Timberwolf

6 ms·

1.
by Timberwolf 6y ago
You get an interesting collision between two expectations on licensing in a modding community for an open source game. Modding communities have historically leaned on self-penned bespoke licences tending toward the, "only Tool fans can
2.
by Timberwolf 6y ago
It's been a long time but I'm sure I remember something along similar themes being one of the essays in the back of the SimCity 2000 manual. Which now makes me all nostalgic for the days when game manuals were something existing a
3.
by Timberwolf 6y ago
Sorry, jargon: Individual Contributor, meaning someone who works on things directly and doesn't do any management.
4.
by Timberwolf 6y ago
Companies really struggle with this, and in both directions. Startups and scale-ups tend to overcompensate to the point management hires get interviewed as super-ICs, where they'll be expected to answer technical stages at (or even abo
5.
by Timberwolf 6y ago
I think the article misses what I think is a vitally important part of the job: being a crap shield. A lot of the work of an EM is wading into the slurry pit with a shovel so your team are free to get the job done: bashing your head against
6.
by Timberwolf 6y ago
One thing which really resonated: "But will you do the boring but necessary browser testing to figure out if what you’re describing is always true, or just most of the time? And will you repeat that testing once new versions have come
7.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
What I like about the '70s stuff is almost everything uses standard parts you can get from any reasonable factor, and the few unique components are usually still simple enough that some hobbyist or small machine shop will be turning th
8.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
I spent four years at an organisation rife with this. I found two major routes for getting to work on hard problems. The first was joining initiatives that were in such utter disarray people were willing to take any risk to get out of the &
9.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
This is a consistent bugbear of mine, and I think a big factor in the resurgence of vinyl. I find it frustrating I can take a recording from a format with limited dynamic range and stereo separation, which is incredibly vulnerable to enviro
10.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
I thought similar. To me what Buzzfeed are calling the "old Internet" here is something I very much remember bemoaning as the "new Internet" in which dedicated protocols such as NNTP and IRC got displaced by brattish com
11.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
My experience working for the 800lb gorilla incumbent was that we didn't take competition seriously at all. Even stuff competitors did that would be trivial for us to replicate got put in the "not a priority" bucket. The few
12.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
The problem with such regulations is they tend to be written by the same kinds of people - those who still assume that having meaningful SQL characters in a password is insecure, or that every device on the Internet will have a static IP.
13.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
They're a great example of the unintended consequences of regulation. I'm sure the original intent was not to have a huge banner where the options for managing what the site tracks were a one click "sure, whatever" or a
14.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
I loved this feature in Windows 7, because all it did there was an exact substring match over the items in the Start menu. As a result, it was instant . The Windows 10 one where it's trying to do a Bing search, look through the Micros
15.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
Every once in a while I'll catch myself trying to read web content in the tiny window between the sidebar ads, the floating video, the cookie control panel and the "other content you might like" block... and I'll stop, p
16.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
I'm fascinated by how many of the things they identified as helpful to new users were later reverted. Looking at my Windows 10 desktop all of the work they did to find a solution where all users identified a program as "running&qu
17.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
> not the VPs, not the CEO This is the biggest problem where I've seen companies try to do this. The C-level and senior management team make a big fuss about how the company is having too many pointless meetings, they need to be eff
18.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
There are some categories of product I'm no longer willing to buy from Amazon: power cables, replacement chargers and batteries being the biggest offenders. They're such a minefield of fakery and shortcuts that are outright danger
19.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
I tend to swap between two modes. If I'm working with well-known tools and a problem I understand reasonably well, I'll approach it in ultra-strict test-first style, where my "red" is, "code won't compile becau
20.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
Totally agree. In my experience "that's just X it does that sometimes" have been symptoms of some of the scariest bugs in the system we've been working on. A couple of examples: - a caching issue that was a "just X&
21.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
If you take "the idea is to give people a chance to share how they really feel in a vulnerable, one-to-one setting" and replace "one-to-one" with "small group" then this feels very close to the way many people
22.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
Something I've noticed about the culture of "work through midnight if that's what it takes" is how much work gets thrown away. I worked at a few places with this culture (startup and established), and it seemed entirely
23.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
Someone (I think possibly John Cutler) made a good point about this, which is that by now the early and middle adopters of classical manifesto-style "Agile" have absorbed it so thoroughly that it's no longer something deservi
24.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
I think LinkedIn suffers from people treating it as an extension of a CV or prospectus, which probably isn't an unfair assumption on their part. Which means not introspecting failures, only commenting or reacting on banal platitudes, a
25.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
In this context, the rationale was little more than this being the last version in which "John" had done significant day-to-day programming, and therefore felt informed enough to interfere with on a daily basis. My personal take w
26.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
I worked with a "John", with the added bonus that I was expected to be the hatchet man telling developers that they couldn't use any language features introduced post Java 5 or that they had to restructure all of their soluti
27.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
I went through this with power tools. What I found was products would end up with three broad classes of negative reviews, segmented mainly by price: * Expensive tools would have gripes about price or lack of inclusion of accessories. If I
28.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
In my experience, architects who are valuable to their teams tend to be the ones who rarely do any "architecture" themselves; instead they work their arse off trying to smash apart every last blocker to the engineers in a team bei
29.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
I had a 17" CRT monitor on a 286, with a Trident 8900 SVGA card driving it. Hard to credit in these days, where even using a non SSD equipped computer is painful, I used to happily wait several seconds for Program Manager to repaint it
30.
by Timberwolf 7y ago
Remastered has it too. Steam version even has achievements for doing things that require you to get a small way through the original. Agree on not needing to play Maniac Mansion first, too. I came to the original having no idea that MM even

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