Whatever happened to looking for evidence?
Morendil
Karma: 9,461
What I suspect is happening, based on (just now) clicking the same link twice in a row and going once to a 404, then the next time to the intended page: one of the Web servers in the site’s load balancing rotation is misconfigured, and systematically throwing errors.
You might want to ask them to look into it.
Yep, works now.
“Glad To Change My Mind” goes to a 404 page.
“Just because many believe in something doesn’t make it true—the opposite, actually.” (This from Googling the too-short excerpt and reading a bit of the surrounding text.) He spoils it by excepting two domains, religion and politics.
For six months straight I’ve kept up a routine of coding a little bit − 10 lines, two lines, just a refactoring—every single day. In the process I’ve picked up some fluency in the new(ish) language Elm, functional programming in general and functional reactive programming in particular.
Awesome, thanks! (ETA) I have the figures already from a secondary source, so that’s OK.
Software Engineering, A Historical Perspective J. Marciniak DOI 10.1002/0471028959.sof321
Cool! Where do you work?
For a while now I’ve also taken part in the Good Judgment Project prediction contests, since Season 2 as a “super-forecaster”. I’ve scaled back my involvement this year for various reasons. But I do know that they’re working on a commercial offering; depending on what you’re looking to do, this may or may not be relevant to your efforts...
I’d welcome any suggestions for how to find collaborators.
Keep posting the material here. Post to Main. Don’t worry about it not being polished enough: you’ll get plenty of feedback. Ignore feedback that isn’t useful to you.
To put this in some perspective, they’re mostly doing it because the Brits did it first.
Still, having any recognition and awareness that there is a problem there is heartening. We’re just getting started here; last I heard, the good old habits were still in force, i.e. of starting software efforts with price tags expressed in hundred million euro multiples, letting them run for a while, then scrapping them as not even worth deploying.
Procurement is one of the big culprits here; a classic case of lost purposes. Ostensibly to save money, departments give a lot of power to policy-making bodies who then dictate a risk-averse process that departments must follow before they can spend their own money. This means that contracts now mainly go to contracting firms who positively relish dealing with red tape, but are less competent at actually shipping code.
Typically this leads to disasters, see above, which result in tightening financial controls, giving even more power to purchasing organizations, the almighty tail wagging all the dogs. The departments’ own IT people, in this setup, end up doing nothing much beyond filling out paperwork, while all actual competencies such as writing the software are “externalized” to contractors.
So the job description is basically to cure government of this addiction. I’ve been given control over a budget of a couple million euros to start with, and instructions to split it over about 10 worthwhile projects this year. Each project should have a 6-month roadmap, with a first go/no-go milestone at two weeks in (and an obligation to report in with something they’ve learned by getting out of the building and talking to end users). At least half of the development crew (4 to 6 people) should be in-house to the departments, not contractors. That should leave much less room to hide incompetence, but we’ll also provide a bit of mentoring to make sure these teams know a minimum of good engineering practice.
A couple months ago I started learning the Elm programming language, and to make things interesting I resolved to push one non-empty code commit to GitHub every single day (ideally also non-trivial, but not everyone’s definition of “trivial” will match mine). I’m now on day 67 of that streak, having written six proto-games (playable here if you’re so inclined, though they’re not hugely entertaining). So far the habit has resisted a new job and a ten-day vacation. I’ve also been keeping a daily journal since Feb 21.
Used my 3D printer (Prusa i3) to print the entire set of plastic printed parts for a different printer (FoldaRap), very much a non-trivial project (~ 50h of printing for 30+ distinct parts) that requires a well-tuned printer. I’m particularly proud as this comes on the tails of completing a major conversion of the Prusa from its original direct-extrusion design to a Bowden setup.
Got hired by the French government to promote a more agile style of programming and project management.
Bragging Thread May 2015
This later piece is perhaps relevant.
there are a lot of studies backing up that claim
Post links to three?
This continues to be a puzzling topic...
My most recent explicit thought about this had to to with teamwork: it’s become a commonplace that “conflict in a team isn’t actually bad”, and I was thinking that conflict per se may not be counterproductive, but I would certainly view engaging in dominance contests as a waste of time all around.
When I coach teams I often consciously adopt (and advocate for others in a similar position) a “low posture”—a cluster of heuristics, really, such as “I’m happy to help the group work through a problem but I’m not the one who makes the decision”, or “invest significant time in hearing people out”.
There can also be a question of perspective: some people are determined to view the world through dominance-tinted glasses, others to see it in tints of warm fuzzy.
I’ve just run my first half-marathon, coming in with an official time of 2h0m44s, close enough to my 2h objective that I’ll call it a win.
Also this month, I reached a first milestone in writing video games using FRP (Functional Reactive Programming) in the Elm language, coding a proto-game that reproduces the basic gameplay of “The Company of Myself”.
Bragging Thread March 2015
Is there any reason you couldn’t email back saying something along the lines of “I’d appreciate your pointing out what specific weaknesses made you rule out my application, so that I can improve to become a stronger candidate for later or for other similar companies, and possibly so that I can send candidates your way that better fit the profile?”
Form and content are not that easily separated. For instance, I like #15 (a bit), because the typography fits the message.
Instead, I’d suggest you focus on design that reinforces, ideally in a humorous way, the message of the slogan.
I feel strongly that “Please Provide an Example” ought to have the word “example” consist of hairy green ball things, in homage to Fenyman’s famous explanation of how he would debug math or physics claim by turning abstract concepts into imagined examples.
“I notice I am confused” could play on a classic “magnifier” icon in the word “notice”, and jumble up the letters of “cnfosued”, or mess up their typography.