141–150 of 279 posts
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Sounds like there may be a niche for some kind of industry standard automated logging system. Nothing complicated - shouldn't take too long.
Are you joking? Should candidates install spyware?
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Just curious - why would you use python if you don't know it?
I did a teamtreehouse or codeacademy course on Python maybe 6 or 7 years ago, but that was all - not even a single project. Mainly my programming experience existed because when I was a teenager I would create scripts for ultima online using EUO [0] and a few times Simba[1]. Also I managed an ecommerce operation for a few years, so I dealt with coders and eventually code. Actually, I started this project in VBA after…
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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…
HP last year managed to accidentally revoke their macOS code signing certificate. I'm not sure how much software was affected, but as far as I know all HP software for Mac, including printer drivers, was broken (CRLs are updated automatically even if you have automatic software update disabled)
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> 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…
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.
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…
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…
The problem was that the humans involved didn't really want what they asked for. They wanted control. They wanted to select a batch with certain characteristics, then another batch with others. They wanted to pass a list of files that must be included, a list that must not. They wanted audit functionality, they wanted multi-step selection, to mark files for auditing, translation, and different annotations types, to select a batch from one annotations type for another.
At the end of the day, this ever evolving script worked out very well and took away the need for a programmer doing complex sql and filesystem queries. There was still a human involved, but that was because the human wanted to be involved. The process taught me about users wanting something other than what they ask for, scope creep, and also showed me the value that could be generated via a fairly simple script created in collaboration with the user.
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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…
Was it a HP printer? HP last year managed to accidentally revoke their macOS code signing certificate. I'm not sure how much software was affected, but as far as I know all HP software for Mac, including printer drivers, was broken (CRLs are updated automatically even if you have automatic software update disabled)
That turned out to have taken over a hundred hours of my time, and still counting. I started in June, expecting to finish by August. It's November now and I'm still at only 80%. There are just too many details that can't be predicted before starting to work on the specific part.
This happens at work too - "can you finish that feature now and release that in the next 15 mins or so"? Sorry, but I've only been a maintainer of this massive codebase for a few months, and haven't even touched that part of the program...? And yeah, I have other pressing work that I'm focusing on, so which one should wait?
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I did a teamtreehouse or codeacademy course on Python maybe 6 or 7 years ago, but that was all - not even a single project. Mainly my programming experience existed because when I was a teenager I would create scripts for ultima online using EUO [0] and a few times Simba[1]. Also I managed an ecommerce operation for a few years, so I dealt with coders and eventually code. Actually, I started this project in VBA after…
Fair enough, it sounded a bit like you learned python specifically for this project.
Adding to this topic, now I can say it was easy enough, even for someone like me. A few times I needed help from actual people and got it from the kind and amazing folks that hang around StackOverflow Python chat, but mostly Python docs (or some simplified form of it provided by other website) and google queries would do the job when I had a code obstacle. Python was overall very intuitive for me, apart from a few surprises (mainly regarding scopes and names).