HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

l-jenkins

7 karma · joined January 15, 2015

submissionscomments
l-jenkins··on Google Scrambles After Software IDs Photo of Two Black People as “Gorillas”
This is the problem with automatic image processing and categorization. It's good, but mistakes like this can happen and embarrass an entire company.
l-jenkins··on Show HN: Bear CMS – A new, much better way to build websites
High availability? Separating the editing/management interface from the live website allows you to quickly "re-publish" a site if something catastrophic happens to the hosting server. My organizations uses an enterprise CMS with the same concept. Our editing interface could be down, but the live sites are still up, and vice versa.
l-jenkins··on Ask HN: How do you familiarize yourself with a new codebase?
I see a lot of comments talking about code that is in a repository. And that is great, if you have it available. There have been many, many times where our team is handed an application that is broken (or has a bug) and asked to fix it. In many, many of those cases we don't have access to the original repository, or there wasn't one.

We generally approach it with heavy customer/owner involvement at first. We need to know what the application's intended purpose is. It is sort of like a lightening BA session. We get what the application should do, and what it isn't doing properly out of this session (and more importantly, what it should be doing instead).

Our first step: get it into a repo.

Now that we have an understanding of what the application's intended purpose is, we can dive into the code. We don't have any analysis tools (but if there are some that people could recommend, I'm all ears) outside of our IDE (Visual Studio). We generally look for the last-modified date as an indicator of what needed work most recently. Of course, we don't have file history so we don't know exactly what changed, but it gives us a rough idea of what was worked on and when.

Next we usually try and use the application in our development environment. We chase each action a user takes in the code to determine what is the core/central part of the application. After that, we try to determine the cause of the problem (and while we are at it, we generally do a security review of the code).

It takes time, and is painstakingly nuanced and very boring. But I'm not sure what other options we have in such cases. As I said, I'm all ears as to what other might do in these situations.

l-jenkins··on Show HN: TryCatch – Get offers only with your desired salary
I've had this happen. When I got the offer from the CEO (small company) it was what I was currently making but with less job security. I stopped dealing with that recruiter immediately and ignore all correspondence from them (or anyone at their company).

I think what they hear is "I need my compensation to be X" instead of "I need my salary to be X". Big difference.

l-jenkins··on Show HN: TryCatch – Get offers only with your desired salary
Wouldn't that be "compensation"?
l-jenkins··on Scrawl – A modern, cross-platform C#, VB.NET and JavaScript IDE
Unless of course they push to make VS cross platform. I wouldn't be surprised if this is in the works. There has been a huge push at MS to become more cross platform with their product offerings. They must know a lot of their developers run OSX with a Windows VM just to run VS. I know pretty much our entire team does that.
l-jenkins··on Why GM Hired 8,000 Programmers
Looks like the sale ultimately goes through the dealership.
l-jenkins··on But Where Do People Work in This Office?
We are set up in offices with 2-5 developers per room. Works out nicely. If work styles don't meld, you can request to move (given there is space).