Olumde

I properly started my software engineering career at the age of 40, after 7 years of grad school. I turned 50 last week. I recently accepted a software engineer position at Microsoft. You can do anything you want -- if you really want to.

PS: I love programming.

Sounds scaringly similar to the ludicrous mass redundancies imposed on the pure mathematics department at the University of Leicester, in order to create funds for AI.

And pray tell on what foundations the field of machine learning and AI is built on? https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/nf5r5o/the_pure_math_...

I find the blind show-me-the-money approach to funding research is baffling, in light of evidence about how research in fields/subjects such as neural networks[1] and mRNA[2] that fell out of favour for many years were eventually proven to be valid and of tremendous use.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3#Career

Yup, I find time estimates to be very difficult for anything but routine tasks, especially now we've moved away from the big design upfront. But maybe we should estimate anyway and routinely revise our estimates, and bear in mind that estimates are just that -- estimates.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuDlPBfVkAI9cI5?format=jpg

[2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkVAaRYXgAA6LaG.jpg

Dirty code will work until it becomes an unwieldy mess that is almost impossible to debug or improve. Then the competition will eat your lunch.

This is precisely the point I made in my comment [1]. The lack of a C++ API is a huge let down in every Blender release.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26921528

Maya's grip on the VFX companies is, I suspect, in part due to how Maya has been built into the pipelines and tools that many companies use, which is only possible because of Maya's fantastic API. I haven't used the API in anger in about 10 years, but it was amazing back them. Very well designed.

Now if Blender had a comparable API that VFX studios could build on Blender would have a better shot at eating Maya's lunch. I predict that smaller companies with smaller budgets and almost no custom software will be the early adopters of Blenders and will pave the way for bigger companies.

I wonder if there are any published proofs or theorems that, directly or indirectly, relied on this conjecture being true.

I don't mind ads. I do however mind seeing the same Gra*erly ad 48,000 times over. Why does anyone think this is a good idea. Showing me the same ad so many times makes me not want to buy the product. Cut it out!

Thanks for making that point. You are right. I was just concerned some organizations would take naming a repo as "job done".

I'm African and I think these name changes are ludicrous. Why not fix the (hopefully unconscious) hiring biases that surely exist in big tech that ends up hiring overwhelmingly male candidates of European and Asian origin?

Reminds me of something Martin Luther King (MLK) said after he started the second phase of his activism. Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had been passed 1964 and 1965 respectively, so MLK started to agitate for economic opportunities and equality. He noted that this would be the harder fight because allowing people to vote costs nothing. It was during this phase of his activism that he was assassinated.

Changing the name of your repo means little and is not a substitute for looking deeply at your organization and asking the hard questions. You can call your repo Conan the Barbarian conqueror of all, or master. It doesn't matter to me.

Edit

Can I just add that IMO overcoming bias can only be achieved by individual effort. No amount of talk about diversity and equality by the company will fix the problem if any persons involved in the hiring process has biases and preferences rooted in ethnicity. If diversity initiatives were sufficient Google would be a more diverse place today. Not faulting them for trying though.

My experience: I once interviewed a candidate who was much older than the rest of the team and I could see ageism welling up in me as soon as I met him. I had to consciously blind myself to the age of the candidate and forced myself to consider the him on merit only. Turns out the guy was great, and I agreed with the team that he would be a good hire. All I ask is not to look at the color or my skin but only on what I know. And do not offer me a job that I cannot do just because you want to be diverse.

I once argued with a colleague that this collection is akin to our software patterns. They are solutions to recurring sub-problems and are a mark of a mature engineering discipline.

I think Shell has decided that it is in the energy business, no matter the source of that energy. Surely its executives can remember seemingly invincible incumbents in other industries that failed to cannibalize their products. That or they are taking the EU directive to phase out new petrol/diesel car engines in 2030 (ish) seriously.

I almost fell prey to one such ad. A friend asked me to buy him a communicator device that came in two modes that were poorly differentiated. The seller wouldn't answer my emails about the differentiation and the contact number was not valid (one digit short). Then I googled said product only to to find that:

(1) The device was a kickstarter project and obviously wasn't ready for sale https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-communicator#/

(2) The device was being offered for sale on many sites e.g. https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/cosmo-communicator

I reported to Facebook but no action was taken as far as I could see.

Electric supersonic flight you mean.

Mathematician

In my opinion daily standups are pointless when there is no short term delivery goal. In my dream company standups, or better dev meetings, would peter out to about once a week and then ramp up as the team approaches a delivery.

I once calculated that daily standups, sprint planning, sprint retrospective, sprint demo, and for some sprint of sprints consume one full day of the week. Now unless the Agile ceremonies make the team at least 25% more productive, to make up for the full day "lost", in my opinion, it is counterproductive.

But none of those activities made our team more productive, effective or deliver faster or better. Our dev teams had a built a great product that customers loved and a customer service that customers frequently lauded us for. In fact, customer loved so much they moved some of their staff into our offices and asked if we had any other product/services to sell to them! (Go figure) We had achieved all this without doing the Agile thing. We simply met and talked though issues. Senior engineers were given the freedom to innovate on the modules that they delivered. It was great, and it worked.

You can grow by 15% even if you have 20 or 25 users :-P .

I am a huge Haskell fan though. The 'problem' with Haskell is that, because of its roots in academic research the language will not chase success at any price (read hacks); and tends to eventually find solutions to its problems even if it means not being popular for a long time. I like that. Watch out for stuff like linear types[1] coming to GHC soon.

[1] https://www.tweag.io/blog/2017-03-13-linear-types/

Reminds me of the velvet bean found in parts of Africa and Asia. It too has hairs and is maddeningly itchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucuna_pruriens

(On the last day of the term in junior secondary school some naughty kid dusted it on all the seats in the class. I can still see everyone writing in pain. Unfortunately, we'd forgotten about our ordeal at the start of the new term and sat on our seats; only to repeat the painful dance.)

Edit: a lady's blogpost about her encounter with the "devil bean" https://dazeetah.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/my-devils-bean-exp...

Trump probably okayed the deal, or made it happen.

Now Tiktok has to please not one but two authoritarian governments.

Are you in the UK? Such terms are common in tech here in the UK.

I also had a job offered with pretty much identical terms. I planned to disclose and negotiate this clause after negotiating the salary (they offered less than I used to make) but they walked off in a huff when I pushed back against the offer. I did not regret it as I have IP that I have been developing for years and I hope to spin into a company in a couple of years.

Trump will scarcely do something like this unless he thinks it will benefit him. Does he think millenials will love him for it or does he think Snowden has dirt on Obama? Time will tell.

Pick a technology that (1) interests you, else you will ask the same question again in N years and (2) is in demand by prospective employers.

Watched it. Not bad but I hated the re-enactments.

I always thought Microsoft did this in order to make inroads into the high-end graphics market, which they did.

I hate, Hate, HATE grammerly ads.

As someone trying to start a company of my own, I really enjoyed that talk he gave on the steps, where he talked about how nvidia was born and grew up. Highly motivating. In fact I curate such entrepreneur talks.

Consultants are the often the first people to get axed when the going gets tough. Then again you may have some super specialist skill in very high demand (e.g. Windows device driver writer, or COBOL expert), in which case you should find a lot of work.

I am in the same boat now and, frankly, I am starting to care less. My medium to long term plan is to commercialize the tech that I've been developing privately for several years now. Were it not for that I'd happily throw myself into studying a big book of algorithms. However I resent spending time that would have otherwise been spent developing my tech -- which is about 1½ years from being ready, (still some R&D and several layers to build out) -- studying algorithms that most (standard) library provide.