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vmarshall23on To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software

eVacs!

https://lwn.net/Articles/44077/ http://www.softimp.com.au/evacs/products.html

vmarshall23on How to build a JavaScript package manager

Oh no. Not just another package manager ... a package manager generator... runs :-)

vmarshall23on The Cool Cam (2007)

I am almost ashamed to admit how many times I've reduced hugely complex things to what amounts to a demo on a shiny retina display ipad. The %99 percent of what-actually-solves-the-problem is still there, but most of reaction could be summed up with "oooh, shiny" :-)

(maybe a touch of hyperbole in there)

vmarshall23on The Making Of “Homer At The Bat,” The Episode That Conquered Prime Time (2012)

Baseball and the Simpsons. Thank you kind person for the perfect combination of topics to drive away the world-is-on-fire news a little bit today. :-)

vmarshall23on Bluetooth 5 Now Available

Wait. What? I'm still waiting for reasonable adoption of 4 (re:BLE) ...

vmarshall23on Open-Source 3D Graphics Design: Where to Begin

I used to believe that Blender was bad UI design, but now I think it's quite good, albeit different approach.

Take this with a huge grain of salt, as 3d art is rarely my primary job function, but after I deliberately sat myself down and tried to approach Blender in the way it's intended, instead of getting frustrated by it not working the way wanted it to, I finally grokked it. Now I'm frustrated by other programs not working the way blender does.

I can't really say if that make it better or worse UI/UX, because I don't really get what most people think of as good UI/UX as being all that great. (e.g. why is the iOS back button on the top left of my screen, when every other directional notion is at the bottom?!?!)

Anyway, I like to think of Blender as a series of UI workflows wrapping some python scripts, workflows that don't assume that all things should be done via the MacBook Wheel :-)

vmarshall23on Project delays: why good software estimates are impossible (2015)

Heh. How long does apt-cache search take. Kidding, and I do recall that being a real problem for most things at one point. You'd go to FreshMeat and just hope that the highest rated one was good. But, re: apt, if it gets in the main repo, then I'm hard-pressed to think I'm smarter than all those people.

That said, for some classes of software, Drupal plugins and Minecraft mods come to mind, are all varying degrees of abysmal. Those take a lot longer to sort through.

Things like "evidence based scheduling" and your permutations around "velocity" and burndown charts seem to help, particularly over time, but I've found no magic bullet.

vmarshall23on Project delays: why good software estimates are impossible (2015)

I've always thought, if you can, with reasonable accuracy, predict how long it will take to build a piece of software, then it's probably already done, and you should just apt-get it or whatever.

However, if it's something truly novel, then kind of by definition, it's impossible to predict how long it will take, because it's never been done before.

Of course, there's a million shades of gray in between, but it's not like bridge building. Bridges are pretty unchanged in 1000's of years. Most software you write, should be brand new, otherwise, why do it?

vmarshall23on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2015)

Location: San Francisco

Remote: Maybe

Willing to relocate: Maybe

Technologies: OSS, Django, Python, JavaScript*, Games, Whatever

Résumé/CV: http://fartytowels.org/vmarshall-resume.pdf

Email: vernon.marshall@gmail.com

vmarshall23on Ask HN: How do you navigate a new codebase?

printf :-/

vmarshall23on The Art of the Propagator (2009) [pdf]

It all ends with Skynet