critium

Please get this off the ground. I would also possibly suggest a separate business, website regression testing.

Selenium is WAAAY to painful.

Whoa! I actually like this better than setting vi mode on terminal.

Just add a kinect and you have your minority report interface!

Having lived in the Philippines and the U.S. I have this observation. The U.S. is not more or less corrupt that the Philippines. They just do it with more _style_. By that I mean, they are just better at hiding it.

Same here. But more of a parody site with some 'bugs' and 'outages'

I know somebody that is actually diagnosed with this and its a serious condition.

Am I the only person that thinks that having the acronymn SAD is actually counterproductive? I mean, kind of sounds like a bad joke right?

The argument i'm making is that no matter who comes in, so long as they dont have a dedicated and passionate lead, it will be all for nothing.

I dont argue that the contractors are/can be part of the problem but from my experience, the government _IS_ the limiting factor, especially when they say that they're the systems integrator, not the contractor as is in this case.

I did my damnest to write/architect/design the best system that I could but if the government forces you to use RH JBoss 2 versions behind the latest, just because they have a support license then refuses to buy JRebel because it was too expensive after paying tens of thousands of dollars on said JBoss, and then changes the system requirements every 6 months you're doomed. Worst of all we were _NOT_ allowed to talk to end users. We can only talk through our Task Order Managers and supposed Technical Leads (that have little or extremely dated technical experience).

I've worked in and out of the public sector for the last 10 years and unfortunately, this actually _PAR FOR THE COURSE_.

This is not the contractors fault. Its the government. Before I left to work with a startup, I was abhorred by the lack of ownership on the client's side. Everybody is looking to shuffle responsibility, keep the lowest profile, and do the least amount of work.

It doesnt matter who's writing the code, unless they find somebody competent and passionate on the government side, large projects are destined to fail and better left off to be written by the public sector. This is government waste at its best.

I'm neither republican or democrat but just to add, if my rinky dink app I was working on for the Dept. Of Commerce gets shown to the president when its in 'ALPHA' state, there is no way the most informed person in the world didnt know that the site was going to fail from the get-go.

It also depends on your tolerance for not 100% correct. I've got a ton of stuff i put together that's functionally perfect but doesnt look like it belongs in a showroom anywhere (unless its abstract art!)

LOL! Its full of HN'ers!

Depends on poetry, but definitely anything other than sing-song poetry is lost on me. Not sure about the link with subvocalication though, since I've never enjoyed that kind of poetry (causality?!?!)

Funny thing, it was at english class that I actually started noticing it. The exercise was to read against the grain and find the hidden meaning. I didnt get it until I physically read out loud.

At around 7 or 8 years old, my reading level was several grades ahead of schedule. I was consuming large (for my age) novels with no sweat.

My parents noticed this and gave me a speed reading book. I incorporated each an every item on that book including the removal of subvocalization. It certainly gave returns right away, allowing me to consume books at a faster rate, but a huge cost.

Years later, I entered college as an engineering student. I noticed that when reading highly technical textbooks, and classes that required deep comprehension of text, I was much much slower that my classmates, or my comprehension level was much lower. Turns out, it was taking almost double the time for me to get through a section.

Really wished I didnt read the speed reading book now. I dont blame my parents at all, it was unfortunate that at nearly 40, i'm still trying to unlearn what that speed reading book taught me. I'm trying to re-learn subvocalication but its very very hard to 'slow' myself down. I've actually installed screen readers to replace subvocalization with some positive effect.

I believe that ocean water has plenty of deuterium.

when i first read this, i thought you put in SIRI not SIR!

That would have been more awesome :)

Yes, having robots and favicon is nice, but there are few items on this list that can embarrass / kill a company like bad security.

To the sounds of several million toilets flushing!

I have been actually pondering this for software for some time now. I used to manage a medium sized development team that was concurrently distributed between the Virginia, Argentina, Ukraine and Pakistan. I've always thought that the amount of communication overhead due to language/layers and time lag caused by that actually increased the cost of the product.

For example, during the day, i'd get requirements hand it out to the leads. If the lead is at PK, then guess what, i'm getting up at 3am to talk to them. Sending emails wont cut it. He then has to translate to a different language and hands it out to his devs. Thats several degrees of separation between the analyst and the dev. I've always believed that what was accomplished could have taken half that team if they were all local.

I think software development insourcing is ripe for this in the U.S. There is a large cost of living divide between NY, SF and Missoula, MT and the mid lvl salaries i've seen here would go a LOT further in those parts of the country and the time zone and language issues are minimal.

Has anybody used this? Any hard numbers in comparison to reference JVM and VMs (jrockit?), latency vs realtime java?

EDIT: Looks like pretty much the same question everywhere. AZUL, please step up.

Point well taken. Even a project you're totally stimulated by, committed to, and engaged in on multiple levels can become a grind if it enters the get-it-done-or-else phase.

I think we're in some sort of agreement here. As I touched on my original comment, depending on the severity of the crunch, I will ask for (yes I was in middle management, blech) and offer days off. I agree that a lunch, no matter how nice it is, is no replacement for a 3 month death march. What you're latching onto are what I use for minor, not more than a few days things.

Though its usually a nightmare for me to work this out with HR, days off to me can mean actual vacation time which to me, is more precious than cash. It can also mean time doing cool stuff, or as the late Steven Covey would put it, time to spend "sharpening the axe" like making a presentation on the latest version of FizzBangWow product/language/framework, trips to conferences. I've even had devs prefer to work on clearing out technical debt. That's craft.

If the cash carrot works for you, then great. On the converse side, one of the main things i look for when building teams, above developer skill is craft and commitment. I try to say away from gunslingers as much as possible.

Which is why I can get away with my minimally adequate rules as you've put it. I certainly dont pat myself in the back about my rules. Its all about sharing the pain. I also forgot my 3rd rule. Only developers set deadlines so I can ask them to commit to it. If we have a date to hit, then we work on scope.

Can I ask everybody here, why is it so prevalent in the Software industry? What other industry accepts crunch mode? I can think of only 2 (military, banking/finance) I mean, do the developers actually like it? Wannabe heroes?

I think the main difference is engagement vs grinding. Take gaming for example. How many hours can you sink into that? My personal experience was that I could go pretty hard at it with very little sleep (I know, i know) and still be quite effective. I get the same way when im hacking away at something i love. Right now, im trying to put together a JS debugger for vim. Its 3am here and I can just keep on going.

Now, the same cant be said about writing TPS reports.

In my manager past, the times i've asked for crunch mode are few and far in between, and I always put a carrot at the end, depending on the severity of the crunch. Anywhere from a nice lunch at a fancy restaurant, to a few days off. I've even dangled a team building movie matinee. I've never found cash to be a real big motivator.

My 2 simple rules for crunch mode:

1. Manager better be there. Me personally, i would dive in and actually start doing code reviews. But even if I had absolutely nothing to add, I had to be there to show support. Even for window dressing. You call for crunch mode, you better be present. Even if its just to buy lunch or starbucks for the devs.

2. Coding is like breathing. Crunch mode inhale must be followed by re-tooling, decompressing exhale. You can only inhale so much.