Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
This whole thing is about some people being more equal than others.
Comment · 4 years ago
This really doesn't seem like a good idea.

I've seen exactly this situation before and it went to hell pretty quickly. The new engineers genuinely have no idea what they have on their hands until something goes snap. And it will go snap.

Comment · 4 years ago
Actually on dating, whatever grabs attention grabs attention. What wins is the genuine connections made.

Twitter lacks the latter. It's just attention.

Comment · 4 years ago
Just a heads up. Powerpoles melt too. Nasty things.
Comment · 4 years ago
I would be happy to produce something that ended up in there. At least it would serve an educational purpose :)
Comment · 4 years ago
Amazing you can apparently start a scam call centre with less administrative effort …
Comment · 4 years ago
Yes you’re not going to get anywhere from inside the system but the system is propped up by a faction of people who have vested interests in making money out of short term thinking.

The only solution is to target those people directly and make it too risky to do business which is environmentally reckless.

Comment · 4 years ago
Look up Roger Hallam. Tied to XR as well. There’s plenty of people distancing themselves from him now including XR.
Comment · 4 years ago
Actually the guy who set up Just Stop Oil was interviewed a while back and said it was never about climate but being against the system. Managed to loop a bunch of lunatics into doing his bidding initially.

As for Aileen Getty, I'm on the fence. I think she has good intentions but threw money at these morons.

As for the morons, while I agree the message is good, the approach does nothing but damage the cause. They recently smashed all the pumps at my local petrol station. All that you end up with is pissed off people who associate the cause with negative people. This is a universally downward spiral.

Comment · 4 years ago
Honestly I don’t write that many tests these days other than integration and functional tests. The assertions are incredibly good at breaking those if anything goes wrong so you need less (unit) test cases. The test cases are always brittle too.

As for strategies, I pepper asserts on inputs and outputs of functions to remove any assumptions about scale and state which are not enforceable by the contract at compile time. Additionally I will tend to assert conditions which need to be in place within the functions. Rarely does anything need any more than that.

Assertions are left in production and any identifiable errors or throws are turned into defects and resolved as priority 1 cases.

Comment · 4 years ago
As an engineer I regularly get pulled into customer calls.

It's really important to know how disconnected you are from customers. On every single occasion at every organisation I have worked for I have discovered great disparity between the user's desires and problems and what is communicated through the layers.

Layering communication is dangerous!

Also quite frankly sometimes it's only engineering who can turn an angry customer back into a happy one because they are the only people who can really action change.

Comment · 4 years ago
Fail fast. Adding assertions everywhere helped me write software which does less unexpected stuff and is more reliable.
Comment · 4 years ago
I am here now as well.
Comment · 4 years ago
About ten years ago I deleted the 10 gig of email I had floating around. I delete everything now. Haven’t needed any of it yet.

If I do need to keep something I print it to a pdf and file that in documents and that’s about 20 emails so far.

Comment · 4 years ago
Yeah I have a vimrc but it’s only about 8 lines long. I usually type it from memory.

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