algeoMA

You can get a small cluster from Digital Ocean pretty cheaply. It's more than $5 (I forget the exact price) but they'll provide a free master node and then you just pay for one additional kubelet (and you can add more as you need them). I have used it for one hobby project and have been pretty happy with it.

I won't reconstruct the reply I wrote to someone else but I agree hackathons are not a silver bullet (and I probably misused the term). Solving the tech debt problem is a whole other can of worms.

I don't think hackathons are always a gimmick, but then again I was probably too loose with my word choice. I mostly meant a period of sustained cooperation with a small group where most of the time is spent together, all meetings are canceled, and you don't try to split up work into bite sized pieces with any formality (like a story/jira ticket).

I agree that organizations that don't trust their engineers with any design or implementation decisions are wasting their talent and probably creating a lot of bored and burned out engineers. If an engineer wants to use a fancy new piece of tech and they can justify it, let them do it.

The benefit of the tiny tasks model is that you don't build stuff people don't care about. Features/bugs exist in a survival of the fittest world and the lowest priority ones never get built/fixed. This was one of the big problems with "hero in the back office coding for months and emerging with a product".

The tiny tasks model also lets you ship updates to the end user much faster and also ensures the product is never in a half-broken state. It's also more robust when you don't have a team of all-star programmers.

I agree that building big projects on your own (or with a tiny team of motivated folks and no mandated meetings) is way more fun and sometimes far more productive. But that's why I think it's important to incorporate things like hackathons and prototype phases into the engineering department. Each software development model has its strengths and should be used when appropriate.

The ebird app is handy. You can use it to get a crowdsourced rarity estimate on an unidentified bird when you're in the field - handy when you're trying to decide between two species (the more common one is a safer bet).

Still, you must concede that the parade of "rusty muffler" arguments are a silly compared to a legitimate housing crisis. Not everything our neighbors/family/friends do makes us happy. And hey, they might have a rusty muffler, but maybe they're less snobbish and more friendly. So while it's totally reasonable to be worried about traffic and school crowding, I feel people should at least try a bit harder to shrug their shoulders about the little things and give it a chance.

Declaring that low-income people won't obey noise ordinances is extremely classist in my view. Yes, tell residents before they move in that the area has strict noise ordinances, and then hand out tickets for violators. But don't block affordable housing simply because it "might happen".

It's more the sneering, condescending tone of the comment that I thought was jaw-dropping. Sure, noise ordinances are reasonable. But labeling poor people as loud - and thus undesirable - is not okay. I can't believe I even had to explain this to be honest.

From the article: "“Low-income people tend to own cars that are in disrepair and ride motorcycles adding to the noise of a ‘lights out at 8 p.m. community,’” Marylyn Rinaldi, a neighboring condominium owner, wrote in 2011 in a letter to the City Council that was later cited in a lawsuit over the project." Nimbyism at its finest.

I also hope this happens. It would be interesting too, if it was bidirectional (services paying you to use them. Payment for your data, essentially).