Thanks - that's an interesting article, although the key quote from the original paper doesn't really help make the case:
> The only thing that can be said with any certainty, is that not doing any technical debt maintenance does impact them negatively. But there isn’t a lot of difference from that point on. This is slightly controversial, and could be unrelated altogether.
Judging by the lack of activity on this thread, and the above article, I think I could effectively argue that technical debt either doesn't exist (outside the minds of developers), or that it's 'a thing', but just not that important.
No worries. When you said "Explaining the impact of technical debt ... is almost impossible," I thought you (or others) might be interested in a good way to explain it. This analogy has helped me, so I hope others may find it useful.
Co-founder of YunoJuno here. I thought I'd chip in on a general point (I
won't attempt to answer specifics here as I think that's probably inviting
trouble for someone like me, with skin in the game.)
What I would say is that we at YJ feel very strongly that the future of
work is freelance. We've (literally) put our money where our mouth is on
this belief (not to mention our careers), and so we, and I'm guessing the
others in this space, really want to work with the freelancer community
to make this happen.
I've been a freelancer (developer), and a hirer (as CTO at various companies),
so feel reasonably in touch with both sides of the market, and frankly, neither
side functions properly. You (as freelancers) shouldn't be paying 20%, and
employers shouldn't be wading through the cr^p that traditional freelancer
recruiters put them through[1]. We're all working on making this better.
Whilst we're doing our thing, there are some great competitors in this market,
and hopefully they would agree with me when I say please don't give up on us
- the world of work is changing, and we're all trying to push it along
in the right direction.
Oh, and one minor rebuff - the very best employers in London, certainly,
are using online services, whether that be YunoJuno or any of the other
sites listed - and whilst the names on the list may change, the migration
to online services is inevitable. This is your future, get involved.
[1]There are exceptions to this - some recruiters are good guys - but they
take a lot of finding.
* Basecamp - dates, discussions, project type stuff
* Google - docs, shared calendars, Hangouts
* Screenhero - screen sharing
We've almost managed to remove email from our daily flow - I very rarely send / receive internal emails now.
HipChat + Trello have become our foundation tools - couldn't live without them. (The new Trello attachments view has plugged a gap, and made sharing designs much easier than it used to be.)
HipChat is brilliant once you move on to building stuff - plug in code commits, deployments, customer service (we have Zendesk alerts) etc.
I would absolutely agree with your last point - sharing links + discussions around links is the biggest problem by far - Google+ is a perfect fit, but (our) people just seem resistant to it. I've tried, and failed, several times to get everyone to adopt it. We have a bunch of iOS people and they often share direct from Flipboard, which may be part of it.
> The use case for these magic methods might seem small, and that may very well be true. I won't spend too much more time on reflection magic methods because they aren't very important
If you want a reason to use the instancecheck magic method, the mocking of test objects is a good one. I recently came unstuck with testing Django models and mocking out DateFields, and the instancecheck method was the solution - http://tech.yunojuno.com/mocking-dates-with-django
I did some JavaCard development on a project probably ten years ago - and the highlight was meeting the "Head of SIM" at a major network, being told how many times a day everyone's SIM card 'crashes'.
I wrote my Master's thesis on software platforms for smartcard applications in 1999. An interesting platform running javacard apart from SIMs is/was the Java iButton from Maxim (then Dallas Semiconductor).
Also, all ATM cards which are smartcards (i.e. almost all of them in countries such as France, Norway) can also hold several applications. The banks just doesn't allow it. In theory you could, even with today's technology, buy a blank card (say, with a David Bowie picture if that's your thing) and have the bank, visa, mastercard, grocery loyalty programme, library card, frequent flyer applications etc on it. Just carry one card! But no, everyone wants to own the card have their logo in it. Sigh.
I'm in London and they are rolling out contactless applications for certain things now. Subway sandwiches all take them. London buses you can pay by swipign your debit card and there is one bank that has a debit card/oyster card(oyster card is use on all London transport).
We used to have them in Poland for a few years now, virtually every single place has contactless terminals. In the UK I managed to use mine at Greggs,and the lady working there had absolutely no idea what I've just done, they were very confused after I told them that they have contactless terminals. Other than that, Subway and McDonalds have them.
It's a bit late for you to enter, unfortunately, but the UK does have something like this. I had the great pleasure of sponsoring a team in the Young Rewired State "Festival of Code" [1] in 2012 - which is open to 13-18 year old students and runs for a week in August.
If you're interested they are always looking for both sponsors (which basically means giving up a meeting room in your office for the week, and providing lunch for the team) and mentors [2] - who can spend some time with the team helping them shape their idea. It's a brilliant scheme, and a really inspiring week.
That's him - Sir Trevor is a much loved British personality (ex-news anchor); he's enough of a fixture to have been parodied for many years by Lenny Henry (a British comedian) as Sir Trevor McDonought.
He's best known for being a good communicator, clear and concise, informative but never patronising. Which makes him quite a good 'patron' for a writing app.
In the UK there is a scheme called SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) which gives investors 50% tax relief on equity investments up to £100K per annum. This is great for startups, as it has resulted in a lot of people investing for tax efficiency (and hence why most angels look to invest up £50K in any single investment, so that they can spread the risk); however, the side-effect of this is that a lot of people who would otherwise have simply invested in markets have become 'angel investors'. Joining an investment club seems like a sensible idea for these investors, however they often lack the experience required to understand (or indeed empathise) with the entrepeneurs they meet.
