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tsewlliw

261 karma · joined November 22, 2010

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tsewlliw··on Ask HN: What is being a "Scrum Master" like?
Expect a different title track, different comp ranges(it's likely in the project management job family, go compare on bls.gov), and likely a manager without experience in your new practice. If you're the first/only, you're also looking at making sure folks understands your role, and how to value your efforts.

I haven't seen folks make the change in formal role. I have seen folks take on the role, and I've taken it on myself (not my fave) with moderate success to make things happen.

Biggest advice: support the people in producing good outcomes, any processes should serve that. But the people create the outcomes, the process is a disposable tool.

tsewlliw··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2023)
Me! I'm working on myself as a physical machine that carries my experience through the world, and my ability to make that a fun and exciting journey full of connections, support, and joy.
tsewlliw··on Ask HN: How to deal with a colleague who does the least amount of work required?
Two things to consider:

1) If everyone else seems like a jerk, maybe you're the jerk. Hard for anyone here to know. I've been the jerk before, happens to all of us. Not everyone stops being the jerk.

2) Sounds like you don't vibe with the culture around feedback, and you're early career. Maybe look around seeking a strong culture of direct feedback as a positive thing you're seeking to help you grow. Seems like a great way to spend your questions at the end of a couple interview panels.

tsewlliw··on Httpiness, a developer-oriented HTTP client for slalom API testing
That product name needs some workshop time.
tsewlliw··on Ask HN: Great internship at shitty loc
Would I as a 40 year old middle manager in Texas take a shot at living in rural central Europe for 4 months to work on ML for factory automation? Might feel lonely because I probably wouldn't move my family with me and take my kid out of school, but yes, that sounds like fun, like a great chapter in a life well lived.
tsewlliw··on Ask HN: Great internship at shitty loc
Make friends. With friends you can make fun anywhere.
tsewlliw··on Ask HN: What is tech debt to you?
Tech debt either makes changes more expensive to implement, or adds operational work to your development team. The rest is bugs, features, and stuff you want to change. Addressing technical debt should result in the ability to make changes faster or make mores changes.
tsewlliw··on Ask HN: How do you prioritize Job offers by money and interest?
Which boss / coworkers / company did you vibe with?
tsewlliw··on Airbnb CEO calls the office an 'anachronistic form' and 'from a pre-digital age'
You're missing that part where soft contribution is dropped. It's doing less work because the person aren't sharing skills and knowledge with the wider organization. That is valued work.
tsewlliw··on Chesterton’s Fence (2020)
A witty saying proves nothing. -- Voltaire

Just as a general rule in conversation, invoking so-and-so's law or this fence isn't a productive tactic. Instead, ask the question that wisdom suggests you ask, and for this bothersome fence in particular, keep in mind that you are weighing an unidentified consequence against a proposed benefit, and at least endeavor to expend some of your own effort on suggesting what the value of the fence might be or how one might go about finding it. You may find some of that effort has been undertaken and that failure has not been shared.

tsewlliw··on Google app analyzes selfies and finds doppelgangers in museum portraits (2018)
Conceptually, this is rather like lossy compression with a shared dictionary. In practice your likeness has still been trasmitted. Jpeg files are after all just numbers too, merely less specialized.
tsewlliw··on Africa declared free of wild polio
Here's hoping we double down on Polio efforts and ensure it is entirely eliminated. Finishing is super important, and this milestone shows this is something humanity can finish.
tsewlliw··on User-defined Order in SQL
This is probably decently efficient if you use recursive CTE's to traverse it, and use keyset pagination rather than limit/offset.

    with recursive cte (udo_id, prv, nxt, label) as (
        select * 
        from udo
        where udo_id = :first_item_id
        union all 
        select u.*
        from udo u
        join cte
        on u.prv = cte.udo_id
    ) select * from cte limit 100
tsewlliw··on An nginx.conf for 2017: HTTP/2, IPV6, HTML5 SSE, load balancing and more.
> 3/ If you think your own DNS server is going to be better maintained than Google's, sure. But not everyone else would.

Be careful here, Google will rate limit you very severely and waiting 10s for DNS responses inside Nginx is no fun. Most cloud providers will give you a good resolver via DHCP that is much more forgiving when you accidentally abuse it.

tsewlliw··on Why does software development take so long?
Why does some software development take so little time?

My suggestion for the answer is that when the goal of the software project is selected carefully in the context of the surrounding ecosystem you can connect a few things and all the real magic was in picking the goal.

When instead you pick the goal and then figure out how to achieve it, who would be surprised that there is often more work involved after picking the goal?

tsewlliw··on ‘Brexit’: The Vote That Could Sink Britain's Economy
Controlling borders is fundamental to sovereignty, the point being that a sovereign nation decides how porous the borders ought to be. To cede that control significantly reduces the self-determination of the people within the border, even if the decision of exactly how porous does not vary between administering entities.
tsewlliw··on If You Build It, They Will Complain
One likely motivator for writing the tooling in the first place was an attempt to automate away manual tasks, the point of which would be to never think about these topics / problems again. In that light, the idea of being anointed "head of stuff I don't ever want to think about" is likely a reason to find a new job. Some people like to do work that interests them, not manage other people doing work that bores them.
tsewlliw··on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
There is nothing wrong with being at work just for the money, and it most definitely does not mean you are cynical. Funding a family or a hobby is a rewarding and valuable life to live. Being in it for the money can be a really powerful way to push through a lot of hard and boring work that nobody capable of doing could possibly be passionate about.
tsewlliw··on Fast Ruby – A collection of common Ruby idioms
This is neat! I think the "why" section thats on some of them is the most valuable part, absorbing that "why" into your lizard brain can add up to huge changes in your natural style :)
tsewlliw··on In Defence of WordPress
I'm with you on this. WordPress is acknowledging the actual behavior of the people who use it and aiming to be secure inside that reality instead of telling people they are doing it wrong and to learn how to internet. That is absolutely laudable and in practice prevents a lot of real problems and lifts people up instead of puts them down.
tsewlliw··on Machine Learning Showdown: Apache Mahout vs. Weka
Just playing around with it, do typical strategies for using these tools include "bad" data? I drew a '-' and got '4' as the guess, which feels very wrong.
tsewlliw··on The Business Guy vs. the Programmer
I like the independence achieved here, down to not having to deal with people with conflicting communication styles.
tsewlliw··on Zed: The Next Phase
> I’m making Zed my day-time job

I'm super excited for you! Passion & Dedication! Bravo

tsewlliw··on Proof Market: Submit Coq proof, get paid with Bitcoin
Way to avoid arbitrary risks and complications!
tsewlliw··on RocksDB – A persistent key-value store for fast storage environments
fixed your link: https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/blob/master/db/db_impl.c...

Take another look! There's a guard object used at the function scope to ensure the lock is released, and this block is bracketed to release and reacquire the lock, not acquire and release. There may be a case for a guard object that does the release/reacquire, but its definitely not a slam dunk like acquire/release

tsewlliw··on The American way of using fork and knife is inefficient and inelegant.
The contrarian in me now says "Cut and then bring the bite to your mouth with your knife, the fork is now a stabilizing tool, also mock every European who doesn't".
tsewlliw··on Dealing with Unicode in Go
Is rune "right" even? I thought that rune was a single codepoint. How does that behave in the presence of combining characters or in non normalized unicode strings?

https://twitter.com/glitchr_

tsewlliw··on Know Thy Java Object Memory Layout
It cannot be done as part of compilation. For example, the superclass you run against may not be the same as the superclass you compile against.
tsewlliw··on Go 1.1 performance improvements
I think JS is actually a radically simpler language than either Python or Ruby. Lua is a much closer comparison, and its certainly got a nice interpreter and JIT available.
tsewlliw··on The Devil in Plain Text
That quote is great, made all the better by the reality that writing code is doing that surgery manually.
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