 lines of IF statements since the original developer didn't put it in a database. It probably started out as a hack that said "for a quantity of 2, let's offer a discount on shipping", and then later someone said "If we're shipping to states on the west coast, use this price"...etc

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