binspace

Humor in programming considered hardful.

If you like to code, you are not a seasoned programmer.

I don't like coding. I like telling programmers what to do, thus I'm the boss 0:-)

Ooh, and I also like to spout out long-winded war stories. Who's your daddy?

Agreed.

Why can't you have both? Maybe a different design would become apparent while developing the product, as opposed to being discovered in the analysis phase. (I'm assuming you are talking about a process with a large and separate analysis phase).

The worst case is millions of dollars spent to build a product only to discover that there are issues late in the testing phase. Wouldn't is be less risky to experiment and validate assumptions earlier in the cycle?

Agile as opposed to methodology X is a bit fuzzy here, as I'm sure testing is extensive and expensive and the feedback cycle is inherently longer, so change is more expensive.

However, it seems that early feedback and validation of design is even more important in these circumstances, since changes late in the product development process and orders of magnitude more expensive than changes early in the process.

Shipping quickly is often a strategy used to discover the problem space. Some things should be done as quickly as possible and some things should not. The developers/tech management are responsible for forseeing such cases.

Hopefully the initial developers are good ones. If not, I'm sorry and I hope they pay you well. I've been there :-|

Yes, because agile methodologies kill people, puppies and hate freedom.

Seriously though, in situations where lives are dependent on the solution working correctly, the process that is used to build the solution needs to take into account human error and have rigorous testing.

i.e. I also wouldn't trust a person who "though about and can 'prove'" a solution in Haskell to control that radiation machine without extensive testing.

Actually, agile methodologies are good for situations where the problem itself (and even customer base) is in flux and not fully known (ie consumer facing web startups). Agile methodologies help lay a roadmap to facilitate communication and prioritization to/from developer, project management, and the customer(s).

The solution may or may not be difficult, but finding the right problem to solve is paramount.

The quality of the solution is often a product of the quality of the people working on the problem. Oh, and don't run out of money :-)

Or be the first to do it right...

Quite a clever ruse to give the insiders more time to dump their stocks.

Balls doesn't scale!

> UPDATE: My wife the attorney acidly points out yet another way in which Sonmez’s argument is flawed and unhelpful. “If surgeons had the failure rate of software engineers,” she observes, “they’d all be in jail.”

Here are some sites written in Rails: http://rubyonrails.org/applications

LinkedIn: Java/Ruby on Rails

He annotated a passive-aggressive annotation on a patch I made and basically hijacked a presentation I made because the library I presented did not fit his aesthetics & work style. I don't remember ever acting in an uncivil way toward him.

If you regularly act like an asshole, expect to get a reputation and to be treated like one (even unfairly).

Btw, I'm glad you are bringing civility up. For some reason the lack of a civil vibe (at least from my experience in the Ruby community) really bothers me.

Our legal system is broken.

Now we know Torvalds is regular.

Government regulation will not stop this, it's top secret. Just give the NSA less money.

> Fortune 500 companies are run by 499 extroverts, plus Bill Gates. There are 435 extroverts in the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate, two from each state.

I doubt it.

I've seen plenty of extroverts who are bad team members.

I've seen plenty of introverts who are effective communicators.

Twitter should move to Oakland :-)

> I appreciate it when people pay taxes because I like public transportation, fire safety, paved roads, bridges, public schools, police officers, health inspectors, safety inspectors, public parks, libraries, clean air, (relatively) fair corporations, airports, hospitals, court systems, electricity, vehicle regulation, elections, veteran associations, child support, public television...

I'll be sure to remember that every time the government raises taxes and pay up without asking any questions or being critical.

The key is to learn how to get the government to give money to you!

Hopefully you have more experience when you are older.

It's not like "public transportation, fire safety, paved roads, bridges, public schools, police officers, health inspectors, safety inspectors, public parks, libraries, clean air, (relatively) fair corporations, airports, hospitals, court systems, electricity, vehicle regulation, elections, veteran associations, child support, public television..." is entirely in the domain of the city government.

I just have a adverse reaction to arguments that claim I should appreciate a service provider that charges too much. Sorry, don't like getting ripped off.

And yes, giving extravagant monies to the government makes everybody lives better, cures cancer, and causes world peace too!

</sarcasm>

Nice straw man. The originating subject was on taxes (since it takes more than a city to provide all of those services), not only SF taxes :-)

San Francisco residents live in the United States of America. The United States of America imposes federal taxes. Federal taxes have been used to fund wars and bailouts of various failed businesses.

Of course, no real city has the authority to have a military. The city does have a police force, which often acts in ways that do not better the lives of SF residents (parking tickets for example).

I don't appreciate the extravagant waste and the entitlement of the state to impose it's will on the people. With our taxes, we also support bailouts, wars, and other profiteering of those in control. Also, these institutions are basically monopolies, where the people in charge are not really accountable to run them efficiently or effectively.

Does giving the government more money make the government more effective?

San Francisco needs to run the city more efficiently. I'm tired of paying lazy lifers to do nothing but collect extravagant salaries and lifetime benefits. Work hard for a living dammit. We do.

Zed, I'm a robot, so I'm impervious to jokes, especially deadpan sarcastic ones without proper metadata :-)

And I agree with your serious statement. Yay, happy!

> The second you made Github more "SysAdmin friendly" you'd piss off the Programmers. Their egos are too softly stroked by having their name first in the URL.

I don't think that's true. Having the name first is great for uniqueness of the fork, but has been a pain when finding the canonical version. I've seen plenty of projects that adopt the similarly named user account, which is great.