It warms my heart to see so many Slashdot friends from the old days commenting on this article. I first heard of Barlow and the EFF via Slashdot, back during the 1998 COPA protests. He helped open my eyes to the idea that the old laws for old technology were going to have unintended consequences when applied to new technology. He made me interested in activism, and his accomplishments still inspire me.
The internet has changed a lot since the late 90's, but the struggle between freedom and safety continues. May we never stop thinking about the consequences of going too far in either direction.
I go through recruiters. With X years of programming experience, they come to me. But HR are the ones who gave them the job requirements, usually.
I've been around long enough, though, that I can interpret what HR says into what's actually needed. 5 years of jQuery experience? How about 15 years of object-oriented javascript programming, that oughta be good. I can familiarize myself with a specific library as needed.
Reading through the job requirements from a recruiter is like being at the end of a game of telephone - you have to guess what the actual intent is, see if it's a job you really want, and if it's something you think you're qualified for.
They ought to know the basics of how a network is put together. Understand vocabulary like router, server, LAN, WAN, ethernet, packet. Not saying they're all going to be future sysadmins, but people who understand how data gets from one place to another definitely have an advantage in today's world.
How often does your PM (also the SM?) re-estimate the stories? I could understand doing that at the end of a sprint, but not in the middle of development, other than "How's that widget coming? I should be done tomorrow."
I work on one of several teams adding features to huge, complex software suite. I don't know how well Agile would work when creating a new application from scratch, but for adding features to an existing program it works really well. The methodology helps us keep a rein on our scope and has greatly improved our interoperability with the other teams. With the goal that a given feature has to be releasable by the end of sprint 4, we're releasing small, working features more often instead of massive, buggy features a couple times a year.
Yes. The recruiters who troll LinkedIn must just search for one specific skill and spam everyone who has it. I always get offers for jobs I'm either not qualified for or would never willingly do.
Last year I realized that I'd never changed my LinkedIn job profile info to "not interested" after starting my new job a year earlier. I'd been getting a lot of pings from recruiters, and I thought that might discourage them. Nope. Saying I wasn't interested made the recruiters even more interested in me!
Which would be great if any of them had a job better than my current one, but they never do. Everything is more boring work I'm less qualified for, for less pay.
Our local Rotary Club gives free dictionaries to all the 3rd graders every year. I checked, but it's not the OED Junior, it's a special edition "Dictionary & Gazetteer" compiled by The Dictionary Project (https://www.dictionaryproject.org/).
I think we're going to see a lot of disruption in enterprise software. A lot of companies are currently resting on past success, counting on the fact that it's really hard for companies to completely replace critical business software.
At the same time, innovations in development frameworks, team management, and a better understanding of UX are allowing upstarts to create better enterprise applications.
I'm guessing Salesforce might not be around 10 years from now.
Even the government is culpable. The national lab where I live has frozen wages so many times that the PhD's working there are on the bottom end of the pay scale for people with their degrees.
Mind you, I have to wonder where those people on the top end are. Really, who *is* hiring PhD chemists and physicists and paying them so well?
I recently updated my LinkedIn settings to say "don't contact me about job opportunities." I like my current job and don't expect to find a better deal anywhere else (decent salary, great coworkers, WFH).
As soon as I put up the "don't contact me" marker, the number of pings I get from recruiters doubled. Still offering the same depressing-sounding jobs with long commutes. I guess saying you're not interested piques their interest.
Mt. Fuji is more well known, but I wonder how all this seismic activity is affecting Mt. Miyajima in the southern part of Japan? It's another active volcano, one I visited in the 90's. It was actively smoking at the time, and surrounded by lava beds.
There are many arguments against adding the IDE, but I don't agree with this one. People said the same thing when Google came out with Gmail. "We've already got hotmail and yahoo and a million other free email services. Why do we need another?" If this tool is good enough or simple enough to use that it becomes ubiquitous, then it doesn't matter what's already out there.
I got one several months ago because I wanted to try building apps for it. If you absolutely have to play around with the bleeding edge of technology, if you are willing to spend that kind of money on a device so that you can be the one who invents what it's used for, then go for it. Otherwise, it's not worth it.
I worked on a project this year to completely rewrite a company's signature application from the ground up. Objectively, you'd think that's something you never, ever want to have to do. But, having done it, I think planning a complete overhaul & rewrite into the product's lifecycle is probably a good idea.
Since the application was first written about a decade ago many, many features have been added with each upgrade. The scope and customer base have expanded. And programming technology has changed hugely during that time.
Rewriting the entire application is a massive effort, sure. But to truly modernize and streamline it, to get rid of the legacy cruft and take advantage of new tools that didn't exist 10 years ago, I think it's worth it. I also think it would've been wise to do this sooner than we did (though that wasn't possible in this case for business reasons).
So maybe when you're choosing a framework, don't worry about whether it'll be the right solution forever. Plan to reevaluate your decision every 3-5 years and change frameworks if something better comes along. And, yes, absolutely adopt the MVC model, because then you don't need to replace every part of your application if one becomes obsolete.
I made the mistake of eating a hamburger in London in 2001. I was on a long business trip and just wanted something quick to eat, so I ducked into a McDonalds.
Little did I know that, thanks to the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease, this simple act would make me ineligible to become a blood donor for years to come.
Yes, it is absolutely possible to measure project manager performance objectively. I work for a very large software company and we have to do this. The record keeping is a bit of a pain for those of us "in the trenches," but with such large projects, I can completely understand why the managers need these kinds of metrics to make sure everything's on track.
If they don't take your recommendation simply to fire or reorganize him as the parent states, recommend implementing a project tracking system. Some examples are Pivotal and Base Camp. Or possibly their current bug-tracking system has some kind of time & budget tracking built in. But this manager needs to regularly report status to his boss. It's just a one-line email or a progress graph once a week, but it will show where they are in relation to where they planned to be on the project.
That should give the manager's boss a really good example of how this guy works. And honestly, most project managers I've known actually like using these kinds of metrics to follow a project's progress. They like seeing objectively how far along the new features are, how many bugs have been found, and whether the project is on schedule or not. That's why they became project managers in the first place!
Another thing to keep in mind is that since Type 1 is genetic, you've got it from birth, which means that there are little kids who have to manage their insulin levels. A weekly treatment could be much, MUCH easier for diabetic kids & their parents to deal with, and less invasive than an insulin pump.
Stack Overflow can't always solve all problems. Many times I have looked for an example of how some piece of Sencha's poorly-documented ExtJs framework works, only to be directed to a Stack Overflow page where someone posted a question looking for the same thing.
I know it can be dull and time-consuming to create examples and documentation, but, really, just linking to the source code does not really explain what a particular class or config option does. If you want programmers to get the most out of your framework, you have to show what can be done with it. If you don't have time to document a feature, why did you bother including it in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
It warms my heart to see so many Slashdot friends from the old days commenting on this article. I first heard of Barlow and the EFF via Slashdot, back during the 1998 COPA protests. He helped open my eyes to the idea that the old laws for old technology were going to have unintended consequences when applied to new technology. He made me interested in activism, and his accomplishments still inspire me.
The internet has changed a lot since the late 90's, but the struggle between freedom and safety continues. May we never stop thinking about the consequences of going too far in either direction.
I go through recruiters. With X years of programming experience, they come to me. But HR are the ones who gave them the job requirements, usually.
I've been around long enough, though, that I can interpret what HR says into what's actually needed. 5 years of jQuery experience? How about 15 years of object-oriented javascript programming, that oughta be good. I can familiarize myself with a specific library as needed.
Reading through the job requirements from a recruiter is like being at the end of a game of telephone - you have to guess what the actual intent is, see if it's a job you really want, and if it's something you think you're qualified for.
They ought to know the basics of how a network is put together. Understand vocabulary like router, server, LAN, WAN, ethernet, packet. Not saying they're all going to be future sysadmins, but people who understand how data gets from one place to another definitely have an advantage in today's world.
How often does your PM (also the SM?) re-estimate the stories? I could understand doing that at the end of a sprint, but not in the middle of development, other than "How's that widget coming? I should be done tomorrow."
I work on one of several teams adding features to huge, complex software suite. I don't know how well Agile would work when creating a new application from scratch, but for adding features to an existing program it works really well. The methodology helps us keep a rein on our scope and has greatly improved our interoperability with the other teams. With the goal that a given feature has to be releasable by the end of sprint 4, we're releasing small, working features more often instead of massive, buggy features a couple times a year.
Yes. The recruiters who troll LinkedIn must just search for one specific skill and spam everyone who has it. I always get offers for jobs I'm either not qualified for or would never willingly do.
Last year I realized that I'd never changed my LinkedIn job profile info to "not interested" after starting my new job a year earlier. I'd been getting a lot of pings from recruiters, and I thought that might discourage them. Nope. Saying I wasn't interested made the recruiters even more interested in me!
Which would be great if any of them had a job better than my current one, but they never do. Everything is more boring work I'm less qualified for, for less pay.
Our local Rotary Club gives free dictionaries to all the 3rd graders every year. I checked, but it's not the OED Junior, it's a special edition "Dictionary & Gazetteer" compiled by The Dictionary Project (https://www.dictionaryproject.org/).
I think we're going to see a lot of disruption in enterprise software. A lot of companies are currently resting on past success, counting on the fact that it's really hard for companies to completely replace critical business software.
At the same time, innovations in development frameworks, team management, and a better understanding of UX are allowing upstarts to create better enterprise applications.
I'm guessing Salesforce might not be around 10 years from now.
Even the government is culpable. The national lab where I live has frozen wages so many times that the PhD's working there are on the bottom end of the pay scale for people with their degrees.
Mind you, I have to wonder where those people on the top end are. Really, who *is* hiring PhD chemists and physicists and paying them so well?
I recently updated my LinkedIn settings to say "don't contact me about job opportunities." I like my current job and don't expect to find a better deal anywhere else (decent salary, great coworkers, WFH).
As soon as I put up the "don't contact me" marker, the number of pings I get from recruiters doubled. Still offering the same depressing-sounding jobs with long commutes. I guess saying you're not interested piques their interest.
Don't get caught unaware by the next major CME. Read the space weather forecast from NOAA.
I was thinking it sounded like whuffie.
Mt. Fuji is more well known, but I wonder how all this seismic activity is affecting Mt. Miyajima in the southern part of Japan? It's another active volcano, one I visited in the 90's. It was actively smoking at the time, and surrounded by lava beds.
There are many arguments against adding the IDE, but I don't agree with this one. People said the same thing when Google came out with Gmail. "We've already got hotmail and yahoo and a million other free email services. Why do we need another?" If this tool is good enough or simple enough to use that it becomes ubiquitous, then it doesn't matter what's already out there.
I got one several months ago because I wanted to try building apps for it. If you absolutely have to play around with the bleeding edge of technology, if you are willing to spend that kind of money on a device so that you can be the one who invents what it's used for, then go for it. Otherwise, it's not worth it.
Time to start working on the darknet in earnest.
I worked on a project this year to completely rewrite a company's signature application from the ground up. Objectively, you'd think that's something you never, ever want to have to do. But, having done it, I think planning a complete overhaul & rewrite into the product's lifecycle is probably a good idea.
Since the application was first written about a decade ago many, many features have been added with each upgrade. The scope and customer base have expanded. And programming technology has changed hugely during that time.
Rewriting the entire application is a massive effort, sure. But to truly modernize and streamline it, to get rid of the legacy cruft and take advantage of new tools that didn't exist 10 years ago, I think it's worth it. I also think it would've been wise to do this sooner than we did (though that wasn't possible in this case for business reasons).
So maybe when you're choosing a framework, don't worry about whether it'll be the right solution forever. Plan to reevaluate your decision every 3-5 years and change frameworks if something better comes along. And, yes, absolutely adopt the MVC model, because then you don't need to replace every part of your application if one becomes obsolete.
A giant wall of ice? Where have I seen that before?
I made the mistake of eating a hamburger in London in 2001. I was on a long business trip and just wanted something quick to eat, so I ducked into a McDonalds.
Little did I know that, thanks to the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease, this simple act would make me ineligible to become a blood donor for years to come.
It's also amusing the ads and pages FB recommends to me. They seem to think I'm a black latina (I'm white, non-Hispanic).
Yes, it is absolutely possible to measure project manager performance objectively. I work for a very large software company and we have to do this. The record keeping is a bit of a pain for those of us "in the trenches," but with such large projects, I can completely understand why the managers need these kinds of metrics to make sure everything's on track.
If they don't take your recommendation simply to fire or reorganize him as the parent states, recommend implementing a project tracking system. Some examples are Pivotal and Base Camp. Or possibly their current bug-tracking system has some kind of time & budget tracking built in. But this manager needs to regularly report status to his boss. It's just a one-line email or a progress graph once a week, but it will show where they are in relation to where they planned to be on the project.
That should give the manager's boss a really good example of how this guy works. And honestly, most project managers I've known actually like using these kinds of metrics to follow a project's progress. They like seeing objectively how far along the new features are, how many bugs have been found, and whether the project is on schedule or not. That's why they became project managers in the first place!
Not that the 5 people in that field have trouble getting jobs anyway. But if you like math and the ocean, it's a good field to go into.
Another thing to keep in mind is that since Type 1 is genetic, you've got it from birth, which means that there are little kids who have to manage their insulin levels. A weekly treatment could be much, MUCH easier for diabetic kids & their parents to deal with, and less invasive than an insulin pump.
Stack Overflow can't always solve all problems. Many times I have looked for an example of how some piece of Sencha's poorly-documented ExtJs framework works, only to be directed to a Stack Overflow page where someone posted a question looking for the same thing.
I know it can be dull and time-consuming to create examples and documentation, but, really, just linking to the source code does not really explain what a particular class or config option does. If you want programmers to get the most out of your framework, you have to show what can be done with it. If you don't have time to document a feature, why did you bother including it in the first place?