zachsnow

Exactly as you say: if customers (that is, the people paying for the software, not necessarily the people filling in forms) need it, then it's a requirement.

The point is that while sorting by last name (say) might not seem important to an engineer, and requiring a last name might seem outright stupid to a person filling in a form, nevertheless it is often an important requirement. Frequently folks will observe some "stupid" form, and link to some "falsehoods engineers believe about X" document, suggesting that engineering "got it wrong", when in fact they have simply misunderstood who the software is actually for.

> What do you really need a first and last name separated for anyways? Sorting?... Sorting by last name isn't usually important...

When paying customers / clients want to sort by last name, because “that’s how we do things”, then you sort by last name. So it’s only important when you want to make money.

Edit to add: your customers also don’t care that someone somewhere has 6 first names and no last name. “This wasn’t a problem with our old software.”

I am from Minneapolis. I’m trying to imagine a fast rail connect to Chicago as being better than driving. Once in Chicago I think I’d like to have a car? It’s only a day’s drive away so I imagine I’d rather drive. Basically the net is that the US is car centric and it will be a lot of work to change that. (Which I’m on board for, it’s just not easy or quick.)

It seems however that 2018 was a “record year” so maybe it’s just back to “normal”?

CA, USA. To be fair it’s not like everyone is smiling all the time! But I genuinely feel that my neighborhood is a great community mostly consisting of interesting and friendly people.

This feels like hyperbole. Instead of saying you are wrong objectively, I’ll say instead that my subjective experience of “the city” is in stark contrast to this. Green spaces and the ocean abound. My neighbors are wonderful people. The businesses around me are owned and operated by local people. I can’t walk down the block without running into good folks with smiles on their faces. I try to bring the same energy to my neighborhood. I couldn’t imagine not living here.

I think the city and the country and everywhere in between can be a wonderful or terrible place, but I would hesitate to say that any one place is right or wrong for any one person.

Why would they line up to work for you of all people? They can work for anyone they want, it’s somewhat of a seller’s market when it comes to programming.

I imagine just about nothing is 100% fun 100% of the time. If many parts of your work are fun, it’s fair to say your work is fun. If you’d rather be doing something else, you could try that, too. Maybe you’d like it more.

Exactly. Admire traits, but don’t (or, try not to) envy. Admiration, and the motivation that can come with it, can be good! But blind envy or jealousy can overlook the negatives that someone might be dealing with.

Still cool.

It seems to me that is how my eyesight works, too, so it’s unsurprising that’s how my mind’s “eyesight” works as well!

I found this to be a very interesting survey of the different things affecting the SF housing market. Whether you agree with all of the points brought up it's hard to deny that it's a complex issue.

> is this not evidence of incomplete requirements?

Yes! But there will never be a complete set of requirements — indeed if you think the requirements are complete, you spent too much time on them and you aren’t looking at the problem carefully enough.

There’s a balance between calling for more complete requirements and being able to work with less complete requirements. The more you can correctly choose to do the latter, the more you “hone this skill”, the more effective you can often be.

(As a bonus, when you do call for more complete requirements, in my experience people will be more open to doing that work. They know you wouldn’t ask if you didn’t “really need it”.)

The article states that by not coding at home you can “have a life, too”, implying you won’t have one if you code at home. This idea is repeated in the article, suggesting to me that it is more than just clickbait.

That’s dumb. Of course you can “have a life”, regardless of whether your hobbies include something you also get paid for. Denigrating folks as not having a “life” for this reason, even as a rhetorical device, is dumb.

That website is very bad at conveying what it actually is to someone that might want to use it.

99% of the job building the core tech; the other 99% of the job is sales, support, account management, marketing, etc.

It’s never just the product, no matter how much we builder types might like.

(No idea whether 60M is the right number for the rest though.)

> ignoring the many many people who turned $15,000 loans into failed businesses.

As far as I understand it, most (VC-backed, tech) companies that raise millions of dollars manage to turn the money into failure.

Not quite the timespans some folks have mentioned, but I’ve been at my company 6-7 years. I helped start it, and it was recently acquired. It’s still super fun to work on. That’s enough for me.

I love how “boring” this stack is; great job just shipping the damn thing!

The same mechanism that ensures that the local coffee shop isn’t charging so much that the owner has a second house in Bermuda — if you raise prices that much you won’t be competitive.

Obviously in an particular case, who knows? But in general I think the expectation is that the market will decide.

I was looking forward to reading this article as the concept (even just the name, identify diversification) immediately resonated with me.

What I found was an anecdote followed by a few hypotheticals. “What if you spend all your time sportsing and then you get hurt?” Really a minimal treatment of the idea unfortunately.

Hey this is neat! Re: injecting into Slack.app, you're right, it's a pain. I had a simple approach here: https://zachsnow.github.io/slinger/ but it needs to be updated for every version (which of course I didn't do).

It would be cool if you made it so that users could inject it manually (via enabling --dev and $.getScript() or so) into the app; I for one don't restart Slack very often, so it wouldn't be too much of a pain.

Re: stick vs automatic, is QWERTY more fun though?

I believe the point is whether the string is intended to be displayed to a human, not whether a human might read it in the code. Still some wiggle room around logging, etc. I guess.

That’s so interesting! I see now what you mean (hi google), but my initial mental image was a rich old man with a death-grip on his riches.

I have found the closer I am to the product and the clients that will be affected, and the more thoroughly I understand the usecase from the client’s perspective, the better I am at understanding how much effort to spend on “getting it right” in this way. Still wrong sometimes though!

> people who can see themselves wanting it if someone else pays (i.e. future them could pay)

Great way to make this point! So when you ask someone "would you pay for it?" you are really asking "would you use it if someone else paid for it?" Which, really, doesn't tell you very much at all.

A minor suggestion: give more buttons in the UI `pointer: cursor` and hover states; it will be easier to see when a click will actually do something (thinking in particular of the black bar of icons at the bottom of the page).

They meant ctrl-a and ctrl-e.

Absolutely; I've also worked with screws that were, as far I as I could understand, purposely made of less rugged metal to ensure that when they were tightened against the object they were meant to fasten (made of plastic), they would strip before damaging it.

Still sucks to accidentally strip a screw that really should be that tight!

Snowboards? In what way? (Genuinely curious what you mean, been snowboarding for 24 years and can't guess, but of course I'm right handed!)