The Whiteboard - 2015-10-02 (page 4 of 4)

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10:04 PM

@JimmyHoffa Every job here sucks and usually for the same reasons. Too much old school management and very top down heirarchal structured organizations. Basically a breeding ground for politics and incompetence to form and be protected at the top.

Part of the problem I think is cultural. We are still a mill town mentality. Management is absolute and unquestionable, workers are very much 9 to 5, not in my job description not my problem attitude, which leads to horizontally organized management structures

@maple_shaft hey! finally in room at same time

you hear anything yet?

Horizontal management slows down any projects

@durron597 no. But my current employer promoted me

@maple_shaft yeah, you mentioned that

I am an architect I guess, not sure if I am getting a raise, but my glass ceiling went up,considerably

I was under the impression that your current workplace is such a clusterf*** that you mostly want to get out of there to avoid aggravation

10:09 PM

I do

This architect thing is my back up plan

yesterday, by durron597

@maple_shaft 20 years of stockpiled canned goods? You think you won't go down with the ship?

lol, you'll get a job at Google and your management will be like "last time we are promoting ANYONE, get a new title and leave immediately" :)

You don't understand, if google,doesn't work for me then I will,save my money and go backbto,school

Has anyone experienced the fact that as soon as they refactor something into a superclass / subclass relationship (from one single class) they immediately want to convert it into a composition structure instead

I hate my career, I hate doing this for a living

10:11 PM

i have so little inheritance in my code, it's all composition basically.

I get that urge whether or not I just refactored it

I might be slightly biased

no? I use inheritance so rarely that when I do use it, it usually fits pretty well.

okay, we're saying the same things.

yup

yes, I believe we are.

10:14 PM

I diagram everything I intend and then hand it to an Indian contractor for him to figure out what I mean by compositions and generalizations

Then decline his pull request because he didn't friggin listen

... and then end up doing it anyways?

No, I eventually get hounded by the project manager about delays in the sprint until I stop caring and just merge the pull request anyway

I fail to understand how getting promoted solves these problems.

This is how I spend 4 hours of,my 10 to 12 hour days

@durron597 it doesn't

5 mins ago, by maple_shaft

You don't understand, if google,doesn't work for me then I will,save my money and go backbto,school

10:17 PM

Well my new boss says he will pull me from this "agile nonsense" which will free me from the chaos

And it is nonsense. I no longer believe in agile anymore

It is snake oil

noooooo, agile is real!

No amount of Agile will make Indian contractors more competent.

it's also the exact opposite of what you just described

I have never seen a company struggle so hard to define acceptance criteria for a single fucking story

Like 50 minutes of grooming for a single estimates story

2 God Damn points

that also sounds like a very serious problem unrelated to whether one is agile or not

10:23 PM

I used to say, if the conversation takes longer than 5 minutes, it is not ready... Until we realized nothing was ready and the pm insisted we work on something because we can't stop sprinting according to his agile standards

we have a slight problem with overanalyzing tickets but usually the worst is spending 10 minutes talking about one ticket

Then they threw more Indians at the problem causing us to split into two teams

did anyone tell them none of the tickets were actionable yet?

@maple_shaft The Indians and the Cowboys?

Then they split the teams horizontally because the stories are too large to be a single vertical slice of business value

Christ then it went really downhill

10:25 PM

what on earth is a vertical slice of business value

As a branch entry operator, I want to submit ABA routing number to the Payment initiation

???

This involves two service calls and several application layers

It is too much for an Indian to do in 2 week timebox

Frankly it is too much for me

High level design, infrastructure, environments, continuous integration, all neglected because the pm crams too much shit into the sprint

I can't keep up after reacting to every little sprint disaster

Oh and they broke rule fucking one of Agile before the project even started

which rule is number one?

You can't have fixed deadline and fixed scope. It is like try ing to parse html with regex. It can't be done and any attempt to will result in cthulu being summoned

But my employer sure does try, good Lord they try and remind us constantly how far behind we are

Ya know Agile

10:34 PM

the Agile Industrial Complex marches on

Agile is like communism. It really only works in small drugged out hippie groups. It doesn't scale though because of human nature

2

Great idea, but I am sure Star trek universe couldn't even pull it off for their projects, and they evolved beyond money

I have the ridiculous fortune to be in a group that is apparently doing agile correctly, including the business manager totally buying into it and doing all the backlog grooming and prioritization and sprint planning and so on so we actually have a really good estimate of our velocity per developer and haven't overcommitted in...many months at least

@Ixrec I hate you

any good at Javascript? we might be hiring soon =D

@maple_shaft You'd also have to move across the pond

10:38 PM

Good enough to be dangerous

if it helps, I was at a place that did agile really well with ~20 devs and the project still failed.

@Telastyn out of curiosity, why did it fail?

@Telastyn how so?

@enderland You sure they're wasps? Recently I learned Wasps are actually more closely related to ants than bees! :)

the product as an entire concept didn't work. The idea was to optimize content in advertising to make people spend more

and they didn't.

also, huge scalability problems

10:41 PM

figures

@maple_shaft I liked my explanation better. A metal witch cursed Fort Duequesne in the 1700's due to receiving a particularly strong French Roast

French Taunting - Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Advertising is the next bubble

I thought the online advertising bubble burst some time ago

@maple_shaft hm, that's the team I just got an offer from at Amazon ;)

it's already common knowledge that some huge percentage of "views" are fake

10:42 PM

@Ixrec nope. and I completely agree with @maple_shaft on this.

does that mean I'm paying more attention than all the marketing people at all the companies?

Not at all, just more than the marks and suckers with big advertising budgets

There are endless companies these days marketing out the ass all the stuff they can do for your company by building you a website and managing your SEO with some fashion of amazing skill

Everyone with a digital arts degree these days is passing themselves off as having trapped lightning in a bottle with some magical internet usability/design/marketing wizardry which all comes down to "I'll build your company a website!"

@JimmyHoffa serves those dirty French bastards right. Why in their right mind did they think the point was a good idea to build a fort there?

order now and get a mobile app thrown in for free?

10:45 PM

Just set up cannons on mount Washington and bombard them over the walls

@Ixrec for the low low price of $100k

Why do you think they call it Mount washington!

user55340

At Employer^^^ one team lead (a month before he left) did a demo for the managers. He got a cardboard box and wooden blocks. On the blocks he wrote the projects his team was to do. He said "this box is one month - put as many of those blocks into the box and we'll get them done in a month". The managers loaded it up just a bit high... he picked up the box and the blocks all fell out of the bottom.

The bottom was rotten "Oh yea, we haven't addressed the libraries that let us build these things in a reasonable timeframe in over a year - they're a bit messy."

4

@maple_shaft Were cannons even really a thing when Fort Duquesne was first being built?

Then the British were even dumber because they built Fort Pitt on the remains!!!!

10:47 PM

@MichaelT how did they take that stunt?

user55340

@Ixrec He left a month later.

oh, right

@JimmyHoffa yeah, the byzantines had cannons back in the 15th century

user55340

It wasn't said if he was forced out, or if he left... but there was some feelings of good riddance on both sides. I sympathized with the team lead more than management though.

user55340

Incidentally, they had trouble hiring a new team lead after that - no one wanted the job.

10:48 PM

@maple_shaft Byzantines? Weren't they in the Middle East? Were the French in The New World really concerned about the Byzantines?

I wonder if they got the hint

@JimmyHoffa where modern day Turkey is

And yeah they wanted forts all along all the rivers in Louisiana territory so they could secure trade routes from Montreal to New Orleans. Th eh were worried about the British taking their territory

And natives

If you haven't been to the fort Pitt museum it is pretty cool. I work a block from point park and the museum

@maple_shaft Everyone from the Burgh knows where you work. :) Their industry is basically 5 or 10 big companies, The End. All the same, I never visited that museum when I was there..

I like French and Indian and revolutionary war history

@maple_shaft it definitely seemed more interesting when I was in the Burgh, was the first time I'd ever seen anything in America that was from the 1600s, more less lots of things. Easy to forget that stuff happened in America when you're used to thinking of "Early America" as the 1800s mining migrations

11:03 PM

l3 forall a b c d f. (Prelude.Apply f) =>
(a -> b -> c -> d) ->
f a -> f b -> f c -> f d
l3 f x y z = f <$> x <*> y <*> z

@maple_shaft Trying to reply to this

? heh

oh haha

Can't do fixed font replies

@maple_shaft Your comma key drunk?

@maple_shaft You're just using crony agile. Real agile is self correcting.

@durron597 his ship is huuuge. It's only a ship in the sense that it's surrounded by water. Realistically it's an island.

@psr I suspect he is fully aware of this and that is the entire point of his rant

@Ixrec goddamnit I wish it were. Oh how I wish other people did this more. The fact that even good coders I work with are in nearly every case clueless about even the existence of any tech built in the last 5 or 10 years makes me nuts. "Node.JS? Never heard of it.. LESS? What?" Ok, let's be honest, there hasn't been shit going on in the server world for the last 10 years, but the front-end world has gone from a horrendous PITA to possibly pleasant.

Trying out different technologies just at random to find out if they're good or not is the only way to ... find out if they're good or not. Too many devs just read a blog and say "Well, the authoritative/majority opinion is: X, ergo, X is correct. The end."

11:14 PM

Writing in C#, and I really miss the friend classes from C++ .

I used SASS once. That was kinda neat.

Paper wasps are 0.7 to 1.0 inch (1.8 to 2.5 cm) long wasps that gather fibers from dead wood and plant stems, which they mix with saliva, and use to construct water-resistant nests made of gray or brown papery material. Paper wasps are also sometimes called umbrella wasps, due to the distinctive design of their nests. == Species == The name "paper wasps" typically refers to members of the vespid subfamily Polistinae, though it often colloquially includes members of the subfamilies Vespinae (hornets and yellowjackets) and Stenogastrinae, which also make nests out of paper. Twenty-two species of...

@JimmyHoffa The number of random technologies available for the front end increases much faster than you can really sample them though. The pace has sped up so much there.

@maple_shaft Heh the funny thing is so many people are these days saying this is precisely what Agile gives you... I don't understand how they claim to have gone to Agile training (which I've been through multi-day Agile training 3 fucking times now) and still think this. Pretty much the entire exercise is multiple days of learning you can't fuckin do that.

@Ixrec yeah, I went all SASS on my latest front-end thing, it was simple.

@NickAlexeev they're available :)

@JimmyHoffa no haven't you heard? Agile is the way you make waterfall projects faster!

11:18 PM

@JimmyHoffa: It's gone from a horrendous PITA to a horrendous pile of frameworks on top of frameworks all supporting hideous scroll-crazy UI trends

imo a major part of the essence of agile is admitting that all fixed deadlines are lies

that is the nugget of agile indeed

don't mind @whatsisname, he hasn't learned how to webscale

@whatsisname why I said possibly pleasant - it's not possibly pleasant if you just grab every framework because you didn't - try different ones and come up with a coherent idea of what they do and what you want, and just went with some made-up stack all the bloogers are selling. That was a typo, but I'm leaving it, it frankly sounds more correct.

@JimmyHoffa Somehow, I'm not as comfortable with package visibility as I am with friend.

11:19 PM

@JimmyHoffa Agile means "go faster". Duh. Also that requirements and design can be skipped and replaced by agility.

@NickAlexeev ? How do you mean exactly? What is "package visibility" ?

@JimmyHoffa I think that's a Java thing?

@psr also that estimate means commitment, but you'll meet it because agile will make you faster.

I thought c# had something really similar to friend

@whatsisname It absolutely has it

11:20 PM

there was some way you could use the internal keyword to do it

precisely

@JimmyHoffa internal I like package visibility less, because every class in the package will have access. I have better control of what I expose, but less control who I expose it to.

msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/…

@NickAlexeev huh? You use internals visible to and dictate which other assemblies can see the class or member/method

though admittedly I'm not familiar with what friend does, so the semantics may be different

@JimmyHoffa Except when estimating, when it is not called "committing". It's only called that retroactively. But yes.

I vaguely recall that using that attribute is beyond obnoxious when signed binaries are involved

11:23 PM

@whatsisname this sounds likely. Everything becomes beyond obnoxious when signed binaries are involved.

Signed binaries are one of those "Everyone should do it" things, which no one ever does, so they've never made it even remotely easy to use because nobody will fuckin' notice anyway.

is that the cryptographic signature kind of signed?

@psr why liftA3 though? That's the only question I've been having. Whatever.

@Ixrec: yeah

@enderland my takeaway from this is that all those Wasps that keep nesting in the eaves of my back patio actually recognize and know who I am. I don't really know how I feel about that. Whatever, I leave them alone because they're utterly harmless anyway.

@enderland Of course there is. Visual Studio Express is free. :) No really though, you can get Xamarin Studio in a free edition as well if you don't want Visual Studio of any form. For what it's worth, emacs literally supports everything and I've heard some say OmniSharp is actually pretty good in it. You definitely don't need to blow the Visual Studio moneys to make a C# app

@durron597 also, .NET runtime was open sourced and has been made quite truly available across platforms in the past year or two. Mono was originally done by the people that went on to make Xamarin and there's been a significant amount of MS support for them over tha past 3 or 5 years... MS has done a lot to cross platforms by open source support to allow it's developer community to stay MS while going after the huge mobile landscape as the big MS motivator. The results are a win for everyone.

@durron597 Iduno, I'm in svn now, and frankly wish I was in TFS.. svn barfs when my files are open in any apps and other weird shit I'm not used to. Everytime I check in, I copy the whole branch locally before doing it to make sure I don't lose my changes and can manually diff them back in if they do get lost

TFS just works... I would prefer git, but in SVN vs TFS, they're both basically identical: Central repo source controls. One of them just feels way more polished and complete. I have never had issue with TFS, or lost a checkin etc

but then I know a lot about TFS and how it works so likely PEBKAC.

Though I never have those issues with git either

11:41 PM

yeah, I've had work lost in SVN and git but it's a very rare problem, and the tl;dr version was almost always "I should've committed more often"

@enderland also, if it's just easy - MonoSharp is an older GUI app that's less polished than Xamarin or Visual Studio but works. I once saw a plugin for Notepad++ even that added C# autocomplete and did a ton of stuff to make a C# application possible. What kind of app is it? Desktop GUI app? Because that's the most "needs IDE" form of app so you can WYSIWYG the winforms

@enderland Wow, I just talked to team B. It sounds amazing. I can't share any details, it's a secret project, but I'm half inclined to accept right now. I just got off the phone 5 minutes ago

user55340

Personally, I'm fine with git, svn or perforce (I have a fondness for the last but its $$$). But whatever the situation, understanding branches are key.

user55340

And yea, commit early and commit often.

user55340

Merge from trunk or master or whatever has the main development effort to your branch frequently if you're not trying to head off in a new direction.

11:42 PM

@MichaelT I'm afraid of committing SVN because literally every time I commit, it blows an error and tells me I have to run "svn cleanup" which makes me concerned it's going to clean up my commit

user55340

svn update, svn commit

in TFS I would commit early / commit often

I have a moderate distrust of git because it's one of those tools you really need to understand thoroughly to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, e.g. before I set it to always do ff-only merges on pull I had a lot of wacky merge commits on local master coming from apparently nowhere

@MichaelT update blows that error too

but when I stick to the subset of commands and aliases I know I understand it's perfectly reliable

user55340

11:43 PM

Not sure whats the problem with that then... I'd blame your cow-orkers.

that is definitely not a problem I've ever had with SVN

@MichaelT perhaps.. I frankly have no idea what's causing the error

@JimmyHoffa That's why I want to switch to git so badly. Commit locally, then merge, then push

user55340

I've not had to do a cleanup at all.

you can commit before you merge

user55340

11:44 PM

git-svn ftw?

@durron597 yeah, same. I would prefer git above all others

well, git isn't the only DVCS

@Ixrec yeah but I'm with you "Everyone says Mercurial is better! I have never used it and have no idea how..."

weird how that worked out, isn't it?

user55340

just have to be declined in its use and what to push back to svn's branches. SVN doesn't like octopus merges and the like.

user55340

11:45 PM

git-svn - Bidirectional operation between a Subversion repository and Git

most projects probably shouldn't be doing octopus merges anyway

@Ixrec yeah. If I had any control over choosing a change in source control tech though I would definitely take a very close look at it and learn it somewhat before making the decision. But I'm a stickler for doing technical analysis on all choices before making decisions about technical direction..

user55340

# Clone a repo (like git clone):
        git svn clone svn.example.com/project/trunk
# Enter the newly cloned directory:
        cd trunk
# You should be on master branch, double-check with 'git branch'
        git branch
# Do some work and commit locally to Git:
        git commit ...
# Something is committed to SVN, rebase your local changes against the
# latest changes in SVN:
        git svn rebase
# Now commit your changes (that were committed previously using Git) to SVN,
# as well as automatically updating your working HEAD:

@JimmyHoffa I wouldn't exactly call you a stickler for wanting to know what A, B and C are before choosing one of them

@Ixrec nonsense, the octopus is a strong and grand creature, beloved by many nations and feared throughout history. You dare to mock the octopus? It will octofuckyouup

11:47 PM

@JimmyHoffa that is precisely why one should not normally do it

@MichaelT I have genuinely been thinking about doing precisely this.. I didn't know there was tooling already available for it.

the strange thing is I actively use SVN on non-coding projects, because it's so trivial to teach it to non-programmers

and sometimes I get tempted to try git-svn on those projects...

user55340

> Prefer to use git svn rebase or git rebase, rather than git pull or git merge to synchronize unintegrated commits with a git svn branch. Doing so will keep the history of unintegrated commits linear with respect to the upstream SVN repository and allow the use of the preferred git svn dcommit subcommand to push unintegrated commits back into SVN.

Originally, git svn recommended that developers pulled or merged from the git svn branch. This was because the author favored git svn set-tree B to commit a single head rather than the git svn set-tree A..B notation to commit multiple commits. U…

user55340

I'd have to rethink - I'm part of the 'merge preferred over rebase' camp.

4 hours ago, by GlenH7

@JimmyHoffa Those words cut deep....

user55340

11:50 PM

(this is because I really worked with github as a central repo for multiple developers and you did 'commit and push often' as the rule... and rebases messed everything up when you had to rewrite your local history)

my personal experience is that merge always creates more of a mess than rebase and doesn't really provide any benefits, unless it's one of those rare situations where you already have a mess involving multiple clones of the repo and you must not change history while fixing it

@Ixrec I presume you were joking? I typically put a good amount into up-front technical analysis

@JimmyHoffa I guess it depends, how much is a "good amount"?

@Ixrec you just don't like that I bash on C++ :P That's mostly sarcasm. It's a dense language and I enjoy whipping on it but that's more fun than substance.

I can't think of other technologies I talk up or bash on that I haven't taken time to try and work with a bit.

ok I might bash vim. But c'mon. : ? Really? Bah, m-x FTW.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa ambient-mixer.com (as an alternative to that jazz loop)

11:55 PM

vim's cool

@Ixrec yeah, but you like C++, what do you know?? :P

I know I'm more productive in Javascript =)

aren't we all... I really do think I'd rather go work in Node.JS than C#, I just can't get over the idea that I'd be working in some front-end only shop and not get to work on large engineering projects..

speaking of which

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