If you want to do any amount serious work such as,
- Write hundreds of e-mails - Write 10k long reports - Code 8 hours a day
You better be using a qwerty keyboard !
I owned touch screen phones, tablets and devices in between such as MS Surface. Non of them are great for any serious work.
Call me outdated, I still use a BlackBerry for writing/drafting e-mails on the go. And yes, I am a keyboard hoarder... every time I come across decent one, I just buy it. My current favourite being MS Ergo 4000.
Not trolling... but I think it is time and right thing to do.
Don't misinterpret me... I worked in a Java house for 4 years. For the life of me, I can't understand why anyone should go for Java solutions at this day and age. Perhaps, it solved some problems around the time it was introduced. Fast forward to today, I find it overly complex, largely irrelevant and struggling to keep up.
I guess Java will haunt all of us for another few decades, similar to Cobol, simply because of Android platform and many other critical software written around it, and the large pool of (barely talented) developers. Good luck!
I worked in an Agile house for 4 years.... and went to local Agile meetups regularly. Overall, my opinion about Agile is bit.. hmmm.. Fragile!
Firstly, Agile is good at getting half-baked products out of the door. Two (2) week cadences, where features to be build, demo and shipped is quite narrow... and you get time to barely test it. Yes, you can demo it is working, but it is the tip of the ice berg. How the feature interact with other features or infrastructure is the iceberg what's below the water surface.
Secondly, Agile is good at sweeping hard work under the carpet. For an example, because there is no centralised architectural thinking or planning, every developer goes wild and build their own architectures... half of them are duplicates doing similar functions (and not to forget, poorly tested). Things like database or API designs generally takes lot of planning and thought process. By design, Agile doesn't allow such lengthy ventures.
Thirdly, Agile not scalable. Agile works best for smaller website projects.. say 5-6 page dynamic websites. If you are to do a huge mission critical project involving 100+ templates, 20+ devs so on... Agile will fail half way point, and you will have to downgrade to Waterfall, and pretend you are doing Agile to your client... which method I christened as "ScrumFall" (after James Bond movie).
Overall, I promote "prototype, maturity and ship" model (I don't know there is an actual name for this). Basically, try out prototypes first.. if it works, then promote to regular development, and finally production. I see JavaScript & C++ language committees adopting a similar work cycle. Overall, they are doing pretty well IMO, with regular releases and good quality.
I have used CoreMedia CMS in my last company. It is an enterprise grade software with lot of bells and whistles. Over the years, it has become better. However, it is somewhat rigid, and not customisation friendly.. this can become a huge problem if your client is a news media outfit trying to reach social media market urgently with crazy creative ideas. Scaling comes at a huge cost, so be ready to buy/rent lots of servers. Furthermore, whole software is written in Java/Spring... which may explain the drain on resources... and if Java is your cup of tea, you may like it (Disclaimer: I hate Java with a passion). And finally, licenses are quite pricey.. so this solution will only work for giant corporations with sizable lucre under their HQ.
Then I happened to work at a hand's distance with WordPress earlier this year. Security is a major problem as many highlighted. There are other administrative issues (e.g. can't make admin accounts for tech staff to troubleshoot things). Unless you have a caching mechanism on the front, expect 10+ seconds of latency YMMV.
In my opinion, there are no one size fits all CMS in the market at this point. All comes with some "gotcha".
Loved playing around with GW-BASIC in early 90s in an early 286 or so. Then enjoyed coding in C/C++ in university years. Recently re-discovering my passion to program with JavaScript.
I've tried many other ugly languages, like Java, Ruby, Python, and some proprietary languages came with corporate software. Naturally, they make you start hating programming in general. YMMV on this.
Like it or not, you got to survive dick-head bosses, power struggles and office politics to have a decent career (more than your coding skills or knowledge)
Former developer and operations (DevOps) guy here, worked for many financial and media outlets; now working as a consultant for remote clients in Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore. By nature of my work, I handle thousands of e-mails, hundreds of voice calls, text messages, WhatsApp, Skype etc on the go.
As for why I still use a BlackBerry: 1. Solid communication device - There is nothing like a BB when it comes to holy trinity (E-mail, voice, text). BlackBerry Hub is an unique app that aggregates all communication details into one place, haven't seen anything like it in other devices. 2. Keyboard - Do I need say more ? 3. Sturdy design - I drop it everyday, still it is working without a hitch 4. Long battery life - Easily a day, if I push, about day-and-half on a single charge 5. Stable OS - It has QNX with proper multi tasking 6. Basic useful/stable apps
I always get slagged off by colleagues, friends and pretty much everybody else for carrying a BB. Fact of the matter is, I am an old geezer with sausage fingers, suffering from early stages of rheumatoid arthritis. As a result, I can't type on touch screens like others. I am not big into social media stuff or any young & hip trends that require all these fancy apps. I am comfortable with the basic & stable apps comes with the OS.
There is nothing like writing a typo free e-mail/text (especially to a client), and ensure intended message is communicated correctly. In that respect, BB is a godsend !
psychology control systems (excluding a few topics, most are un-applicable and highly theoretical) behavioural science statistics economics (more of a snake oil) climate science any theoretical disciplines and the list goes on...
Don't get me wrong.. I am a man of science. As of late, word "science" is used and abused quite badly. For me, it is always the "scientific method" that counts. Body of knowledge is always contestable, unless it has survived the test of time.
p.s. One time, someone asked me "why science can't answer XYZ?". My answer was "Science is a methodical way of exploring the natural world, and not a corpus of answers for all questions out there".
It is amazing how George Orwell predicted all these half-a-century or so ago. Even Yes Minister has one episode on a similar issue, that was three decades back.
Are we ignoring warnings from the past? or decided to be selective in terms of learning from the past?
trying to define where earth's atmosphere ends and space starts.
Interpreting the actual intent of a person, from a sentence he/she wrote, is quite challenging. Especially if you are using a language like English. Not convinced? read this one -> "Is the duck ready to eat?"
On the other end, things can be taken out of context. Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses is a prime example, where all book burners read only certain passages, not the entire novel.
I watch YouTube a lot, on average about 2-3 hours a day. As of late, I live in a country where there is a bandwidth cap of 40 GB/month. And I have no option but to YouTube at 144p to avoid extra bandwidth charges.
I applaud all efforts by tech companies to reduce bandwidth usage (and not to forget, making inter-webs more exciting). Then again, none of those efforts matter, if bandwidth caps are forcing consumers to use internet like back in 90s.
skills that are practically useful in life, such as
1. Self reliance (how to cook, how to do minor repair works around house, etc) 2. Think broadly (do projects that encompasses everything from planning, prototyping, executing, teamwork etc.) 3. Financial management 4. Driving (it is better to start young, see Finland) 5. Surviving outdoors (you never know when you gonna need it) 6. Interacting face-to-face 7. Objective thinking (so that they won't fall into sound-bites of politicians)
I do not foresee "coding" will help anyone in the broader spectrum. Perhaps, it can liberate few talented coders who would've gone to another field. Other than you enter into an STEM career; quite unlikely "coding" will help you survive.
Something peripheral: "coding" projects will only succeed because of other skills i.e planning, team work, communication etc; not because of your "coding" skills it self.
I worked as a developer, and I was one of the rare ones who took QA feedback positively.
By and large, I got along well with QA. Simply because I acknowledged the fact that they helped me a lot in understanding better about developing quality software (at least UX wise). I was always driven to write code that pass QA, which I took as part of my work and pride.
However, not every developer shares the same sentiment as me. They went on to complain and remove QA, and take all that responsibility to them. Great, that's as good as you are the judge for your own court case. Since then, my employer fired all QAs, and ever since, quality reaching new "lows" every quarter.
From the article: "Above all, devops is a cultural philosophy".
Looks like it is another buzz word like Agile. Based on my experience, Agile can be "Fragile" when the team is not committed on it. Beyond that, Agile can NOT be applied to a) large projects b) projects with lot of groundwork and c) dev stack that require long compilation/building process. Most Agile/Scrum projects I worked end up falling back to a semi "Waterfall" workflow while still doing some Agile stuff (which I happily coined "ScrumFall" after the penultimate James Bond movie.)
Having said all that, jury is still out there as to whether there is something called DevOps. Only time can tell I suppose. Just my $0.02.
1. Hopefully the death of Java and similar GC knock-off languages like C#. World would be a really nice place without them. 2. Expect demise/marginalising of dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, etc (Python may survive for a bit, as some of the NLP libraries are written in it). 3. Expect JavaScript to be the de-facto language. In fact, it has become on the web. But yet to see it getting closer to OS and general hardware. 4. C/C++ will remain there as long as there are hardware and peripherals. Fortran because of research and stuff. 5. Maybe the second coming of Functional Languages. I expected languages like F# to take off rapidly, but still haven't seen any momentum. Likely, they will have its day when more and more cores are squeezed into the CPU.
Work wise
1. Nothing will change... still there will be incompetent managers, unrealistic timelines and unworkable workflows (agile, scrum, waterfall)
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to do any amount serious work such as,
- Write hundreds of e-mails
- Write 10k long reports
- Code 8 hours a day
You better be using a qwerty keyboard !
I owned touch screen phones, tablets and devices in between such as MS Surface. Non of them are great for any serious work.
Call me outdated, I still use a BlackBerry for writing/drafting e-mails on the go. And yes, I am a keyboard hoarder... every time I come across decent one, I just buy it. My current favourite being MS Ergo 4000.
Linux on desktop... finally arrives in 2017 !!!
I mean seriously... M$ is doing a great job on that... check here:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/...
Not trolling... but I think it is time and right thing to do.
Don't misinterpret me... I worked in a Java house for 4 years. For the life of me, I can't understand why anyone should go for Java solutions at this day and age. Perhaps, it solved some problems around the time it was introduced. Fast forward to today, I find it overly complex, largely irrelevant and struggling to keep up.
I guess Java will haunt all of us for another few decades, similar to Cobol, simply because of Android platform and many other critical software written around it, and the large pool of (barely talented) developers. Good luck!
Floppy's ultimate demise came about because of USB technology, which was superior and did much more than just a storage technology.
Somebody please enlighten me, what's the technology making 3.5mm redundant at this point?
I worked in an Agile house for 4 years.... and went to local Agile meetups regularly. Overall, my opinion about Agile is bit.. hmmm.. Fragile!
Firstly, Agile is good at getting half-baked products out of the door. Two (2) week cadences, where features to be build, demo and shipped is quite narrow... and you get time to barely test it. Yes, you can demo it is working, but it is the tip of the ice berg. How the feature interact with other features or infrastructure is the iceberg what's below the water surface.
Secondly, Agile is good at sweeping hard work under the carpet. For an example, because there is no centralised architectural thinking or planning, every developer goes wild and build their own architectures... half of them are duplicates doing similar functions (and not to forget, poorly tested). Things like database or API designs generally takes lot of planning and thought process. By design, Agile doesn't allow such lengthy ventures.
Thirdly, Agile not scalable. Agile works best for smaller website projects.. say 5-6 page dynamic websites. If you are to do a huge mission critical project involving 100+ templates, 20+ devs so on... Agile will fail half way point, and you will have to downgrade to Waterfall, and pretend you are doing Agile to your client... which method I christened as "ScrumFall" (after James Bond movie).
Overall, I promote "prototype, maturity and ship" model (I don't know there is an actual name for this). Basically, try out prototypes first.. if it works, then promote to regular development, and finally production. I see JavaScript & C++ language committees adopting a similar work cycle. Overall, they are doing pretty well IMO, with regular releases and good quality.
I have used CoreMedia CMS in my last company. It is an enterprise grade software with lot of bells and whistles. Over the years, it has become better. However, it is somewhat rigid, and not customisation friendly.. this can become a huge problem if your client is a news media outfit trying to reach social media market urgently with crazy creative ideas. Scaling comes at a huge cost, so be ready to buy/rent lots of servers. Furthermore, whole software is written in Java/Spring... which may explain the drain on resources... and if Java is your cup of tea, you may like it (Disclaimer: I hate Java with a passion). And finally, licenses are quite pricey.. so this solution will only work for giant corporations with sizable lucre under their HQ.
Then I happened to work at a hand's distance with WordPress earlier this year. Security is a major problem as many highlighted. There are other administrative issues (e.g. can't make admin accounts for tech staff to troubleshoot things). Unless you have a caching mechanism on the front, expect 10+ seconds of latency YMMV.
In my opinion, there are no one size fits all CMS in the market at this point. All comes with some "gotcha".
Loved playing around with GW-BASIC in early 90s in an early 286 or so.
Then enjoyed coding in C/C++ in university years.
Recently re-discovering my passion to program with JavaScript.
I've tried many other ugly languages, like Java, Ruby, Python, and some proprietary languages came with corporate software. Naturally, they make you start hating programming in general. YMMV on this.
Bridgekeeper: What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
King Arthur: What do you mean? An African or European swallow?
Spoiler: This is from the bridge scene of Monty Python's Holy Grail !
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Like it or not, you got to survive dick-head bosses, power struggles and office politics to have a decent career (more than your coding skills or knowledge)
After all, we gonna see linux on every desktop once M$ rolls out linux bash on win10.
Heck.. I never thought this could ever happen.
First and foremost, this is old news!
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Former developer and operations (DevOps) guy here, worked for many financial and media outlets; now working as a consultant for remote clients in Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore. By nature of my work, I handle thousands of e-mails, hundreds of voice calls, text messages, WhatsApp, Skype etc on the go.
As for why I still use a BlackBerry:
1. Solid communication device - There is nothing like a BB when it comes to holy trinity (E-mail, voice, text). BlackBerry Hub is an unique app that aggregates all communication details into one place, haven't seen anything like it in other devices.
2. Keyboard - Do I need say more ?
3. Sturdy design - I drop it everyday, still it is working without a hitch
4. Long battery life - Easily a day, if I push, about day-and-half on a single charge
5. Stable OS - It has QNX with proper multi tasking
6. Basic useful/stable apps
I always get slagged off by colleagues, friends and pretty much everybody else for carrying a BB. Fact of the matter is, I am an old geezer with sausage fingers, suffering from early stages of rheumatoid arthritis. As a result, I can't type on touch screens like others. I am not big into social media stuff or any young & hip trends that require all these fancy apps. I am comfortable with the basic & stable apps comes with the OS.
There is nothing like writing a typo free e-mail/text (especially to a client), and ensure intended message is communicated correctly. In that respect, BB is a godsend !
Ancient Greece had a direct democracy, but as the population gets bigger, country has to move to a representatives system.
As for ideas, how about using a Block Chain system similar to BitCoin to counter voting frauds?
psychology
control systems (excluding a few topics, most are un-applicable and highly theoretical)
behavioural science
statistics
economics (more of a snake oil)
climate science
any theoretical disciplines
and the list goes on...
Don't get me wrong.. I am a man of science. As of late, word "science" is used and abused quite badly. For me, it is always the "scientific method" that counts. Body of knowledge is always contestable, unless it has survived the test of time.
p.s.
One time, someone asked me "why science can't answer XYZ?".
My answer was "Science is a methodical way of exploring the natural world, and not a corpus of answers for all questions out there".
proof:
left -> left -> left = right
It is amazing how George Orwell predicted all these half-a-century or so ago.
Even Yes Minister has one episode on a similar issue, that was three decades back.
Are we ignoring warnings from the past? or decided to be selective in terms of learning from the past?
trying to define where earth's atmosphere ends and space starts.
Interpreting the actual intent of a person, from a sentence he/she wrote, is quite challenging.
Especially if you are using a language like English. Not convinced? read this one -> "Is the duck ready to eat?"
On the other end, things can be taken out of context. Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses is a prime example, where all book burners read only certain passages, not the entire novel.
I watch YouTube a lot, on average about 2-3 hours a day. As of late, I live in a country where there is a bandwidth cap of 40 GB/month. And I have no option but to YouTube at 144p to avoid extra bandwidth charges.
I applaud all efforts by tech companies to reduce bandwidth usage (and not to forget, making inter-webs more exciting). Then again, none of those efforts matter, if bandwidth caps are forcing consumers to use internet like back in 90s.
skills that are practically useful in life, such as
1. Self reliance (how to cook, how to do minor repair works around house, etc)
2. Think broadly (do projects that encompasses everything from planning, prototyping, executing, teamwork etc.)
3. Financial management
4. Driving (it is better to start young, see Finland)
5. Surviving outdoors (you never know when you gonna need it)
6. Interacting face-to-face
7. Objective thinking (so that they won't fall into sound-bites of politicians)
I do not foresee "coding" will help anyone in the broader spectrum. Perhaps, it can liberate few talented coders who would've gone to another field. Other than you enter into an STEM career; quite unlikely "coding" will help you survive.
Something peripheral: "coding" projects will only succeed because of other skills i.e planning, team work, communication etc; not because of your "coding" skills it self.
I worked as a developer, and I was one of the rare ones who took QA feedback positively.
By and large, I got along well with QA. Simply because I acknowledged the fact that they helped me a lot in understanding better about developing quality software (at least UX wise). I was always driven to write code that pass QA, which I took as part of my work and pride.
However, not every developer shares the same sentiment as me. They went on to complain and remove QA, and take all that responsibility to them. Great, that's as good as you are the judge for your own court case. Since then, my employer fired all QAs, and ever since, quality reaching new "lows" every quarter.
Sith lord is not behind it !
"Elementary, My Dear Watson!"
From the article: "Above all, devops is a cultural philosophy".
Looks like it is another buzz word like Agile. Based on my experience, Agile can be "Fragile" when the team is not committed on it. Beyond that, Agile can NOT be applied to a) large projects b) projects with lot of groundwork and c) dev stack that require long compilation/building process. Most Agile/Scrum projects I worked end up falling back to a semi "Waterfall" workflow while still doing some Agile stuff (which I happily coined "ScrumFall" after the penultimate James Bond movie.)
Having said all that, jury is still out there as to whether there is something called DevOps. Only time can tell I suppose. Just my $0.02.
Vodka ?
Languages wise
1. Hopefully the death of Java and similar GC knock-off languages like C#. World would be a really nice place without them.
2. Expect demise/marginalising of dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, etc (Python may survive for a bit, as some of the NLP libraries are written in it).
3. Expect JavaScript to be the de-facto language. In fact, it has become on the web. But yet to see it getting closer to OS and general hardware.
4. C/C++ will remain there as long as there are hardware and peripherals. Fortran because of research and stuff.
5. Maybe the second coming of Functional Languages. I expected languages like F# to take off rapidly, but still haven't seen any momentum. Likely, they will have its day when more and more cores are squeezed into the CPU.
Work wise
1. Nothing will change... still there will be incompetent managers, unrealistic timelines and unworkable workflows (agile, scrum, waterfall)