The U.S. healthcare system traps people in companies, for fear of losing access to reliable healthcare. A system that was completely independent from employers would be much more beneficial to employees. Plus, it would save huge administrative costs for private companies. This would especially benefit small companies, but, really, it would make the job of running any company much easier.
Swoop in to the sounds of Jan Hammer’s Crocketts Theme with his Tesla staff entourage, you’re fired you’re fired, sit down, hack the planet, job done, planet bows before him, free speech restored.
How it turned out:
“Um, boss, we’ve spent the last three days trying to get a build running in Jenkins. Might want to get the dudes you fired back.”. While all the advertisers distance themselves from the unravelling incel, racist, sexist shit show.
You joined Tesla to build cars of the future and bring self driving to the masses and then they ask you to review some other companys codebase, so that the boss can fire bunch of people.
Yay, I will do my absolute best.
I agree with it. There a rare subspecies of developers who enjoy fixing bugs. The more rare and obscure, the better. Maybe they derive the same kind of pleasure as a police detective solving a hard case.
I do believe they should be princely rewarded and I would hope there would be more of these people as this will allow us the people who enjoy building concentrate on it.
I believe there was a thread on HN two days ago of a guy who enjoys fixing bugs asking how he can make a business out of it. Chapeau to him!
I don't care about the products I work on. I don't own the product, I don't work for an NGO willing to change the world and the product would probably won't revolutionize the industry.
The product's only purpose is to make some people rich. And I don't care for it.
What I care about is being paid, learning, advancing my career and not being bored to death while I work.
So I do quality work because of that. I don't enjoy fixing bugs (some people do), so if I can avoid fixing bugs, I'm happier. I also try to ship as least bugs as possible and I test my code before pushing it. The code has to pass an QA cycle so I will fix my bugs if any. But if some bug is coming from production I'd rather pass on it and take on a feature instead.
> I once reviewed code for a company that got purchased. I took less than a few hours to reach conclusion. There were 7 developers and in 2 months only one was writing code. The entire team but that one developer was fired. Twitter has grown a reputation for being slow and a rest and vest haven. Won't be surprised if they are looking for people not writing code.
I ran across some developers (in multiple orgs over the years) that would produce large amount of almost purposefully unmaintainable code. Yes, they were “productive”, and no, the stuff they produced made no difference and was a waste (both features wise and code wise since). 100% of these codebases turned out to be unsalvageable and were rewritten. It just would usually take orgs many months, usually after such developers leave to realize the complete and utter waste they left.
Not saying there are no slackers, it’s just productive devs are not necessarily those that produce the most of code.
- Q4 wearables of $9.6B, beats est byu close to $1B
- Q4 Services Rev fo $19.2B short of Est by $800M
- Q4 iphone Rev of $42.6B meets Est
- Q4 ipad Rev of $7.2B, short of Est by $600M
- Q4 Rev of $90.2B beats Est by $2B, that also means its up 8ish% YoY
- Q4 Mac Revenue of $11.5B, beats by $2B, nice, forgot they make computers;)
- China Rev of $15.5B, this is interesting, AAPL clearly has alot of China exposure in a time when that can go away in an instant.
- declared a cash div of $0.23/share
Interesting:
- AAPL hiking prices on Apple One, up $2, Music up $1/month, TV up $2,
- they generated over $24B in cash
- they returned $29B to investors this quarter, wow, them and MSFT and cash flow machines, maybe the only two tech companies you want to hodl right now
- they have only spent $300M on acquisitions this year, that doesn't seem like alot.
Watch for:
- lots of currency exposure in this company, does the USD strength help or hurt them, or are they really good at hedging currency risk?
- AAPLE has $23B in cash, down 1/3 from this time last year. Mostly given back to investors. Probably nothing to worry about here:)
- $3 trillion in market cap has been lost in the past year among 7 of the biggest stocks. $GOOG $MSFT $META $AMZN $TSLA $NFLX $AAPL( from twitter)
- from bloomberg, Maestri said Apple will likely see 10 percentage points of currency impact in the first quarter.
That is alot, and a significant headwind.
That could be an entire paypal worth of currency drag
One of the things I have a hard time conveying to non-parents is that the most time-intensive parts of parenting don't last forever.
I've talked to a lot of young people who say they don't want kids because they think their personal lives will permanently halt the moment they have kids. I spend a lot of time trying to explain that:
1) I still spend a lot of time with friends and can do most of my personal hobbies/activities on weekends. My wife and I are good at sharing the load. You don't need 2 parents watching kids 100% of the time.
2) The sleepless nights and diaper changes are a mere blip on the scale of a lifetime with kids. You deal with it, then the kids grow up quicker than you think. Don't let the idea of the first few months/years define your entire decision for how you want to structure your family for the rest of your life.
3) You actually like hanging out with your own kids. I talk to a lot of people who are anchored to some negative experience they had 10 years ago babysitting for someone else's kids, as if that was representative of parenting life. It's not at all. At the end of the day, I actually rush to finish up my work so I can have more kid time. It's fun.
Ok, I have a lot of experience in this area and recently was a key contributor in migrating our 200+ person design department over to Figma from Sketch beginning in early 2022.
The only thing I can't speak to is the first point since all of that evaluation and decision making process was routed to people far above my paygrade. So to your other bulletpoints:
2. There are many alternatives to Figma - the industry standard in UI/UX design was Sketch from about 2013. Figma began really emerging in 2017-2019, and then skyrocketed in marketshare during the COVID pandemic[0]. uxtools.co is a great resource for data around this - not just as it pertains to the current Adobe/Figma context but as a year-to-year "State of UX design tools" pulse check.
However, and this is key: not one competitor holds a candle to both the amount of features and designer-friendly implementation of said features that Figma has. I have seen some of the staunchiest "It's just another design tool, it'll be replaced! Sketch is fine! The tools don't matter, it's your UX skills that are most important" crowd capitulate the superiority of Figma after getting to dig in for a while.
Sketch has been falling behind for years and hasn't even began to catch up. Other competitors like Adobe XD, UXPin, InVision Studio feel like clunky stripped-down Figma knockoffs in comparison. Webflow and Framer are too niche in my mind to be considered competitors: those are GUI-based low/no-code landing page builders. Those do not serve the needs of a UX practice, especially one at scale.
Someone will see this comment and say "but, Penpot!" Sure, that is potentially a viable competitor, but it is still in infancy though they did just raise a big round [1]. They went live I think mid-2021. And virtually nobody knew who they were until the day the Figma acquisition was announced. I would estimate that the adoption rate among mature teams right now is effectively zero. It looks like a great product and I am so thrilled someone is putting out an OSS design tool that looks competent, but it is far too early to call them a competitor as far as I am concerned.
3. Not that I've observed. I am sure they have aped some of Figma's features in XD in the last handful of years, but looking at the XD landing page now, the product looks the same to me as it did in 2017.
4. The biggest fears among my industry peers that I have observed:
-Fear of Figma being bundled into Adobe Creative Cloud, which is viewed largely as an annoying workflow dependency that only exists to keep recurring revenue going to Adobe and interrupt you with an update modal from time to time. People really hate OS-level depedencies that suck precious RAM. This is another reason people love Figma - they understand that nobody wants both Figma AND the "Figma Cloud Uploader" running 40+ hours a week on their work Macbook, bogging your system resources down. This was another point InVision fucked up - having the Craft suite running behind Sketch all the time is a shitty experience.
-Fear of Figma becoming less performant over time. Adobe products became synonymous with the pinwheel of death on MacOS. There have been a crop of memes in the design industry social realms [2] visualizing that future.
Figma have done some brilliant work in performance and architecture. Many of their engineering blog posts have been shared on HN. The post about building a plugin API, IIRC, generated a lot of discussion [3].
I only mention that because Figma leadership are saying that Adobe wants to learn from Figma's team on how to improve performance and architecture of their existing products. If THAT is true, then that actually strikes me as a win-win for everyone: if Adobe leaves Figma to their devices but uses insight from them to improve Adobe legacy products, I feel like everyone wins.
Of course, this could all just be honeymoon period, "grand plans post-acquisition" talk from newly minted wealthy folks. Lots of designers are expecting Adobe to take their enterprise chainsaw to Figma and fuck it all up for us. I am trying to be optimistic. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Figma fanboy and have been doing advocacy work (for free, stupidly, but whatever) for them for years. I hope the team will continue to build on what was a revolutionary change in design tooling for the industry. They insist that this is the case and that they and Adobe are committed to keeping things that way. Most people I know in the industry are not so positive about it.
> they really embody this notion that every billionaire is a policy failure.
If only more people realised this. Instead we do the opposite and worship the system which make them happen.
Very inspiring overall. I've always heard good things about the company but never knew of the founder. There's something about seeing one carry such dignified ideals throughout their life, without wavering to societal expectations, that is so admirable.
git clone https://github.com/compumike/crystal-docker-quickstart.git my_app
cd my_app
./d_dev
# docker container spins up in a few seconds... within the container's bash shell, try:
make spec
make && out/my_app
# outside container, you may edit src/main.cr, save it, and then again within container:
make && out/my_app
If I may, I made one using restic that seems much easier to use [0]. You only need a dumb storage host and no database. Restic takes care of the indexing and we use snapshots just like commits.
Top-most comment to the link you provided pretty much explains the situation. TDD is a software development method, not a generic problem solving method. If one doesn’t know how a Sudoku solver works, applying TDD or any other software development method won’t help.
I could write an entire blog post on my opinions on this topic. I continue to be extremely skeptical of TDD. It is sort of infamous but there is the incident where a TDD proponent tries and fails to develop a sudoku solver and keeps failing at it [1].
This kind of situation matches my experience. It was cemented when I worked with a guy who was a zealot about TDD and the whole Clean Code cabal around Uncle Bob. He was also one of the worst programmers I have worked with.
I don't mean to say that whole mindset is necessarily bad. I just found that becoming obsessed with it isn't sufficient. I've worked with guys who have never written a single test yet ship code that does the job, meets performance specs, and runs in production environments with no issues. And I've worked with guys who get on their high horse about TDD but can't ship code on time, or it is too slow, and it has constant issues in production.
No amount of rationalizing about the theoretical benefits can match my experience. I do not believe you can take a bad programmer and make them good by forcing them to adhere to TDD.
What is everyone building in rust, and how do the killer rust features (mentioned in other comments) help you?
I'm not anti rust in any way, it's more of having limited time and so many languages problem. But I'm interested in the types of problems rust is good for, so I could consider it if/when I encounter them
Lots of people complain about Kubernetes complexity but I have found it is as complex as you make it. If you are running some simple workloads then once you have the pipeline setup, there is almost no maintenance required.
When people complain and then start talking about super complex configuration, bespoke networking functionality and helm charts that have "too many options" then surely that just means you don't have the skills to use the system to that degree?
I could say that .Net is too complicated because it has MSIL and library binding sequences involving versions and public keys and the fact you can not always link e.g. netfx with netstandard but these are either just things you need to learn, or things that you can't use until you do learn them.
It's like someone complaining that a Ferrari is too complicated because you can't work out how to change the cylinder head when most people will just drive it.
I always say stay in use1 because almost everybody is there and when it's suffering any kind of outage so much of the internet is affected that it's no big deal that you're a part of the outage. People just go outside and get some air knowing it will be back up in a few hours, usually right around the time the AWS status page acknowledges that there is an issue.
Microsoft would license their burger recipe. All the licensees would sell unique, subpar versions. They'd also for some reason have a $10 billion contract to supply burgers to the military.
Apple would sell exactly one kind of burger, which is great but costs $20. The wrapper is rose gold or space grey. Only Apple-certified condiments can be applied to the burgers, and a packet of ketchup is $5. Each year the faithful queue outside for the privilege of obtaining the latest burger.
Google would open up 5 competing, different burger places next to each other and then close them all down a year later, confused that none of them did well enough. All to open a new Taco stand on the other side of town and claim it's got the same great food you liked before (it doesn't).
Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/
I've tried to type out several pithy comments, but the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.
Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac, but it's not on the menu anymore because Taco Bell had a few really good quarters, so McDonald's decided to pivot to tacos. Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted.
Edit: To clarify, this example is contrived and the details are not the point. The point is that Facebook offered something to their users, spent years and billions of dollars making sure that as many people as possible got it from Facebook, and then decided to just yank the rug out from under all those people to chase the fairy tale of endless growth.
> Despite a long and storied career in software development, I have few abstract problem-solving skills. I proceed through problems in increments, getting slightly better each time. The beneficial thing for you that my experience brings is that I can do it really fast. Fast enough to deliver a working piece of software in a timeframe that won’t bankrupt you.
> Never in my entire career have I whiteboarded a solution that even remotely survived contact with software frameworks, APIs and hardware constraints. A hundred different gotchas and restrictions lay in wait. The only way through them to a resilient solution is one step at a time. So, I can’t show you anything meaningful with Leetcode challenges unless I practice them as a discrete skill.
This, 1000x. This whole piece nails it, but this really jumped out.
I succeed and excel because I actually get things done, rather than "mostly done". No interview methodology ever can hope to screen for this. Or any of the other things mentioned above.
The process is getting worse, not better, and this piece rightly points out why.
The question of whether to use K8s or not is like wondering what kind of saw you should use to cut wood. There's different saws for different purposes. But even with the right saw, you still have to know how to use it correctly. Better to use a hand saw correctly than a table saw incorrectly. (you can use a table saw incorrectly, but best case the work ends up crap, worst case you lose a finger)
After building infrastructure for dozens of teams, I'm quite convinced of the following:
- if your people aren't very skilled, they won't build anything well. most software engineers i've seen professionally working in the cloud are handymen trying to build a wood cabinet.
- if your people can't build well, it doesn't matter what technology they use. choosing between building a cabinet out of metal or cherry wood doesn't make much difference if they've never built a cabinet before.
- if the first two holds: then only use the technology which requires the least skill to use well, and where the amount of maintenance is closest to zero. don't build a wood cabinet from scratch when you can buy flat pack. don't buy flat pack when you can buy an assembled cabinet, get it shipped, and carried into your office.
- if using the aforementioned technology requires 'building' or 'assembling', and that is not core to the customer-facing aspect of your product, then you should not be building, you should be buying. if your business doesn't involve assembling flat pack furniture, don't ask your employees to build their own desks and chairs from Home Depot or Ikea parts. buy the premade desk and chairs, use them to make your actual product.
- a software engineer knows as much about cloud architecture as a fine woodworker knows about framing. "it's all just wood" until the house takes 10x as long to frame and is 10x as expensive and still doesn't meet code.
- people will try to build things they don't fully understand and leave the company before anyone realizes the mess they've made. imagine your retail store is accessible by driving a car over a wooden bridge built by a handyman.
I think it's really deserving of praise that Sheryl managed to join Facebook in 2008, joining right as it was clear Facebook would become a behemoth. She then spent 14 years helping to steer a young Mark Zuckerberg through some of the most immoral, damaging and discrediting decisions a company can make. Now, at the absolutely peak of Facebook, where it's losing users, it's reputation is so bad it literally had to change it's name and "pivot", now she steps aside.
"To the victims of genocides organised on my platform, to the little girls who self-harmed looking at photos on our platform, to the businesses we destroyed through our arbitrary and capricious policy changes, my job is done here, it's been an honor"
