softwaredoug

I see it all the time in my domain (search). Novice data scientists getting into a new field quickly get frustrated with existing practitioners. Existing practitioners want to use tried and true metho…

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1831/

I like this book, but not a lot of practica advice. A good compendium is The Sleep Solution by Chris Winter.

Discussions of interviews always cast a practice as definitively “good” or “bad”. The reality is it depends what the real job will entail. If the job actually requires a lot of white boarding style pr…

Well it’s certainly relevant if the job requires a lot of thinking on your feet. Like consulting and solutioning with clients under pressure... None of these interview practices are by themselves good…

In addition to docs, I’d also add evangelism as often missing. For a project to be successful, someone fronting the project and engaging with a potential community on how it could be used. Call it “sa…

Using the term “AI” was also a big red flag that this person doesn’t know how the algorithm works. It’s not some sky net sentient thing trying to get us to watch more videos... it’s math and training …

There’s a whole generation of developers that didn’t come up in IBM and then later MS days of vendor lock-in. Open source is default and it’s easy to only see the benefits and positive side of one ven…

This article reads a bit too triumphal for my tastes. Factory towns and globalized industrialization have a dark side. Certainly this story can’t all be roses?

It’s tough (speaking as a consultant at a smaller company). Large company procurement/legal basically limits the viable pool of competing consulting firms to those with sunk capital in their own …

Sure. I also am conveying the benefits might manifest in other ways (Cadillac health care, profit share, bonuses, autonomy, growth oppys, etc)

Pro tip: if you make pay your only consideration, you may end up pretty miserable. Often companies pay very high because they burn through employees, and are otherwise a nightmare to work for for a va…

> The difference between a consultant and sales is that the consultant gets paid by the hour, the sales person gets paid by the success of the customer, I like your attitude about sales, but as a c…

I agree on quoting. I think my problem is slacks product design isn’t very opinionated. There are many ways of calling back to an earlier conversation, but slack users don’t really have guidance on wh…

My “mixed reviews” probably have more to do with slack being scatterbrained from a product direction. Look how poorly threading works nearly all of the time, with half of the conversation buried in a …

As mentioned on the podcast “Lexicon Valley”

> But many of these companies experience difficulties with respect to their business models, as can be seen from a bevy of recent licensing schemes that attempt to straddle the line between open so…

You’re right, as an adult I’m not suddenly going to become a piano virtuoso. Innateness here is a pretty complicated topic. Hard work at an early age probably has a huge part of molding skills we asso…

Best parenting advice I ever got was to praise children for hard work, and avoid calling them “smart.” Intelligence becomes a stand in for some measure of goodness or social fitness that after a while…

By “lock in” I should have clarified I meant locked in to a proprietary ecosystem. Certainly being dependent on open source can be problematic if you’re not an active member of the community (or if th…

For those terrified of an AWS dominated future, projects like this are crucial. The closer we can get to OSS based push button open source DB cluster in any cloud, the less we need fear AWS will host…

I don’t have a problem to people linking to their blogs as long as it’s relevant and helpful to the conversation.

I think the difference is high value, in demand skills vs temp office work. Indeed we’ve always had this dichotomy with temp agencies paying peanuts to just about anyone to do menial office tasks. But…

If you like “Why We Sleep” I recommend “The Sleep Solution” as a companion. Why We Sleep is heavy on interesting sleep science but light on practical tips for improving sleep (The Sleep Solution is th…