A bunch of extremely well-paid SWEs complain about donating two bucks to a completely free encyclopedia representing hundreds of thousands of volunteer human hours of effort; replacing (sorry, “disrupting”) extremely expensive Britannica books means to me the orange site has lost it’s way.
> bunch of extremely well-paid SWEs complain about donating two bucks to a completely free encyclopedia
You are NOT donating to free encyclopedia. You are donating to their parent company, which spends fraction of your donations on the encyclopedia, the rest goes to other questionable causes. That what bothers everybody.
An item hitting the front page doesn't mean anything like "most people here agree with the premise". Just that they find the content potentially interesting to see, discuss, debate, etc.
That would hold merit if I wouldn’t regularly see people’s insightful comments sent deep into greyed-out oblivion because they went against the grain of the echo chamber.
Be it here, on Reddit, or any site with a content voting system, the vote buttons always end up being ‘this is what I could have said’ and ‘get bent’ buttons.
Funnily enough, imageboards seem to have it figured out: post something interesting, your thread or comment gets engaged. Post drivel - everyone ignores you. Meritocracy.
The pushback is very present amongst Wikipedians editors too, you know, the people actually writing the encyclopedia. But I guess software engineers on hacker news know better and can just handwave the issue because it makes them feel better to think that their donation is useful.
I'm an underpaid inspector with heavy ADHD. At this point I feel like my chances of breaking into the tech industry are a pipedream. I still enjoy hacker news, especially since I can access it at work.
Not everyone here is a silicon valley millionaire. Sure there are some, but there are many who are not. Some are even from developing nations where a few USD represents a significant amount of money.
I think the core of the argument is that they don't need the money, but act like they do to keep the site running but actually run a huge surplus.
Donate to a real charity instead of the intransparent mess which is the Wikimedia foundation. It is an awful charity from any point of view, your money does not go to Wikipedia (the website), in fact it just enters a web of different undisclosed charities.
> For example, if someone asked: "can you unbatch those 1k RPCs?"
"Can we do _________?" is the worst question to ask me as an engineer. Like, yes, we probably _can_ do literally almost anything, with enough hours and money. But what's the budget? What really is _______?
Eg: If it's "analytics to a page", what do we want to track? Where does the data go? How do people view the data? I need to know the answer to those questions, plus the "budget", before even entertaining a yes or no answer. Which I think sounds like I'm beating around the bush by asking, but I'm not! :)
One thing I love at my current job is people embracing the X/Y question terms. People will frequently ask on Slack, "How do I do X?" and immediately follow up with "I'm asking because in implementing process Y, it seems like I need an X."
omg yes. state the underlying goal to achieve and detail how you intend to go about it and seek help. i dont know how many problems i helped solve only to find out the underlying problem was already solved in another way.
ive learned to ask that as my first follow up question for random requests for help: is this the real problem or are you trying to solve a different higher level problem
Just another anecdote: They’re the only airline to lose my luggage, and their complete lack of giving a fuck or competence in returning it was a tremendous and expensive pain in the ass. Only through pulling a personal favor with a friend in Berlin was I able to ever get my luggage.
There’s something wrong at Lufthansa. The queue to fill out my lost luggage form was like an hour long when I arrived, and looked to be just as long when I was done.
I am curious about who your intended user is. I’m just thinking about how most FE build pipelines I’ve used have a bunch of “checks” like linters, running various tests, maybe reaching out to some other services when the build passes or fails.
Is the idea with this that the developer would do these steps locally? I also might just be misunderstanding this tool.
The things in build pipelines today that you mentioned (linting, testing, events/webhooks), are all things that Reflame will eventually try to build versions of, with a focus on speed similar to what we've done with deployment, but they're definitely not there today.
This means if you want those things (and most reasonable people probably do), you do still need to install and run them locally and in whatever existing CI pipeline you're currently running them in.
The difference Reflame makes even in this context is that your deploys, both to preview and to production, are no longer blocked behind all of those frustratingly slow processes that break your flow every time you hit them:
If you want to share a work in progress with someone else, you no longer have to wait minutes for a preview to go up. It will be up the moment you made your changes.
If you have a production issue where you need to ship new code to fix, you no longer have to wait minutes for a build pipeline to run, during which your product will remain broken. It can go live as soon as you're done coding the fix.
Most importantly, having instant deploys unblocks a ton of opportunities around running tests and checks against the live production deployment, either as sanity checks that run after shipping with notifications on failure, allowing you a chance to revert (also instantly) if you broke something, in order to maximize the efficiency of the feedback loop (this is the approach I'd recommend and build first), or as a blocking safety net that can prevent broken changes from reaching customers in exchange for adding more friction to deploy every other good changeset (I'll probably build this eventually given enough demand, but would recommend that it be used very sparingly).
> Why does this happen? No idea, but it's not lost on me that a lot of these things are backed by huge companies with giant piles of money who are using them as marketing.
Your whole post is spot-on :)
My two cents on the answer to this question:
- New tools / frameworks / libraries / etc often position themselves as “solving” some perceived deficiency of the prior generation of that thing. So it can be attractive to want to move over to something that solves a pain point. (Whether it actually does, or whether it just replaces it with a new pain point is another thing…) Monolith to microservices is an example.
- At least for me, if I’m starting a new project (especially if it’s in a space I’m not that experienced in), it’s tempting to choose what looks to be the simplest choice, which could be for example a niche database technology suited for my exact need (even if in reality a regular SQL db would be just fine).
I’ve bounced around between frontend and backend and devops, plus some iOS and one Android project. I’ve hopped in and out of various languages/frameworks. For the past year or so I’ve been using elixir which is my first big functional language job, as an example.
I would not worry about job opportunities. Here’s why:
General problem-solving abilities (eg. breaking down work into smaller chunks of work until you have something actionable) translate well to all kinds of software.
Skills like being able to communicate well with other engineers, product folks, etc is also similar.
Also, tech moves fast. Even if I were to have stuck with only frontend work, that landscape has changed so much in 14 years it’s not like the way I built things in 2008 is the same as 2022. Which is to say that regardless of staying in one area or moving around, I’ve always had to keep learning new things. I think other areas are like this too, eg Apple coming out with new ways of doing things every few years; Android SDKs having major changes over time.
Maybe I’m just feeling preachy at the moment but follow what excites you :)
I feel strongly that you’re likely to get another 10 years out of it if you keep up with regular maintenance. My non-Prius Toyota is 17 years old. The outside looks like a war zone from being a city car but the interior is in great shape and everything works perfectly. A family member has a Prius approaching 300,000 miles. Good cars.
[edit: Regular maintenance is key! I take mine in to my local mechanic for an oil change and inspection 2-3 times a year. For elderly cars, don’t wait for a noise or a light to go off :) ]
I didn’t even think about that, but absolutely. I’m not a single parent, but my wife works in retail and just those late hours make daycare pick ups, late afternoon meeting, on-call and incidents a major hassle.
A bunch of extremely well-paid SWEs complain about donating two bucks to a completely free encyclopedia representing hundreds of thousands of volunteer human hours of effort; replacing (sorry, “disrupting”) extremely expensive Britannica books means to me the orange site has lost it’s way.