boothead

I recently totally bombed a programming interview, and I always feel like I've done terribly, even if feedback afterwards is quite good.

I'd be interested in hearing how you improved your performance in interviews, if you wouldn't mind sharing?

That's awesome! I've been thinking for a while that coops make a huge amount of sense for software development. Thanks for putting the lists together!

BTW have you read http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/? It's very pertinent to the kind of organisation you've built according to your team page. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts if you have.

Thanks! How about deployment, monitoring etc? Any regrets on the stack you've chosen or changes you'd make?

If I may also ask, how did you fund it, and what's your revenue model? I'd like to make the leap one day to having some SaaS revenue, but all the apps I've seen seem (on the surface at least) like pretty hard markets to stand out in...

The most awesome book I'm currently reading is "Custard, Cakes and Category Theory" by Eugenia Cheng [1]. It's already bringing some much needed back ground, some "why", to my much neglected maths education.

On a more spiritual note, I'd also recommend Mindsight by Dan Siegel [2]. An excellent book for getting some intuition into how people's past experiences shape them. The Trauma of Everyday life by Mark Epstien [3] blends teachings of Buddhism and mindfulness with the life long lessons of a Psychotherapist.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cakes-Custard-Category-Theory-unders...

[2] http://www.drdansiegel.com/books/mindsight/2/

[3] http://markepsteinmd.com/

Just the one I asked below on how long/much it took you to get this together and the stack and tools used?

I'd be quite interested in the amount of time/money that's been spent developing this and the tool set. What would people estimate as a ballpark figure for resource required to put something like this together?

Thanks Stefan :-)

I guess the takeaway here is that repeat business from the same client is rather nice!

I'd be interested to know how you go about getting new business, if you wouldn't mind sharing?

Thanks for the recommendation. If it wasn't $73 I'd definitely grab a copy. Why is Haskell "if you must" though? Are the others better at expressing code algebraically?

You are correct sir!

Paul Egoscue's books "Pain Free" and "Pain Free at your PC" are also very good. I'm really looking forward to Kelly Starrett's "Deskbound" to come out too.

   Reformulating an understandable bug report (“the Froobnicator class throws an
   uncaught exception when the input contains UTF-8”) into a long-winded user story
   (“as a developer, I want to be able to run this software without seeing a 500 line
   stack trace when…”) will magically make it easier to plan work.

This is a lie?! Oh my god what are we doing every day!

I'm reading this at the moment:

http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

Some extracts from the intro:

"And it’s not only at the bottom of the pyramid. There is a dirty secret I have discovered in the fifteen years I have spent consulting and coaching organizational leaders: life at the top of the pyramids isn’t much more fulfilling. Behind the façade and the bravado, the lives of powerful corporate leaders are ones of quiet suffering too. Their frantic activity is often a poor cover up for a deep inner sense of emptiness. The power games, the politics, and the infighting end up taking their toll on everybody. At both the top and bottom, organizations are more often than not playfields for unfulfilling pursuits of our egos, inhospitable to the deeper yearnings of our souls.

This book isn’t a rant about large corporations gone mad with greed. People who work in government agencies or nonprofits are rarely more exuberant about their workplaces. Even professions of calling aren’t immune to organizational disillusionment. Teachers, doctors, and nurses are leaving their field of vocation in droves. Our schools, unfortunately, are for the most part soulless machines where students and teachers simply go through the motions. We have turned hospitals into cold, bureaucratic institutions that dispossess doctors and nurses of their capacity to care from the heart. "

"The way we try to deal with organizations’ current problems often seems to make things worse, not better. Most organizations have gone through many rounds of change programs, mergers, centralizations and decentralizations, new IT systems, new mission statements, new scorecards, or new incentive systems. It feels like we have stretched the current way we run organizations to its limits, and these traditional recipes often seem part of the problem, not the solution.

We yearn for more, for radically better ways to be in organizations. But is that genuinely possible, or mere wishful thinking? If it turns out that it is possible to create organizations that draw out more of our human potential, then what do such organizations look like? How do we bring them to life? These are the questions at the heart of this book. "

Patagonia gets a few mentions as a so called teal organization in this book http://www.reinventingorganizations.com. It's a great read if you want to understand how some of the counter intuitive bahaviours come about.

How about AnyUnit?

You might also find Charlie Munger's mental models useful:

http://www.thinkmentalmodels.com/

Make sure you keep blogging - I really enjoyed your last post on testing with Haskell!

I've been doing the hour of code with my 7 yr old daughter. She really enjoys it, so much so that I now get bugged more to "do coding" than to help her with her homework. She's going to love this!

As an aside - To all of you focused on making it easier for the next generation to learn and use these skills:

Thank you so much!

Hey Pusher guys; how much of that flow went through Haskell? Are you using it for your main service yet?

Not really - but it does let you chunk functionality together from smaller pieces.

So if you have function f1 that takes a and returns b (a -> b) and a function f2 that takes b and returns c (b -> c) you can compose them into a function (a -> c) all it does is call f2(f1(a))

And yet a language has to evolve or become obsolete...

I love libraries like this and fn.py, and I really miss the things I've got used to having available in Haskell when I write python. It's possible to use function patterns in python (Applicative and Functor are things you can implement in any language). However given who is in charge of python and the way he feels about FP, I don't think python will ever be a decent functional programming environment:

  As long as I'm "in charge" the chances of this (or anything like it) being accepted into
  Python are zero. I get a headache when I try to understand code that uses function
  composition,  and I end up having to laboriously rewrite it using more traditional
  call notation before I move on to understanding what it actually does. Python is not
  Haskell, and perhaps more importantly, Python users are not like Haskell users.
  Either way, what may work out beautifully in Haskell will be like a
  fish out of water in Python.

  I understand that it's fun to try to sole this puzzle, but evolving Python is more than
  solving puzzles. Enjoy debating the puzzle, but in the end Python will survive
  without the solution.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1017621/why-isnt-python-v...

I usually think of immutability in terms of saving myself from getting bitten :-)

Interesting. What did/do you use to ascertain where all your money goes?

Isn't $500 ~ 6M IDR about what you'd expect from a basic office job in Indonesia? I would have expected that an IT job would be more. Your English seems very good, have you tried consulting remotely?

That looks pretty cool. I had a play with orgs agenda a while back, but the lack of integration with devices made it less useful than it could have been.

I just got my 7 year old daughter started on the http://code.org/ exercises. She completed the hour of code, got her certificate, and is now always saying to me "Daddy can we do some more code"?

> Apparently the models developed by 1000s years of music theory is not good enough for haskell

Perhaps not, but Haskell is good enough for them:

  Functional Generation of Harmony and Melody http://dreixel.net/research/pdf/fghm.pdf

Yes, absolutely agree with you. I wish I was writing Haskell day to day.

My point was that it takes a long trivial amount of time to learn Haskell during which you might feel "unproductive" by that measure. I feel that it's during that period that the magic happens :-)

This is the most important part for me:

  And precisely for that reason, lots of natural, evolving, overlapping hierarchies can emerge
  ―hierarchies of development, skill, talent, expertise, and recognition