pm

An acquaintance worked as CTO of the DTA, and ultimately it was a joke. The skills were there, but the clout to bust through politics was not there, so nothing ever got done. He ended up leaving after less than a year.

I personally refer to these concepts respectively as inherent and incidental complexity, what should be classed as inherent complexity is anything that directly supports the description of the problem. Everything else is incidental complexity (and we mostly write incidental complexity).

The big thing that I don't hear often is about where complexity lives. Complexity is like a pile of receipts you need to hunt down to do your tax - you can have it distributed all over your house, you can sweep up into a pile, or you could file it. The first is by far the most complex, and I've worked on codebases that looked like that. Even the most trivial of changes takes a long time.

As an addendum, choose technology you enjoy. As a consequence, it should be something you already know, but you'll be so more productive because it won't feel like a chore.

The Django shop test had nothing to do with your skills as a developer, and everything to do with language gatekeeping. It's just overcompensating for boring work and poor pay. It's no different to how the gaming industry exploits workers.

Don't give up. And for the love of all that is holy, don't work municipal IT, it would only demotivate you further. Keep at it, improve your skills and keep applying.

Fox "con" surely.

I remember reading about Looker, before Google bought them out. I never used it myself, but it may have fit the description.

Without having to listen to 4 hours of podcasts, what was their take?

Thanks, I needed this comment. I'm a fan of your writing style.

Thanks! Indeed, it's the interfaces that are hardest to define. I don't know a good heuristic to determine it I'm afraid - everything I've ever done was on intuition.

The OP is describing Conway's Law, and shows that half the battle is being able to define the problem space in a way that minimises communication and maximises utility. As such, it could be inferred that beginning with a monolithic organisation, and splitting off a new team at the appropriate time when a useful problem space had been defined could be a possible best practice, assuming the organisation was flexible enough.

Food for thought, at least.

Build software through "meeting in the middle". Define the front (user interface), define the back (data structures), and then progress towards the middle.

After all an interface is, by definition, where two things meet and interact. There are too many unknowns otherwise.

Colin is talking about criticising implementation decisions in software, in particular unconstructive criticism bereft of context.

Colin is criticising your idea, but is also trying to understand how you formed that idea in the first place, in an effort to hedge against the possibility it has good reasons he can't see. He's not just saying, "your idea is garbage".

Indeed, but we need to differentiate between the inherent complexity of the problem (which can't be mitigated, but only shifted around as the article points out), and the incidental complexity added when we create the solution.

The inherent complexity can be taken on by the solution (and the inherent complexity may be hidden behind a simple interface, or it may be introduced in the interface, but that's another problem), or it gets removed of the problem domain, and then needs to be dealt with by the user.

There's no correct answer; half the problem is defining the appropriate problem domain, and even then there are only better or worse solutions. The incidental complexity of the system comes purely down to the implementation, which often comes down to how well the problem domain is defined in the first place.

That's a fair amount of tinkering time. Go for a walk, and enjoy the milestone. I'll check this out sometime soon.

I've seen the Spark ads popping up in social media for the last couple of weeks, and while it's not really my thing in terms of guitar playing (I prefer restricting my pedalboard), I can appreciate the effort going into a product like this, especially as a software engineer.

How much work have you put into this so far?

True, in the case of "not enough surgical masks", it's not ambition (and I don't mean it in a financial sense either). It's a combination of ambition, imagination, foresight and desire.

If Bill Gates had manufactured or stockpiled basic medical items, someone would be complaining about why he didn't do it sooner, or accusing him of profiteering, or somesuch. It shouldn't be up to one person to be responsible for the foibles of the human race, even if they have outsized resources. They just become a scapegoat for our own lack of responsibility.

Perhaps desire is the wrong word to use. I don't think he means desire in terms of willpower or motivation, but in terms of ambition. I do think the world has lost some of of its ambition over the last 50 years.

If you're doing enough business they'll usually cut your fees if you ask (according to a friend who did just that).

Agreed, what harm does a minimum wage cause? We have a reasonable minimum wage in Australia (though I don't think it's been adjusted for inflation for a while) and it facilitates time for education, which in turn facilitates social mobility.

On the other hand, you can have no minimum wage, and end up with a class of working poor who have no time to educate themselves, thus condemning them to a life of constant work with no hope of social mobility.

I don't see how a minimum wage is harmful.

What field did you come from and what did you end up going into?

You seem to already have it, but admit what you don't know, and don't be coy about it. You will learn from those below you as much as from those above you.

I suffered from the same paralysis when attempting to do my own projects, and it had less to do with the tech than it did the problem I wanted to solve.

Eventually, to get started, I settled on doing a small command line app in Python/Click. It was a utility I actually needed (even if someone else didn't really need it), and it's the kind of thing I could iterate on without too much trouble.

It's usually much easier to start small.

Yes, use pipenv or poetry. I don't know why there are still wars about this going on.

Unfortunately there are people who complain that pipenv makes the ecosystem as bad as npm, which frankly is an improvement.

The updated version of the program, when pushed to servers, crashed the older version of the program on other servers which had yet to be updated. Rather than rolling back to diagnose and understand the cause, they charged on updating all the servers.

There are people who create consumer products, and there are people who create the products that power those products. It's no different to when id Software sold licences of their engines to other game developers. Perhaps you can turn your infrastructure into a business of its own.

I've been using Magic Mice for ten years without any problems. Was there a model that had different ergonomics than the rest? I think I've used all models. It's been my favourite mouse since I started using it (mainly for the touch functionality).

The quickest change is no change, naturally.

However, "better" is dependent on the situation. If the data is unlikely to change, stay the course. If not, then while a database might be more maintainable over the long term, even if not as efficient.

Same age as you, and I'm doing the same thing.

I'm continuing as a software engineer to pay the bills, but I pursue music, games, and at one point in my career was a graphic designer and illustrator (though perhaps not very successfully; I'll get back to it at some point).

I'm about to start learn electronics as I'm interested in building robots and making custom guitar pedals. I don't think I could ever be laser-focussed (95% sure I'm ADHD; used to think I was bipolar but not sure about that diagnosis anymore). Embrace your neurology.

Data structures are the basis of what you start off with for any program. The key is to understand the domain you want to model. It's hardly unique to FAANG.

Heck, I remember Microsoft FrontPage doing at least some of this.