The Whiteboard

12:48 AM

@Bob just for curiosity's sake I buy my wife android and myself windows phone so I can learn about them both. Moral of the story: Presented with an iPhone I'd have no idea what to do

maple_shaft

12:00 PM

@psr Sorry for the late repy... thanks for that response. Although I haven't started there just yet, a close friend of mine works there and gave me pretty much the same idea from many long talks

Not only is it internal enterprise software development, it is for a non-profit healthcare system with a very volatile environment for upper level managers. Directors are replaced every couple years and with that goes the major direction in IT

Each director comes in and he knows he has a limited window of time to show some kind of result or progress

He sets sweeping visions and goals but the analysts and middle managers on the ground typically have trouble realizing what these mean

The business struggles to define what they really want I think because the business either doesn't really want it or they don't realize the potential of what is possible, that want and desire is mostly always coming from the top

I am not saying that the Business side is totally to blame either, the developer group here doesn't do themselves favors...

they are very much the attitude that you suggested, we did what was asked, its not our fault. Without explicit direction they will sometimes sit idle for months completely content in doing nothing, not even advancing skillsets or prototyping new technologies

My group is mostly devoid of these tenured developers, we are all from the outside and we all trust each other and many of us have worked with each other in the past. There are no political constraints for what we want to do or how we want to do it... if we get this right then we can set a beaming example of how the other development groups need to be, and these architecture documents we are creating now can help transform the organization

The elephant in the room of course is Business Involvement. They have ridiculously ambitious goals, this isn't a small integration package we are working on. They can't just do what they did in the past...

> BA: C'mon... pokes developer with stick ... do predictive medicine... pokes again ... c'mon do it already

@thorstenmüller I take it that you have seen this song and dance before and have a more pessimistic take on my chances

I have resolved myself to try 150% and be incredibly stubborn until they change, I am fired or until I burn out

thorsten müller

12:37 PM

@maple_shaft no I wouldn't say that I'm that pessimistic about such things. As you described it you have the management on your side. This gives you a good start. As you describe the developer team looks bad and in large companies (and in a non-profit bureaucratic environment maybe even worse) things are slow and difficult to change, but not impossible.

It will be a psychological task more than a technical one to get the right people make decisions. Do you think you can change the developers attitude?

maple_shaft

@thorstenmüller I am unsure about this aspect

The job I am leaving one of my repsonsibilities was maintaining a legacy application that this orgs developers had written and it was abhorrent quality

To get fired there as a developer you would have to do a line of coke on the ass of your managers wife, on his desk, while looking at him in the eyes...

and even then you will probably just get sent to mandatory rehab

maple_shaft

One a less humorous note, this org spun off a for-profit division that was supposed to be modeled like a Google startup and they had some REALLY smart devs join them. They had some good ideas but I think lack of directions and failure on the business side to realize their high level goals has created a truly toxic work environment over there

thorsten müller

12:52 PM

@maple_shaft this would have been the second question if you can get rid of them if there isn't any other chance. If you can't fire them and can't motivate them you are basically without a team. Unless they are willing to pay two teams in which case you may be able to move them to something like QA where they can do less damage (what they may even like)

If they have been good at some time it should be possible to motivate them again. Then you are back with the problems on management level. But those mostly are less toxic.

maple_shaft

@thorstenmüller This was my second thought and actually what I think the managers are planning to do... they are either going to relegate them to less involvement in design, more involvement in testing and continuing to maintain legacy applications. If they want to be involved they will have to play by the same rules as everybody else

I am getting ahead of myself... I want to establish our documents and do a small scale prototype that will demonstrate the new development process, and dually help the analysts realize exactly what is possible with the new data warehouses that are being built

I think that will inject new life into this project and get the gears turning

Sure it is a challenge but I like these kinds of psychological challenges! I prefer solving team and process problems over code and implementation problems

thorsten müller

I guess you must prefer this if you want to work in such environments. That's why I never liked large companies or team lead work in general. Sometimes this happens of course and I don't mind too much if things can be resolved. But at some point I want to get back to code and try out how I can get this search engine to run faster or provide smarter results.

maple_shaft

@thorstenmüller I like working with people like you....

people like you are refreshing precisely because you do not have any political motivations or desires outside of doing what you do amazingly well

Bob

1:31 PM

@JimmyHoffa Me and my wife both have iPhones, I feel like I need to expand my horizon a bit in the cell phone department.

user55340

@Bob What do you want to do with it? Consider getting the android tablet type device instead of a phone.

Bob

That's not a bad idea actually

Especially because I'm still grandfathered in on an unlimited plan and would have to swap to a capped plan if I upgraded with a new contract

user55340

From my perspective, I might get a device some day as a development target... but I'm heavily invested in iOS apps and to switch those to another system would be expensive...

user55340

1:50 PM

Radio this morning was saying "welcome to the 82nd day of February"

Bob

Ha.

user55340

@Bob The weather underground map - wxug.us/o16 (its got snowfall total and radar on there, toggle them to get an idea)

user55340

A cow-orker says of this weekend (when we were in the 70's) "That was the shortest summer I've ever seen!"

Bob

2:16 PM

It was weird, one day we're eating outside and the next the fireplace is on.

Jimmy Hoffa

@maple_shaft If ya don't mind me asking, you're not at UPMC or West Penn Allegheny are you?

Feel free not to answer.

@Bob having had android and windows phone, I find the metro interface for a phone far more intuitive and responsive because everything's asynchronous, but it lacks the power features of the android phone because the smaller pool of developers who write apps for it and the sandboxed space on the phone available to a developer; direct hardware control is somewhat off limits except what XNA libraries make available, while there are android apps that do all manner of things

Bob

2:35 PM

Do you think there's a good windows phone market for developing apps?

Jimmy Hoffa

@Bob eh, if you can do it such that it's easy to support it on phone/tablet/desktop there's value there, if you write it such that it's stuck to one of them though I wouldn't suspect so. It's quite easy though to make it work across them all.

it's C# .NET WPF, you can write that code such that it's executable across all of those platforms, though that's a little trickier than the alternative of just compiling the same code to target the different platforms, the variance in code for each platform is going to be miniscule

It's a great development stack for application development too which is the other big attractor. It's still not going to be competitive to a developer against android or iphone though; either of those will still be more profitable, though the MS platforms would be profitable I wager

(android/iphone are probably considerably more profitable)

user55340

@maple_shaft To get fired here as a developer you either have to be drunk at work or play with your phone in front of a manger.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT ...kind of a low bar actually

I don't recall ever working somewhere anyone didn't actively fiddle with their phones while mid-conversation

It's like reading your e-mail during a conversation, just a part of the modern office culture that everyone participates in is my experience

Also, last Friday was monthly beer and games at work day here :)

At a previous job there was a guy who left ~2 every day and for the hours he was in did basically nothing (always had an excuse why he couldn't which basically amounted to he was waiting on someone else to do something he didn't know how to do), he was on the rolls for like 2 years before he was transferred under a new manager who finally fired him.

maple_shaft

2:51 PM

@JimmyHoffa I work at UPMC yes. I used to work for WPAHS but the politics was so thick it could not be cut with diamond tipped blades

that is where creativity, productivity, quality and happiness in general go to die

user55340

I remember working at SGI in tech support in the .com boom days... we had a beer bash every friday. This was California, so there was wine too. The person who had the night shift for friday had dibbs on the wine. So yea, sitting in your cube, glass of wine, waiting for the very rare friday night support call.

maple_shaft

> The laws are lax around here, to get arrested you either need to go on a shooting spree or jay-walk

Jimmy Hoffa

@maple_shaft Ah yeah, I heard more or less the same things about UPMC that you're saying heh

Worked with some folks who came from there. Small market out there, everyone's either connected through UPMC, PPG, or Union Switch and Signal

maple_shaft

@JimmyHoffa And UPMC is the best paying gig in town by leaps and bounds. Everybody else is a slave. At least I am coming in with some important political backings which are important here

I never had political clout at WPAHS which is probably why I felt so miserable there

well g2g to a meeting

Jimmy Hoffa

3:17 PM

Yeah, being a passionate developer with no political authority in an org is totally miserable.

Jimmy Hoffa

3:44 PM

There is definitely AI going on in the side bar

nemerle.org/About/#ID0ESG <-- this looks awesome, how have I not heard of it previously..

It can be written like C# or ML (with HM type inference and algebraic types), has macros, and integrates with visual studio 2008, compiles to CIL.

user55340

4:10 PM

FWIW, the google website translator question...

user55340

1

Q: Documentation, Examples, etc of implementing Google's Website Translator

I can't seem to find any documentation or examples of Google's Website Translator. Here is a link to the home page for it but short of getting started and a couple of key features, I can't find any actual documentation on it. Website Translator

google-translate

user55340

(they've even got a full tag for that with a few questions in there - webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/google-translate )

Bob

Anyone familiar with how to use/cite code in an APA-styled paper?

Discount and ethics codes are clogging up my search results...

user55340

@Bob Writers.SE would likely like that question - writers.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/apa+citations

user55340

We're looking to expand our scope to more explicitly include tech writing, so I though this site would be appropriate for this. — neilfein Feb 13 at 5:45

user55340

4:21 PM

There... thats the best way to link it.

user55340

5:06 PM

@JimmyHoffa there's a question for you to glance at...

user55340

1

Q: Feature boundaries in functional programming

I very much enjoy the functional programming paradigm, but I am still not sure how to go about designing a small/medium project with it. When using OO, I have a set of labelled entities (classes) with clearly defined boundaries. I can reason about stuff like: what is this class doing? should I...

design functional-programming

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Yeah, I'm pondering answering, but it already has a relatively good answer..

Can other people view this?
http://stackexchange.com/filters/88792/haskell-and-fp

Thomas Owens

5:25 PM

@JimmyHoffa Yes.

Jimmy Hoffa

Good, let it be known: I have created my own SE site with this filter, and henceforth it is the best SE site. Yep.

FP.SE

Thomas Owens

Not including Stack Overflow?

Jimmy Hoffa

I've little interest in "What's wrong with my haskell: blar x = x -> x+1"

user55340

5:56 PM

It is interesting seeing the difference in how the person approaches the "my question was closed" on meta and the final outcome...

user55340

1

Q: Can anyone tell me why this question was closed?

Documentation, Examples, etc of implementing Google's Website Translator The one comment I got was a link that was so generic, it might as well have been to www.google.com.

discussion closed-questions

user55340

Wow, thank you. Very helpful. — SLoret 3 hours ago

user55340

vs

user55340

-6

Q: How to get rid of Bullies in Stack Exchange

I have seen people downvoting any questions without reading the question properly, just the title and hit the downvote without caring to read the content/question. Once I asked the question, I got downvote in 3 seconds, common in 3 seconds, I cannot even finish reading the first line, the person ...

discussion stackexchange

user55340

@YannisRizos, I agree this question is non-constructive, but still I'd care to read before voting it. I am positive about SE and people here who are here to help. I don't mean to call them bully, but some people cannot help themselves to surf around and hit the close button as fast as they could. Yeah it sounds like overreaction but there are always some genuine questions which may not have genuine answer but may have collection of answers to satisfy the questioner. — Jhilke Dai yesterday

user55340

5:58 PM

(granted, the second one seems to have come around to a better understanding... but it was a longer process)

user55340

6:30 PM

I'm sad... there's a troubleshooting set of comments in a problem I'm having that ended up in a chat... from '11, but the chat is gone. Maybe a search for "continue this discussion in chat" find the chat room, see if the chat still exists, and then delete the comment if it doesn't should be considered part of the cleanup scripts... so I wouldn't know I should be sad.

psr

6:48 PM

@JimmyHoffa And this question is answered both by Doc Brown and Mike Brown - another sign of artificial intelligence at work. Or just intelligence. Plus, the question is about evaluating programs using artificial intelligence - and the answers suggested using real intelligence! It's like a fractal time travel story!

3

Q: Are there any well-known quantitative approaches to evaluate a particular design whether it satisfies or violates the SOLID design principles?

I designed an application framework by considering the SOLID design principles and supported by design patterns. However, I wonder if there are any automated tools or well-known approaches to evaluate whether the SOLID design principles are satisfied or violated in the proposed design?

design-patterns frameworks object-oriented-design solid software-evaluation

Bob

@MichaelT Very good then.

user55340

@Bob There is some bits that are interesting when it comes to cross SE network... politics (for the lack of a better word). There is the "be jealous of your community" with the idea that one should try to make their own .SE as accepting as possible. There is also the "migrate something that is best served elsewhere there" - these are sometimes competing ideals.

user55340

I've had a few flags of "this is a DBA design question" refused and the question kept here rather than migrated to DBA because of the first... and there have been times when the second one is realized as more important and questions get migrated out to another site.

user55340

There have been some migrations that are "we don't want this question here" that get migrated out.. sometimes we get SO mods asking us if a question is a good fit here... (and sometimes we've said, no - but we would love to have you migrate a question from a 30k SO user and an answer from a 20k SO user here - it would make P.SE a better place)

psr

@MichaelT - I think it really is complicated though. Technical DB questions will get great treatment at the DBA site, but questions about what the role of the DB should be will ALWAYS be answered "as large as possible" at the DBA site. Questions involving architecture with the database do better here.

user55340

7:00 PM

There was a question that CS.SE took after we closed one here... and then that workplace to P.SE migration that raised a few eyebrows...

user55340

@psr Indeed. Just sometimes its a question that seems borderline and the depth of knowledge that is required to give the best possible answer on the question would be DBA, but the "be jealous of your own community" kept it here.

user55340

As it stands, I don't think that we would mind pointing people asking about the specifics of writing documentation and APA style guides to writers.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT of course not, we're developers, we hate documentation and everything related to it by definition

Bob

Recently I looked up the meaning of 'APA' and realized that the American Psychological Association probably doesn't care very much about academic computer science writing and CS could really use it's own guide for a more interactive (or at least Wikipedia-style cited) style.

user55340

I occasionally scare my manager by documenting things... he's learned not to ask the question of why I want to document things...

Mgr: Why are you documenting that?
Me: So if I get hit by a truck it won't be a problem.
Mgr: But you won't get hit by a truck if you look both ways when crossing the road. (aside: we sometimes have to park across the street where semis often drive)
Me: Getting hit by a truck is also "I'm got a new job, bye."
Mgr: Oh.

Bob

7:06 PM

Academic writing in general is just... Archaic in form.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa: What better place to make stuff up than Programmers? — Robert Harvey 16 hours ago

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT He has a point, it's why I'm here.

But I'm not here anymore, now I'm on FP.SE!

Bob

7:27 PM

You know I feel somewhat guilty for asking far more questions than I answer (like, on the order of *50), but I suppose it does provide search results for anyone else with the same issue...

user55340

@Bob On any SE site, one tends to find two groups - askers and answeres. As long as one is asking good questions, and giving good answers it really doesn't matter what group you are in - they are both critical for a Q&A site to work.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Bob Note you get rep for asking questions, that's intrinsically by design.

user55340

@Bob Consider also, sometimes I feel guilty for not having asked a question yet.

Bob

See? 1/3 ratio just now.

Yeah, I do try to at least ask quality questions

Or do some research beforehand

So it's a well informed terrible question ; )

user55340

'terrible' is a very subjective metric. If you have tried ( whathaveyoutried.com ) you are likely asking a good question... maybe not the best for the SE format, but it is probably a good question.

Bob

7:43 PM

Heh

maple_shaft

7:58 PM

Ahhh the old day before the last day at your job... copying the entire codebase of every project you have worked on to your flash drive for "personal reference"

user55340

8:16 PM

Ohh... 7777 rep!

psr

Rep via chmod

user55340

@psr That's a rather promisquis permissions... setuid, setguid, and sticky (eww...) while world viewable and writeable too...

psr

@MichaelT I've thought for a while that you were world viewable and writeable. I had not known about promiscuous and sticky.

user55340

8:51 PM

@psr There are no naked pics of me on the net... I am not world viewable...

Bob

9:18 PM

Did you try -la ? I'm not going to try grep though, unless you're into that sort of thing.

The greatest irony when writing a research paper is going to find resources that back up what you already wrote so you can prove you have no original ideas and you copied off someone else.

user55340

9:45 PM

Or how about the:
1. Post rumor as fact on Wikipedia
2. News agency reports on rumor based on Wikipedia
3. When asked for citation for rumor, news article from #2 is used

Bob

10:12 PM

Me and a friend used to joke about that, having had access to a .edu domain directly

We could create a fake page/paper and post it as if it was fact, then cite it on Wikipedia and see if other places start citing it

The likelihood of someone who actually knows enough to refute it directly goes down in direct correlation with how obscure/unresearched a topic it is.

We also talked about using papers that are rare but have abstracts for the same purpose

My god the number of SE sites has grown since the last time I looked at it

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