141–150 of 309 posts
hahaha they gave the designer keys… to deploy to prod! as a lead engineer this is something I don’t even want… as soon as you have keys to deploy to prod, guess what you’ll be asked to do? and always at the worst times!
The stab at Musk seems out of place. You might not like him, or his politics, but he took over and reformed a slow and bloated place, and despite all the doomsayers Twitter is still working and IMO better than before. And he has a solid track record of delivering: finance app, electric cars, rockets. Sure he over-promises and under-delivers, sometimes borderline lies, etc. but there is a huge amount of wisdom behind…
a) According to Fidelity it is worth 80% less than when he purchased it.
b) Threads and Bluesky are growing at 1m users a day. Former at ~300m MAU.
c) EU is going to be throwing the book at X over a failure to manage trust/safety.
By any definition X is not doing well.
An ageless idea... "There once was the first software engineering best-selling book. It was called The Psychology of Computer Programming (Weinberg 1971). There was a peculiar idea contained among the many excellent ideas of that book. It was the idea that the task of programming should be egoless. Programmers, the author said, should not invest their ego in the product they were building. ... What’s the alternative…
Ego loss comes from experience, age. Hopefully.
If our heart is aimed right, we can take advantage of religious practices to level-up, but with a callous or cruel or hateful heart, no amount of religious practices is going to do anything but cement our horrible behavior. This is because we each have the choice of how and why to behave one way or another.
The love one feels in one's heart is of little consequence if there is no selfless action in service to the loved person's happiness. It all adds up, as do all the petty callous treatments of the people in out-groups we don't give a sh_t about. And we should care about everyone; that is the way of compassion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the one who solves this problem will flood the world with a neverending wave of light.. every day I wonder how come I do so few now that I'm paid compared to when I was jobless and hacking prototypes for $0 finding the recipe for creating goal driven, high speed, high quality, frictionless teams is a difficult quest
A difficult quest indeed, but not impossible. Sometimes teams like this do exist. You know the ones. They founded the trillion-dollar companies you hear about and became billionaires themselves
Kind of tangential, but: > Then one day, our designer broke the build in the middle of the night. Everyone came in the next day and couldn’t work until they figured out what had happened. I've heard this [campfire?] story before. A bad commit happens and now no one can do any work. And I don't understand... Is it really that big of a deal to have to revert to an older commit or comment out the broken code until it ge…
Stateless code makes for boring programs, but stateful code can be difficult to roll back. As a toy example, imagine a database with columns for `first name` and `last name` and an update that combined them into a single `full name` column. That's going to be tough to revert for users signing up with just their full names.
Although in this case the build broke because the last committer didn't have authorization to deploy to production. The "fix" was giving him permission to deploy in the future. It is not clear why the developers going about their regular day wouldn't naturally resolve the broken build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
The points do "soften up" but it starts with this, at number one:
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
> "We are living in the age of narcissistic personality disorder"
With a picture of the man who revolutionized EV vehicles, worldwide. Who created a company that sends rockets into spaces and then... freaking catches the booster down to the centimeter with giant chopsticks... And who created StarLink. And all this in record time.
If he considers Musk has narcissistic personality disorder then the world needs way more of those people.
How can seriously write about methodology and criticize the one person (if there's only one to pick) who has a proven track record showing he masters efficiency?
And I can tell you, for sure, a type of place where I go and see a lot of soul-crushed, egoless, people: public servants in inefficient public administrations.
It must be hard for egoless people to live in a world created by people with incredibly strong egos.
Linus and Theo de Raadt certainly comes to mind. And we all use and depend on the work of these people.
At some point when you see crap, you have to take a stand. Be it when you find crap at work or be it when you read crap online.
I think Dan is missing mentioning one ingredient: Security.
Not code security, the human feeling of personal security. Most especially, of being secure in one's role.
And that drives so much of this. If everyone is secure in themselves, or able to transcend worrying about their personal security, then magic happens.
Without it, things will inevitably wander back to gatekeeping, control, and conflict. Much as in the world at large.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Western society (or at least USA society) seems to me to foster the idea of "not my responsibility". My example would be, going to a fast food place and not cleaning your table even though there are trashcans and places to put your tray. Spilling something and not even attempting to clean up after yourself. Unions have this in spades. "My job is X, I don't do Y, in fact I'm not allowed to do Y as that takes a job awa…
If there's a country that doesn't speed and litter please get me a visa so I can go home
I want to go off a small tangent > In Theory There Is No Difference Between Theory and Practice, While In Practice There Is I for one used to believe in a cross functional team. I used to believe that everyone in a team should be able to do every task in the team. I still believe it somewhat but my ego is shattered. I worked on one team where the lead believed in this more than I ever did. Consequently, I was doing t…
Where I've worked, a cross functional team is one made up of functional experts from different groups. A team where everyone could do the work of everyone else was a team that was cross trained.