• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • For MIT/Apache it doesn’t matter. That’s always a problem with those free to use licenses you have a “good idea” who’s using it, but you never really can tell. It also creates a shit load of wasted improvements every time a company uses it, moth balls the project, but never pushes code upstream because why do that? \s So you sit back and hope that someone in the company feels a big enough moral drive or obligation to contribute their improvements up stream. But, how can you tell definitively? You can sometimes see it in the job descriptions they are hiring for, also I have had companies reach out out me personally for help. Many open source projects also will reach out and ask, and if they get the ok, will put it in the project description in order to encourage others companies to do the same. So why to companies bother? The funny thing about open source is that it lets people who like solving tough problems (the best type of engineers) know where the tough problems are being definitively solved, because here’s the code, and here’s the author from xyz company contributing and showing the rest of the world how it’s done. Often this will bring in engineers who are at the top of their game to these companies.




  • The problem with this logic is the manufactures have no control over the iPhone update. The article didn’t go into exactly what happened, but it could have been that the device worked fine at launch, but then Apple released an update which caused an issue in the app. Even if it didn’t happen this way I could definitely see it happening. Using an app for critical life sustaining medical devices is like playing Russian Roulette, an update from Google or Apple can put you in the hospital, or worse.



  • The problem with this is that companies like rabbitai are exploiting our inherent drive to teach in order to pass on knowledge and make society and life better for the next generation and ourselves. (In this case code reviews) This doesn’t work in this situation because you’re not actually helping out another person that will reciprocate help to you down the line. You’re helping out a large company, which has no moral values and doesn’t operate in society with the same values as a human being. To me a code review is more than just pointing out mistakes it’s also about sharing knowledge and having meaningful dialog about what makes sense and what doesn’t. There’s no doubt that AI is an amazing achievement, but to me it seems that every application of this technology that involves human interaction manages to simultaneously exploit and erase the core “humanness”, of the interaction. I think this is the case because these types of AI applications are purely monetarily driven, and not for the advancement of our society. OpenAI had the right idea to start with, but they have sunken into the same trope in lock step with the rest of the Googles, Apples and Amazons of the world. Imagine if one of these large companies like say Google had been given money by the us government to create the arpa net and then went on to only use the technology for profit. Would we really be in the same connected world we are now?






  • I have to chime in on this one, I grew up in Oregon and worked at Target a couple of years as a cashier and cart collector. This was by far the most miserable job I have ever had, it sucked. Besides leaving their nasty ass trash and dirty diapers in the carts people would leave them scattered all over the mall parking lot. It was my job to walk a mile or so around the lot that encircled the mall at closing time in the pouring rain and collect them. This was before they had the robots that push them for the workers, so we used a rope attached to the front to steer about 35-40 at once. With out fail id consantly get my sopping wet feet run over by those fucking things while trying to push them back to the store. Not to mention, we’d get the occasional wind storm and the ones that weren’t corraled would blow all over the parking lot crashing into cars. Then we’d get bitched at by the customers. Trust me when you put a cart back in the corral, the people working at the store appreciate it. There’s more than enough other work to get done in retail.




  • I started out where everyone else did and worked my way up so I’ve “been in the trenches”. After doing this for 20 years and shipping multiple consumer and internal products I’ve seen it all and know what can make or break a project and what works and doesn’t when introducing or using a new technology to a dev group. Also, I definitely don’t throw it over the fence, it’s a team effort and we all agree on what sounds like the best approach. Along with code reviews, part of the coding I discussed is sitting down and creating a skeleton of tests and an initial architecture that others can build off of and give me feedback on. If someone is having trouble implementing something I sit down with them and work through it. It’s also about trust, people also trust me and know that in general I know what I’m talking about. The thing is most people would read my resume (or even this quick summary) and say I’d make a great development manager. But the problem with being pigeon holed into being a manager just because your a great dev is that it doesn’t reflect what developers are good at, making software. More and more companies are realizing this when they shove their best dev engineers into the position of a manger and it crushes their souls, and makes them leave. So they are creating these principal or staff positions which at most companies are laterally equivalent to a director of software engineering without the people/staff managment. There’s a great podcast episode on this by Stephen Dubner who wrote the book Freakonomics https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-there-so-many-bad-bosses/


  • The position to try to achieve these days is of principal or staff engineer. In this role I get to code all day (mostly exploring new and upcoming technologies that might benefit the company) AND lend my advice for architectural solutions to various groups. In my opinion it’s the best of both worlds, with out having to be pushed into a management or lead position (which always “leads” to more project management than software engineering).