Gerald Weinberg was a prolific author in the tech consultancy space, and most of his writing consists of anecdotes like this. He explains his theories by telling stories, the veracity of which isn’t the point.
On the specific note, I frequently make these mistakes, despite having read his books and knowing the problem to which he’s referring. I say “could you just…” and “we should really do x today”. In the abstract, we can all see the problem, yet it’s easy to forget in reality.
> On the specific note, I frequently make these mistakes, despite having read his books and knowing the problem to which he’s referring. I say “could you just…” and “we should really do x today”. In the abstract, we can all see the problem, yet it’s easy to forget in reality.
Oh, sure, I don't mean "no one who has read RFC 2119 will ever use 'should' incorrectly." I mean that I would hope that someone who understands the need to define 'should' would recognize, when looking at a requirements document and themselves singling out the word 'should', that divergent opinions on its meaning could be at issue.
> He explains his theories by telling stories, the veracity of which isn’t the point.
I am not so concerned with whether the story did happen as with whether it could happen. I think telling such a story risks giving a misleading idea of the ways of getting people to understand their difference—that "here, let me define that for you" in such a bald-faced form is a productive post-conflict resolution strategy. (After all, it's what those of us with engineer's disease, or at least I, think should resolve such a conflict.) More honest, I think, to emphasize the importance of such interventions beforehand than to pretend that people will easily respond amiably to them afterwards.
That’s a huge understatement. We have electricity, refrigeration, medicine, mass transit (including international), human rights, enormous increases in population, fast media, internet, nuclear weapons, universal literacy, factory lines, spaceships, cities of many millions of people. Anyone that’s played Civilisation knows how far the tech tree goes once you hit the Enlightenment.
And you can see how much internet and social media have changed society, so imagine the impact of all those things combined on the human brain.
I find this a vague, reductionist view. When I have dinner with my family today, there’s more than one nature, while my own nature has changed in the last 10 years. To say most people have had the same nature at least for the last 300 years is only true if you reduce “nature” to something so banal that it means nothing at all.
The behavior of one person over a single lifetime really has nothing at all to do with the behavior of humans as a species over the span of millennia.
Over the course of our history as a species, people have roughly always had the same drive. The same types of people have always existed and always follow the same patterns. Compare Alexander and Napoleon. Aristotle and Freud. Pliny and Darwin. Follow the lines of philosophy, science, engineering, politics, military all the way from antiquity to today. Each has a common thread woven back to the beginning of civilization.
You are not that different from someone living in ancient Rome, no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. Times and culture change, but people have always been what we are now, good and bad both. We have the same drive for greed, generosity, community, solitude, family, power, glory. The wheel of Ka turns and turns.
You should study ancient history, it's pretty fascinating for exactly this reason. People are frequently quite surprised to learn just how similar ancient people were to how we see ourselves now. This is also one of the biggest mistakes people make when studying history: underestimating ancient peoples and framing them as some sort of primitive undeveloped animals. The pyramids were just as ancient and mysterious to the Romans as they are to us to this day.
I'll talk about the simplest ones, just my personal opinion.
- Color.
- The organizational logic is not prominent enough, I have to be very careful to find which section is which. Color can help but UX designers should do more.
- The default chat box is too small, and it doesn't appear when you click on the channel by default.
I only participate when I need to interact with bytecodealliance, and you need to ask more people to get better feedback.
If you want ChatGPT to say nice things about you (or bad things about your competitors), then you'll need to give it your version of information - at least that will be the line peddled to us.
I've already received emails from SEO snake oil sellers now advertising themselves as being able to influence ChatGPT output.
I'd say this is exactly what the interviewers wanted. They're interested in how you break down the problem, the types of solutions you consider, your understanding of the trade-offs involved. For example, I interviewed somebody who was adamant they could prevent double-booking by polling an end-point and storing the state in Redux. Fantastic JavaScript skills, terrible knowledge of databases.
Also, there are many UI challenges solved easily by React plugins - e.g. multi-select boxes, datepickers, colour pickers, file uploads, etc. Yes, this is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. But I don't have a nutcracker, and I do already have a sledgehammer, so why not.
I agree, it would be nice to make it easy to donate, and then the donations are spread to others within the ecosystem. But perhaps they're worried about a ruckus when they choose to make a donation someone doesn't agree with, so they'd need to have a layer of bureaucracy that they don't want to manage.
No. Tax deduction effectively excludes middlemen if they don't exclusively distribute to tax-deductible purposes. And at least in Germany, the hurdle is high, as is the risk of being retroactively declared non-deductible, after which you need to pay all the retroactive taxes, usually bankrupting your org and even the middle-men.
This is true of all famous essays. People remove the nuance included in the body and over-apply the title without really understanding it.
For example "Goto considered harmful". I remember working with a very good programmer who'd used a "goto", and a much less senior one[1] rejected their PR by linking to the article.
[1] I'm ashamed to say it was me, a long time ago.
That's precisely why I love to only comment things with questions, i.e. "isn't go-to considered harmful? Is this really the best way?".
It gives the person making the change the opportunity to give context for their decision - and either change or spell out their reasoning for it, potentially giving me an opportunity to learn from them.
Another good benefit is that it doesn't "attack" the PR author in the "non-violent communication" way
You can totally do this with non-passive-aggressive phrasings ("Is this possible using structured programming instead of GOTO? What went wrong when you tried, how messy does it get?")
On the specific note, I frequently make these mistakes, despite having read his books and knowing the problem to which he’s referring. I say “could you just…” and “we should really do x today”. In the abstract, we can all see the problem, yet it’s easy to forget in reality.