The Whiteboard

4:49 AM

Can anyone demystify what commonjs means for a javascript developer?

2:33 PM

Work Drama: Highly dysfunctional "scrum-HAHAHAHA" I can't say that with a straight face, project. Product Owner and BA's have no authority on software requirements. They have to delegate to product and operations on every little detail. One extraordinarily complex feature in particular was assigned to a junior BA. He was paired with a BSA that has a hard time fitting into the culture here. She is incredibly talented, highly intelligent, overly qualified and a person who demands competence...

... from those she works with. The problem is that she doesn't report to the BA manager but to the development manager

She called out certain people, made some enemies and now everybody has used her as a political target to scapegoat failures. She floundered for 5 months with this junior BA on this critical complex component mostly because she just wasn't getting good business requirements to do functionals on

Her own manager lambasted her in her year end review, basically blaming her for just about every problem

She was recently pulled from this, but they didn't pull the junior BA who has been struggling with this as well and honestly was the real cause for their being 5 months spent on these requirements with nothing to show for it.

What they decided to do is keep the junior BA on task, pull her, put me and one other developer on this to act as a BSA, and basically babysit the junior guy to do his work for him. We were then told not to try and reuse anything the BSA had done because it was "worthless" even though she had drawn over 65 detailed flowcharts

So here I am, completely lost, with bad requirements, no support from our vendor supplier yet because of beuracratic reasons, and I was told that my sprint goal is to get it 50% complete in detail in the two weeks

When I questioned how realistic that was I was basically told this has 100% of executive focus now so it "must" happen

it can't NOT happen apparently

So idk

kinda demoralized

thinking about just not even trying and letting them chop my head off too

I have more political capital than she did, she made a lot of enemies, I made a lot of friends. Hopefully they will actually address the real problem and not the person trying to solve it

Why are they throwing developers at requirements and expecting things will turn out differently?! What could I possibly do better than a BA or BSA in this front?

I am just dumbfounded that this company can be as financially successful as it is and be so completely dysfunctional

It makes me realize how little IT actually matters to corporations

not necessarily how corporations percieve the value of IT but the REAL value of IT. If it actually mattered then companies couldn't operate like this and still turn massive windfall profits

enderland

Nearly all companies are software companies now, whether or not they realize it. Successful companies will realize this sooner rather than later and those who never do will eventually be marginalized

maple_shaft

@enderland I want to believe this

I really do

@enderland congratulations on getting married btw

durron597

2:50 PM

@maple_shaft Start sending out resumes

enderland

@maple_shaft thanks :) it's bad for SE but good for me

durron597

in the meantime, tell your immediate boss exactly what you just told us, and say that if they expect you to do this without solving the problems on their end then they're not going to get the results they want

maple_shaft

3:03 PM

@durron597 No

no man.. just no. I am too afraid to leave anymore. Everytime I do each job gets worse and worse. I think surely it can't possibly get any worse than this... and it always gets exponentially more so

the more money I make, the worse dysfunction I face and the more useless and powerless I become

I feel like like defeated me

life*

durron597

Wanna move to Texas?

maple_shaft

Kind of

enderland

@maple_shaft this sounds like management ;)

maple_shaft

my family is here and it will kill them for me to move the baby far away

durron597

We have the opposite problem that you have

maple_shaft

3:05 PM

but I am having a nervous breakdown

durron597

the management here isn't dysfunctional, but we can't find any talent

enderland

#oilprobs

durron597

yeah, i'm sure all the good people here are already working for Shell and Exxon

enderland

@maple_shaft are you a planner/long term thinker by chance?

maple_shaft

yes

thats where I shine, devising machavellian schemes that develop over years until a grand symphony of epic proportions unfurls itself upon an unsuspecting world

and I sit by and watch the event while eating popcorn

enderland

3:08 PM

and trying to properly account for all contingencies and seeing people screw up and therefore cause more problem contigencies? ;)

durron597

Ah, are you a butterfly programmer?

Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want.

user41796

@maple_shaft - the easy way out of your current predicament is you go back to management; apologize and say "sorry, but my skills simply aren't good enough to salvage a critical project like this in such a short period of time." And the "obviously, I'll try my best but I want to set expectations appropriately." When you tell them ahead of time that you're going to fail there's not a whole lot that can be done about it.

user41796

And does anyone know of an easy way to query a web server to see what it's hosting up? In particular, I've got an IP camera and I'm trying to find the streams it's pushing out. And the documentation really sucks.

maple_shaft

@GlenH7 I said so much to my project manager but he looked like he was going to have a stroke.

I will try with my regular manager. I have my one on one with him shortly

user41796

Frame it as "I'm trying to protect the company."

durron597

3:15 PM

Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work j…

2

maple_shaft

@durron597 How does a programmer use 'cat'?

durron597

@maple_shaft How does a programmer use a magnetized needle and a steady hand?

maple_shaft

you can't write programs with cat alone, you could pipe it to tee or something

user41796

@maple_shaft I'm more familiar with dogs... :-)

user41796

cat new_stuff old_stuff

durron597

3:16 PM

REAL programmers use sed -i

sed -i 's/if $x > 0$ {/if $x < 0$ {/'

user41796

@durron597 REAL programmers have cat aliased to sed -i.

user41796

@maple_shaft semi-useful if you have a lot of log files you need to roll together

user41796

Or a whole bunch of transactional stuff spread across files.

user41796

tbh. I probably used pipes a lot more than I ever used cat though.

user41796

run sed or grep to extract out the bits I wanted and pipe that into a results file.

maple_shaft

3:34 PM

@GlenH7 I honestly can't say I have ever used sed

user41796

sed is awesome

maple_shaft

types 'man sed' in putty...

Mind. Blown

user41796

If you've ever had to do a search & replace then you'll appreciate sed

user41796

It's wicked powerful

user41796

Although it does use regex, so it's a problem in and of itself.

maple_shaft

3:36 PM

@GlenH7 Could you use sed to parse HTML?

lol

1326

Q: RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

I need to match all of these opening tags: <p> <a href="foo"> But not these: <br /> <hr class="foo" /> I came up with this and wanted to make sure I've got it right. I am only capturing the a-z. <([a-z]+) *[^/]*?> I believe it says: Find a less-than, then Find (and capture) a-z one or ...

enderland

3:47 PM

oops. I'm the guy that broke the build, apparently...

Ampt

@enderland FOR SHAME!

user55340

4:18 PM

So... today's my day off.

durron597

@MichaelT Gotta use up all that saved up vacation time amirite?

user55340

Note that I can't (shouldn't) get on chat at all from my work machine. The bit about working in the public sector and open records... that could cause so much of a mess.

user55340

@durron597 9/80 schedule.

user55340

Work 80 hours in 9 days and get the 10th one off.

Ampt

wait... what? you do 9 days on, one off?

what kind of madness is this?

does that include weekends?

user55340

4:21 PM

Cap letters are days I work: uMTWRFsuMTWRfs (repeat)

Ampt

oh, well then I change my opinion in the opposite direction: WTF, you get an extra day off?

user55340

I do all my time in 9 days... so yea... extra day off.

Ampt

ah, that's just what you do, it's not what's typical?

user55340

About a third of the team does it that way.

Ampt

that's nice though

basically get an extra 26 days of vacation a yaer

granted you can't move them around or anything

user55340

4:23 PM

Very nice. Especially as a single person - being able to do the errands that need to be done during the week day

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT 9/80 is AWESOME.

Ampt

(or sitting on progs chatting about monads)

user55340

Or a 3 day weekend to go for photography that is a day drive away.

user55340

@Ampt I was going to talk about elevators...

user55340

play.elevatorsaga.com

Thomas Owens

4:24 PM

I wish we officially supported it. I work 9 hour days typically, but we need to put in 40 hours a week. So it usually ends up being either a 9 hour day on Friday to hit 45 and get OT or working enough hours on Friday to get 40 and then going home.

user55340

I suspect that overall, I did more than 80h this pay cycle... trying to introduce maven yesterday.

user55340

(currently its eclipse managed ant scripts... which are a mess)

user55340

Upgrading a library is a major undertaking because you've got to do all the transitive dependencies by hand.

Thomas Owens

Although I do like the OT. Especially since I'm moving closer to Boston, the extra money will help offset the moving costs.

user55340

OT for me isn't as valuable anymore because I'm an exempt worker now. While its technically by the hour (I'm salaried though), they can't mandate OT nor do they need to pay a differential for OT.

user55340

4:27 PM

(compare Employer^^^ where I was a non-exempt (different pay) which meant that they could require OT... but they had to pay 1.5x)

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT I don't understand my OT. I'm salaried, but if I work 45 hours, I get straight pay for those times. But if I work 40.1 - 44.9 hours, I get paid for 40.

So it's some kind of weird thing that's not hourly and not really salaried.

user55340

Oh... found out fun things about prisons... they have HUGE network pipes.

user55340

There's one getting redundant 10Gb.

Thomas Owens

Streaming large amounts of video and/or audio to offsite monitoring?

Ampt

@ThomasOwens beat me to it.

Thomas Owens

4:29 PM

I was thinking real-time, but backup may also explain it.

user55340

@ThomasOwens yep. Lots of streaming video (500+ cameras) and video conferencing (why make the judge go to the prison or transport the prisoners?)

user55340

Not to mention a mini educational network too - for worker training programs.

user55340

If you aren't after the glamor, it seems like a good place to be (working tech for the less glamours parts of the state).

user55340

Things like digging into email from backups for all the times the department gets sued (they get sued a lot).

Ampt

ugh... I hate you SO much right now @MichaelT. As if I didn't already waste enough time every day thinking about how to optimize elevators...

durron597

4:33 PM

all this discussion of OT... my company doesn't even have an HR department

user55340

@Ampt could always star the link so that others don't get more productive...

Ampt

FEEL MY PAIN!

user55340

Elevator Saga - write JavaScript to optimize elevators.

user55340

There - just a nicer version than a raw link.

Ampt

the raw link was so much more subtle though

you're clicking it just to see where it goes, and the next thing you know you've set up a monadic queue system to determine which floors are used most to stage elevators there before anyone even pushes a button

user55340

4:37 PM

Amusing the coincidence of having the prog21 link advocating JavaScript rather than Python there.

Ampt

@MichaelT yeah... this may be the straw that breaks the camels back of my learning javascript

user55340

I wonder what wonders @JimmyHoffa will come up with for play.elevatorsaga.com

Ampt

@MichaelT some evil contraption powered by the souls of the ~~damned~~ enterprise programmer.

maple_shaft

@ThomasOwens It could be worse, you could be salaried exempt and expected to work as much overtime as is needed to get the job done

Eg. Me

Eg. Every god damn IT worker in Pittsburgh

Oh its even worse here... we are instructed if we need to put in extra hours, but then implicitly expected to not enter more than 40 hours into our PM application because "it throws off budgets"

I did anyway and got like 5 phone calls in an hour of people complaining how I am making their job so much harder by doing that and trying to guilt me into entering 40 hours

I never even had to work more than 45hrs in a given week though which is the weird part

I was just doing, 42-44 hour weeks

i don't understand this place

its like everybodies IQ is below 90

Robert Harvey

My first question on The Workplace:

0

Q: Salary range of $m to $n, depending on experience... Why?

In the past, I've seen a number of job openings that ask for this. The difference between m and n can be substantial. Why would a company do this? Is it to get the hopes up of a potential applicant, and then offer something that's still in the range, but lower than the top? Will they pay more...

interviewing job-search job-offer

maple_shaft

4:51 PM

The CEO of our company, President Herbert Mountain Dew Camacho

Robert Harvey

Heh. Camacho is the name of a used car outfit here in Lancaster.

I don't think he drinks Mountain Dew, though.

Thomas Owens

@maple_shaft Doing that would be illegal here, and cause us to lose our contracts.

Robert Harvey

It would be illegal here as well, unless you're Exempt.

durron597

5:05 PM

My problem with that site is that my monitor is 1280x1024 so it scrolls off the right

user55340

@RobertHarvey At the university, they open up one req, but the pay scale depends on the the experience. So you could apply for it and get an associate technical staff (entry level), technical staff (medium), or senior technical staff (senior) level position. The advertised rate is the minimum of the entry to maximum of senior.

user55340

Which bin you fall into and where you further sub bin into is very formally defined.

Robert Harvey

@MichaelT I've seen that at our local community college as a function of the pay grade, but not across multiple pay grades... only within the same pay grade.

BTW, that LRU cache thing is pretty cool. Is there an example of that somewhere?

user55340

@RobertHarvey ohr.wisc.edu/WebListing/Unclassified/…

user55340

> SR INFORM PROC CONSLT(S44BN) or INFORM PROCESS CONSLT(S44DN)

Robert Harvey

5:09 PM

Fifty grand? Sheesh.

user55340

Note there that they just give the minimum rather than the maximum though...

Robert Harvey

It's minimum, all right.

user55340

That's the minimum of the SS44DN. The S44BN has a higher minimum.

user55340

Also note that 50k in Madison isn't bad at all for an entry level computer position.

user55340

And the state has huge benefits package (speaking from experience there)

user55340

5:11 PM

They actually still have a pension.

Robert Harvey

115

Q: How would you implement an LRU cache in Java 6?

Please don't say EHCache or OSCache, etc. Assume for purposes of this question that I want to implement my own using just the SDK (learning by doing). Given that the cache will be used in a multithreaded environment, which datastructures would you use? I've already implemented one using LinkedHas...

java caching data-structures lru

user55340

If you read how it works, there's also a sabatical (once you get to 5y, you go up to 160h vacation/year... but you can bank 40h of that indefinitely to be taken as a lump sum later on)

user55340

When my father retired, he had the better part of a year in the vacation / sabbatical account. Then theres the "unused sick days gets converted into health insurance when retiring" bit too. Lots of nice bits around a state job that make the $ amount seem low.

Robert Harvey

I have an application in at the community college, but my wife works there and her work life is a bit of a circus. They've spent the last few years chipping away at the benefits, so benefits look much like a private industry job now.

Fun fact: involvement in CAL-PERS (their retirement system) can cost you some of your Social Security benefits.

Alas, there doesn't appear to be an equivalent to LinkedHashTable in C#. Perhaps System.Collections.Specialized.OrderedDictionary

Ampt

that sounds like a not-so-fun fact to me...

user55340

5:17 PM

@RobertHarvey C# dosen't have as rich of a collection library as Java does.

Robert Harvey

@Ampt The job I applied for is a 1-year term. I won't even vest during that time if I'm hired.

That said, I have heard that the perks are nice working for a school.

psr

@maple_shaft My play would probably be to say that I understand this is of critical importance and I'm 100% committed to it, but of course at some point it just isn't possible - if they said they wanted 100% completion by close of business today it would clearly be impossible, right?

(continued) So what I'll do is I'll realize that 4 weeks is a set-in-stone deadline and I'll do the best possible job that 4 weeks allows. I'll also make sure everyone involved knows this is top priority, short deadline stuff. But I won't have the same quality in 4 weeks that I would have had in 4 months, or however long a decent job turns out to require.

(continued) I'm telling you this now not to be negative, but to avoid surprises and to make sure it's really what you want, that I should do the best possible job in 4 weeks, even if that turns out to mean that the quality is low enough that it has significant negative impact on later stages of the project.

I might even make sure that conversation took place over email.

user55340

5:39 PM

@maple_shaft Some corporations consider IT to be a cost and try to minimize that cost. Others consider IT to be the ability to scale solutions (We can do 3x the work of 10 people with 10 people and 10 IT people).

user55340

Employer^^^ was very much in the "minimize IT costs at all costs" camp for the most part. They're also a large profitable company... but it is an issue of continuing to scale without further serious IT investment.

user55340

Current employer, on the other hand... well, profit isn't a concern in the public sector... but costs still are. There it is a "this team that was doing work with paper phone books 10 years ago is now able to do so much more today with the tools they have available and IT support" The linear scaling of the tasks they had by just adding more manpower would have been prohibitive. IT allows them to work smarter.

user55340

In other bits... a response to Agile:

user55340

Software craftsmanship

Software craftsmanship is an approach to software development that emphasizes the coding skills of the software developers themselves. It is a response by software developers to the perceived ills of the mainstream software industry, including the prioritization of financial concerns over developer accountability. Historically, programmers have been encouraged to see themselves as practitioners of the well-defined statistical analysis and mathematical rigor of a scientific approach with computational theory. This has changed to an engineering approach with connotations of precision, predictability...

user55340

Of course, they have a manifesto too: manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org

user55340

5:44 PM

> Not only working software,
but also well-crafted software

Not only responding to change,
but also steadily adding value

Not only individuals and interactions,
but also a community of professionals

Not only customer collaboration,
but also productive partnerships

Ampt

everyone's got a manifesto nowadays

Thomas Owens

Should I make a manifesto?

Google infobox'd "how to write a manifesto": google.com/…

Ampt

what, you mean the SE mods haven't come up with the SE moderation manifesto yet?

slackers

Robert Harvey

Moderator Manifesto: If you never get called out on Meta, you're not moderating hard enough.

3

You're welcome.

psr

@ThomasOwens Remember that you only get one, so if you make it "people don't eat enough onions" or something like that then you may find yourself without a manifesto available when you really need one.

Thomas Owens

6:10 PM

@psr Why do I only get one?

Can I make appendices to it?

psr

@ThomasOwens Everybody only gets one. It's how manifesto's work.

@ThomasOwens Yes, but you have to live in a shack by yourself in the woods and type it with a manual typewriter onto the home-made toilet-paper you no longer require.

Thomas Owens

:(

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr I glued the words of my manifesto together in a spiral and stuck it in a diorama presenting it popping out of the stomach of a macrame alien

Jimmy Hoffa

7:02 PM

humble bundle looks fun - card game RPGs can be entertaining for casual play

maple_shaft

7:22 PM

SE Moderator Manifesto: Quality content over Opinionated Discussions, Enforcing standards over appeasing power users, Editing out extraneous details over not harming fragile egos, Closing as dupe over having 43 additional answers to the same question that has been asked several times a year since the sites inception...

lets keep going with this....

Allowing quality content to speak for itself on a good subjective question over highly opinionated open ended preference style questions that encourage hundreds of mostly similar answers in two or three separate camps with the loudest, most charismatic personality giving the most popular answer getting more votes than the well researched heroic attempt at ACTUALLY answering the question once and for all

MetaFight

no homework

mandatory use of at least one question mark.

durron597

Has anyone found the controller code of elevator saga to be buggy

For some reason, to the best of my ability i don't think it's my code, when i do elevator.goToFloor() in challenge 3 the commands always go to only one of my elevators

user55340

7:48 PM

@durron597 try copying the devtest one: github.com/magwo/elevatorsaga/wiki/Developer-testing-solution

durron597

I actually think it must be my code now, but the bug is really weird.

It has also renewed my hatred for javascript.

maple_shaft

I remember getting the ol' code me an elevator controller and simulator homework assignment for my Advanced Object Oriented Programming C++ class in college

Some grey beard instructor came in on the first day, basically said, here is your assignments. Pick one. The program works minimally you get a C. The program is optimized best effort you get a B. You do both programs optimized best effort you get an A.

user55340

@maple_shaft my elevator bit was in operating systems - disk seeking controller.

maple_shaft

The rest of the class was awesome. We ate funions, drank Dr. Pepper and he told us stories about programming with punch cards

He would lecture for maybe 15 minutes and the rest of the time was Free-Coding

That class made me want to become a programmer, apart from the fact I was going to school for IT

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