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If I get a sniff that a company is outsourcing interviewing, I bail. This has only happened once and it wasn't a job I was super excited for, so it was really easy to just treat this as a red flag of things to come. Also, if you have make me take a 30 minute 'coding test' on a website that lacks simple Intellisense, let alone features of an actual IDE, then I will also immediately bail.
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May 26, 2020 06:41
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Spring Heeled Jack posted:Our CIO is requesting anyone brought in for an interview fill out some application that lists education and work experience on it, no loving idea why. I think I've stopped listing my education on my resume around 28. Unrelated, let me tell you my tale of woe: I'm really good at WPF. I really like WPF. WPF is a pretty niche skill though and I'm not convinced I have particularly high mobility. The moral of the story is to keep on learning - never stop learning, and hopefully you are learning something for web...
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May 27, 2020 03:06
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Sagacity posted:I'm also an architect currently and my job seems to be mostly talking about how teams want to implement things and then making suggestions so they don't shoot themselves in the foot. Seems to work well enough, but sometimes the big picture gets lost. There certainly isn't a silver bullet, but there are a lot of ways an org can shoot themselves in the foot. The best architect / tech directors / whatever the title might be seem to be those who are already very accomplished engineers themselves. I think that's the whole point, but it seems like some orgs perceive them less like 'Engineers who can now consult for very large scale, large reaching decisions' and more like, 'Engineering oversight and management'. If you hire for the latter, you are going to have a very, very bad time.
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Jun 15, 2020 21:35
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Protocol7 posted:Can’t wait for the brain implant that will let me generate entire websites with a thought. I'll preorder that.
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Jul 15, 2020 23:57
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csammis posted:"Okay GPT-3, make the padding between buttons like Google but from 2007. I took a picture on my phone and you can download it here: C:\Users\Dipshit\Desktop\GoodGooglePicture.doc" I laughed at this uncontrollably for way too long. Oh dear this is too real.
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Jul 16, 2020 08:12
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Protocol7 posted:Why stop there? I won’t be satisfied until we have serverless artificial intelligence IoT applications powered by the blockchain to provide actionable insights into natural language processing. Can we get some machine learning to help with this? My grandson says that it can play mario, so it seems like it could do business.
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Jul 19, 2020 06:34
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So as others have mentioned, despite the structure of 'user facing string, functional int' not really conforming the conventions of KVP, I'd still use a Dictionary<string , int>/Map/Whatever to represent this. It provides the structure that you'd basically want anyway, and most languages have robust features around Dictionaries such that you don't have to write a lot of supporting code to manipulate and manage them.
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Jul 29, 2020 21:32
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Our team maintains our own ORM and I am completely sold that it might be ideal to just build it yourself. The advantages are that you get to build it exactly how you want, adding features is very easy, and you are expected to have at least some understanding of SQL as a team which conveys some nice benefits.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:10
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shoeberto posted:We rolled our own ORM but we have an extreme benefit of a relatively small surface area of what is involved. I can see using an off the shelf solution if your core DB schema is constantly expanding to support new features, but our features primarily evolve by way of using existing ORM pieces as lego bricks essentially. This was kind of our problem space and our concerns. Off the shelf stuff *can* make things easy, but rarely does exactly what you want, and depending on how 'exactly' you need the tooling and how difficult it'd be to build for your project (I think our's took a week of one person's time), it might make sense to just build it. I totally get the idea that it'd be a bad idea for some projects and teams, but even in hindsight, there is no way I would just do the same thing. We get so much mileage out of our solution and the cost was quite low.
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Aug 29, 2020 04:46
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I"ve never seen a project manager bring actual value to a team.
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Sep 14, 2020 07:07
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Inacio posted:if you work at reddit and you have anything to do with their new site, i really don't like you reddit's new layouts are total trash. I have no idea how that stuff gets greenlit, prototyped, and rolled out without anyone asking, 'Is this actually better...?'
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Oct 29, 2020 22:30
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ChickenWing posted:How do you distinguish e2e tests from automated QA tests? Or is QA automation a pipe dream doomed to be too brittle forever? My entire job is basically trying to answer the question "How do we use software to better improve test". We get an enormous amount of freedom to experiment, and experiment we have. Here's what I've more or less decided on: As a product's state is more and more finite, automated tests can cover more of your total test area. Whether or not you can realize returns on that automation vs human effort in a given time span is dependent on the product and processes involved, but even in the most optimistic of scenarios, automated testing is going be unable cover everything. You can definitely reduce the human effort required to complete QA with confidence, but you can't eliminate it. Even in the best of times, it's hard to build rigid, reliable automated tests that aren't exactly unit tests in code (and even that is hardly the Perfect Solution™). Anyone who insists they can remove all human effort from that process is trying to sell you something... Consider the opposite end of the spectrum of this problem, where possible state approaches infinity. Something like a video game becomes overwhelming to test really quickly without human QA. To this end, the goal we have is not to eliminate people from the process, but instead remove overhead that comes with test. Asking questions like, 'What tooling exposes the most useful data to discover bugs' and 'What is the absolute path of least resistance between bug discovery, entry, and fix verification'? have gone a long way to reducing man hours in test without sacrificing quality. There are pieces of test you can automate, but if you are in game QA Engineering for a game at large scale, and your task is to automate, I'd argue your team is solving the wrong problem. There is a lot of nuance to this and it depends a lot on the nature of the product. I'd argue strongly that most of the solutions a team develops should be product specific (if scale allows). I also think the way most QA Engineering is done is quite bad, especially in games. I should write a proposal for GDC... Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Feb 26, 2021 |
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Feb 26, 2021 22:32
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Very frequently, the most complicated part of a SaaS product is it's marketing, presentation, and it's payment processing. The 'service' itself seems to be increasingly trivial. I think my favorite recent example of complexity being 95% marketing with out of control pricing might be Visual Ping. For the low, low price of $97 a month, you can fetch the HTML of a webpage up to 20k times and diff it...automatically!!! Comes with cool looking screen caps. That is an insanely trivial problem to solve and if you want to use their service, it'll cost you as much, or MORE than the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Mar 14, 2021 |
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Mar 14, 2021 11:14
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I don't feel like I'm experienced enough yet to with enough different teams and enough different projects to say something as sweeping as, "The more you enforce 'academic' coding standards on a project, the less output you'll get", but I'm increasingly convinced that is indeed the case. I also think trying to design around every potential future problem is a huge mistake. I more and more believe that you should build a thing the best way you and your team currently can, and be prepared for the consequences of inexperience, looser standards, or likely both. If you are in a field where mistakes are truly catastrophic, then a different set of rules probably apply, but for the vast majority of software, a bug doesn't mean that a plane crashes. The most successful stories I have about my career for both personal/team growth, and for a final product usually start with, 'We made an MVP that became the product really fast...' and end with, '...and then we lit it all on fire, started over, and rebuilt knowing more about our product, data pipes, and stakeholders'. My hot take: Be less scared to just trash a project and start over.
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Apr 4, 2021 03:20
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Volmarias posted:And this is when you wake up to the 3AM page that the prototype service you made two years ago is crashing under the workload again? Actually yes, but the solution is to fix it. An anecdote in our case is that we had a service that was delivering a couple hundred MBs of data every time you loaded a view. On the company Intranet, this was fine and the load time was but 10 seconds. But on the VPN when WFH started, load times would shoot to 3 - 5 minutes. The problem was that we never designed this system to handle a lot of data - we didn't even think about it but wild success was the breeding ground for more and more use, which inflated the data payload, which lead us to where we are now. The solution? Keep the front end. Keep the database (most of it anyway). Burn everything in between - rearchitect and rewrite. It took 6 weeks of work, but the end result is a product that now scales with huge dataloads and we are better engineers and architects for it. I think teams are really scared of this and I think sometimes that fear is justified, but I see way more teams just wallow in that fear endlessly, trying to plan for every possible situation and end up in the coding cargo cult of TDD in the name of mitigating risk at all costs (dont at me). They end up releasing nothing, or at it's very best, a shell of what was promised. The culture of the team is so much more productive and people are allowed to both create and learn in ways that a book could never teach. Again, sample size of about half a dozen teams for me, but being able to freely create without a lot of fear of backlash if the software isn't Perfect Forever (or even good for more than 2x ROI or so) has produced better engineers and better teams in a pretty short window of time. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 23:38
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The obvious answer here it to tailor code review to the team culture, the code standards and the individual, but I think when it comes to junior engineers, give them enough rope to really hang themselves later. The experience of actually trying to maintain unmaintainable code is way more powerful than someone saying, 'this is difficult to maintain'. Ideally a more junior engineer is on a project where scuffed code isn't that big of a deal, as long as it works. Let them make their own design and architectural decisions and let them do a really bad job. When it comes to maintenance and updates, I'd put them on point for it and let them scrub their own work. Actually having to work through your own mess is such a strong motivation to write better code. It also gives you a lot of personal perspective on what 'good code' actually looks like, and more often, what 'bad code' looks like. I don't think it's particularly helpful to say the words to people unless you are willing to explain in detail why a certain pattern is superior. Even then, I think a complete understanding of those ideas is not well attained unless you experience it first hand. This has been how we've trained up new engineers and the results have been very positive - we end up with people that not only know how to better architect systems, but also know why they want to do it a specific way and can speak to it technically in a way that is tempered by real experience. Let your engineers write bad code more.
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Apr 12, 2021 21:28
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Pollyanna posted:I’m beginning to hate it whenever I add nits to a PR. I’m going to stop doing it altogether I think. This has been my take away as well.
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Apr 15, 2021 01:07
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dantheman650 posted:I'm really curious how management is going to play this. Historically, the answer to this would be 'poorly'. Probably depends on how boomer the management is though. We have a ton of people who just moved and have told the powers that be that 'I live in Canada now and will not be returning to the office. Do with that information what you will.'
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Apr 26, 2021 23:20
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The Basecamp post seems fine? The way they presented it was kinda 'eh', but the ideas here seem totally fine.
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Apr 27, 2021 01:03
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Blinkz0rz posted:Ah, the "if it's not valuable to me then it shouldn't be valuable to anyone" approach There certainly is at least of streak of that in my view of this, but it's much more of my belief that I'd rather just see said benefits as part of direct comp. It's like getting an Amazon Gift Card for as a gift, when you could just give me cash... Just give me cash. I use our fitness and some other fringe benefits, but I feel the same way about those: Just don't and instead of just put the cost into my check. Kid benefits also rub me the wrong way because the benefit is frequently huge and the world does not need more kids. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Apr 27, 2021 |
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Apr 27, 2021 01:37
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froglet posted:And today, I accidentally updated everything in a table in the database, and not in a good way. I was working on creating a specific scenario in our demo environment for a demo someone is doing on Tuesday, I noticed a typo, and because our UI doesn't allow you to correct typos in our system (yes this is dumb, I know), I did an UPDATE statement and somehow I missed the WHERE clause and got that terrible sinking feeling when I realised I had renamed more than 16,000 rows from whatever they were previously to something about getting qualified in gas installation and plumbing. Thankfully, the senior developer was able to restore it from a recent backup. But man, that moment I realised what I'd done and the pit of my stomach fell out.. Not great. I'm pretty sure critically scuffing a database is a time-honored tradition and more of a rite of passage. Each member of our team has at least some story of just really wrecking a DB in some way. I wrecked our telemetry completely by overwriting timestamps. Another person deleted 2 million records by 'migrating' the data to nowhere...somehow. Another person on our team actually completely wrecked the entire thing by killing the service on the host because a query 'seemed slow'. You are in good company.
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Apr 30, 2021 18:29
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Cugel the Clever posted:I'm frustrated by my org's QA folks. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that devs and QA collaborate to develop and document an explicit test plan with steps and behavior to be validated in order to reliably cover all our bases, have a record of doing so, and be able to reuse it the next time. But folks just come up with some broad areas to look into and "poke around at", resulting in everyone covering the same obvious paths and neglecting less-obvious poo poo we'd have known to look for with just a bit of forethought. How big is your project and updates? How well staffed is your QA team and what other things are they working on? Test plans that truly cover every component of software, or even a critical path are difficult to craft in a way that makes everyone happy. Development and QA both want confidence, but how you achieve that and what's realistic to achieve depends a great deal on the kind of software you build, and your QA departments maturity and depth. Speaking for games, expecting compete end-to-end testing is not happening. The plan is frequently to figure out what stuff is more likely to fail, and regress the most important systems. This is also coming from a very well-oiled QA team and other teams in the industry are uh...much worse. If your software has a more manageable number of possible states on it's critical path than a game, then some kind of automation may be a more ideal approach. Regardless, this is a complex process, but one that is better navigated when Dev is explicit about what it expects out of QA, and QA works with dev and better explains the limitations of the department and what's reasonable within a given time frame. Expect a lot less if your QA is mostly temp and contract.
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May 17, 2021 23:35
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I'd treat anything Atlassian as a last resort. Their software isn't great. The licensing is absurd. Most of it half works around the edges. The killer features are that they play nice together and something like Jira is infinitely customizable (in theory, not in practice). They built a business successfully on marketing their tools to middle manager types who want to see shiny charts and graphs while having no idea how to actually audit the strengths and weaknesses of the software.
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May 23, 2021 08:35
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There is no way a dev team worth their salt is NOT going to shred your first PR. As others have said, as long as it's stuff like, 'This is not the convention we use' and not 'ur bad and you should feel bad', that's a good sign. They want to mold you into a better engineer and I'd personally be really scared if my first PR with a new team doesn't get a lot of feedback. Speaking of which, I start on said new team in 2 weeks. I'm excited and scared. My background is a lot of C# and C++ and I think my first project will be Python, a language I haven't touched in years, so it'll be fun/scary to spin back up on that. I expect my PRs to get shredded.
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May 26, 2021 23:46
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At the very least, something like "You're not really close here" needs to be followed up with very specific critique. Is it in violation of style guides? Is the run time bad? (if so, how?) Is there actually just a set of bugs at run time here that they spotted? Furthermore, you don't need to actually pepper that kind of feedback with that attack. You can just say, 'The runtime here is super bad. You shouldn't be searching a list n times for a result, you should be using a hashmap which saves substantial time' (or whatever the problem would be). +1 to schedule a one-on-one
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Jun 4, 2021 21:40
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Has anyone tried to implement something like StreamDeck or a LoupeDeck into their workflow for Visual Studio / VSCode? I've been working on a list of 'things I'd like to be able to do in one button', and it's getting to a critical mass such that I'm considering getting one of these devices. A LoupeDeck in particular seems substantially more flexible, but will likely require more specific configuration. Honestly though, if I can make it work, I'd love to try and investigate what it would take to put some functionality on those kinds of devices.
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Jun 14, 2021 05:48
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Github Desktop is a pretty good. It doesn't have all the features of git, but it's easy and fast to do the basic stuff. The real killer feature though is that it shows file deltas in the interface -- I really like that.
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Jun 26, 2021 19:09
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:A gui is supposed to present the options available to the user in a visual manner so they don't have to remember commands. The GIT guis do this successfully. The problem is that if you don't understand what those options do or why you would use them, you won't be able to successfully use GIT - the GUIs present the options just fine, but the GUI doesn't turn a non-git user into a git user. I've never bothered learning CLI Git and have lived on Github for Desktop forever. I have a pretty OK-ish understanding of exactly what's happening, but I've definitely let the app abstract away a lot of poo poo that I don't want to think about.
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Jul 5, 2021 19:55
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Armauk posted:I'd get this if there was a buy-it-once option. I can't stand yearly subscriptions to software. Yep - I was really interested in this until I got to licensing and payment. Charge me whatever you want, but I'm not doing anything but a perpetual license. Affinity has gotten a lot of my money because Adobe just really doesn't want my money.
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Jul 13, 2021 21:59
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Posting therapy time: I feel like the way my team solves problems is pretty much the exact polar opposite of the way I'd solve problems and this kills my motivation to do work stuff out. So put me on the 'I just don't feel like working' bus.
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Sep 23, 2021 00:59
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lifg posted:This is the greatest thing and I will accept no disagreement. This is the dumbest thing I've read since trump got banned on Twitter
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Nov 6, 2021 03:19
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Doom Mathematic posted:What if I put on the chain that Greg Isenberg is a big idiot who should never be listened to? Hypothetically. His smart contract will forever be tainted with such a note until consensus is broken, and he and his 7 friends who's twitters are just blockchain word salad might care.
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Nov 7, 2021 21:39
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This guy is just a factory of really stupid poo poo: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg/status/1458061300374949888 Ah yes, the legendary MVP without any P at all.
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Nov 10, 2021 23:56
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I'm increasingly convinced that the culture of microservices has given the entire industry brain worms. Everyone seems to have forgotten that poo poo doesn't need to be complicated.
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Feb 10, 2022 19:05
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I've only ever received an used macbook, because buying a new machine for every new hire would be hilarious stupid and wasteful, unless the headcount itself is new. I usually request a PC though and I'd say 50/50 I get a new PC. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Feb 23, 2022 |
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Feb 23, 2022 22:19
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In my very early years as a sys admin, I actually had a subscription to Experts Exchange and got good value out of it, so there's that I suppose.
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Feb 24, 2022 05:54
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I have never seen the point of remote dev environments. If you are doing something where you need horsepower, put a 5950X and boatload of memory on a local machine and let it fly. You can make that real for under $1500. I don't even think remote dev spaces offer something fatter than that anyway. If you are paying for an equivalent box In The Cloud™, you'll break even in 3 months. If you are bound to MacOS...that sucks. As I see it, if you have a reason to use something like Codespaces, you should just build a box. The experience is better for the developer. The cost is lower on the timescale of 'months'. You can actually customize your environment. You can more deliberately spec out the hardware.
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Mar 10, 2022 22:37
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prom candy posted:When you say build a box do you mean build a PC in my house that I shell into to do development, or build a PC and use it as my dev machine? I have strong opinions about MacOS, so that might color a lot of my thoughts here. I say build a box and use it as your dev machine. Reducing complexity in the chain from 'idea > dev > build > test' is very valuable to me. Being able to run VS, build, and test on the same box is a big deal. To that end, I strongly support the idea of building a beefy box that you work on as your primary dev box. However, if you must be on a laptop, that's a bummer, but then my solution would be to do the latter: RDP into Windows or remote into a Linux box that serves as your main dev machine. My personal setup is that I have a monster desktop that serves as my main dev machine, and a Macbook that is nothing but an RDP client to access said machine when I can't be there physically for whatever reason. CPColin posted:My new team since the reorg keeps asking me if I want to switch to AWS Workspaces and I don't know how many ways I need to tell them it would be adding the lag of a network round-trip for zero gain before they get it and stop asking. It's worse than gaining zero. Latency aside, the boxes you are renting from AWS are pretty lovely. The top end, non-GPU box has 8 logical cores, 32 GB of memory and 275 GB of storage and you are paying $140/month for it. You could just build an equivalent machine and then some for <$700 right now. A Ryzen 3600 is going to outrun that VM. If you have correctly identified that developer time is more expensive then hardware, then you will quickly realize you are burning up enormous amounts of cash compared to the sheer time save you'd realize out of a top end consumer Zen 3 or Alder Lake unit would net you. It's so bizarre. I have no idea how remote workspaces get business. There is nothing to be gained here but pain. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Mar 10, 2022 |
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Mar 10, 2022 22:55
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Working with AWS et al makes me want to go back to just buying my own hardware and renting half a rack (unless I really do need to do goofy scaling things). For every magical thing cloud services do 'for free', there is some bullshit lurking in the background. It's like, the biggest monkey's paw in tech. The problem is always upfront cost in both hardware and config. I'm looking into that right now for a potential service a friends and I want to start up. We'd save big on the monthly and have all the freedom and flexibility that comes with having your own hardware, but the upfront costs are gross and honestly I could swallow that pill if I didn't have to deal with maintenence. I'm so, so sick of having to deal with critical data /config...
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Mar 15, 2022 22:59
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cum jabbar posted:What's the use case for a web IDE? Programmers too dumb to set up their own environments? It's something you can sell as an overpriced SaaS product to a team lead or C-level who's never actually done real work in the last ten years. ... Oh, why is it useful to an engineering team? Uh... Something something the cloud.
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Mar 18, 2022 00:58
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