akeefer

6 ms·

1.
by akeefer 11y ago
This post kind of misses the main point of services like Wealthfront. You're paying 0.25% in exchange for automatic rebalancing, asset class diversification, and tax optimization. If the combination of those factors is going to incre
2.
by akeefer 13y ago
Sure, you can call that structure the design, or the architecture, or whatever you like. Either way, it's a fair question. As a point of semantics: TDD generally stands for "test-driven development," not "test-driven d
3.
by akeefer 13y ago
I think this is a great explanation of a lot of the obvious pitfalls with "basic" TDD, and why so many people end up putting in a lot of effort with TDD without getting much return. I personally have kind of moved away from TDD ov
4.
by akeefer 14y ago
I'm not sure that people who use relational databases would be surprised that there can be data-level race conditions. For example, if you write code like: 1) User requests transfer in the UI 2) Query the DB to see if the transfer is legal
5.
by akeefer 14y ago
Fundamentally, what matters is the set of invariants you want to preserve, and it's usually the case that some number can be preserved for you by the database and some can't and have to be dealt with at the application level. So by "consis
6.
by akeefer 14y ago
While I agree that it's a hard problem, I'm not sure I'd agree that it's a hard problem to notice. It's such a common problem for anyone dealing with a relational database that I (and pretty much every engineer I work with) would recognize
7.
by akeefer 14y ago
While I appreciate how thorough the article is, it's a bit of a strawman. Pretty much everyone who makes use of a relational database in a professional capacity has to be aware of what transaction isolation level they're using, make their
8.
by akeefer 14y ago
This is kind of conflating two different things. One thing is conventions around things like where curly braces go, naming conventions for classes and methods and different types of variables, how much whitespace to use where, and so forth.
9.
by akeefer 14y ago
I haven't read it myself, but http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Estimating-Planning-Mike-Cohn/dp... looks a good description of the story points/relative estimation techniques. They're really not something that should require a whole book to e
10.
by akeefer 14y ago
There are two serious problems with this post, and it really saddens me that I see these sorts of posts so frequently here, with so many concurring voices. First of all, cost absolutely 100% has to factor into prioritization decisions. Tha
11.
by akeefer 14y ago
The only thing I've ever seen work (and I've seen it work well) is to avoid estimating based on time. Instead, you estimate things relatively and then empirically measure how long things take (known as the "velocity" in agile parlance). S
12.
by akeefer 14y ago
Apple is what it is because they tightly control the end-to-end user experience, from the hardware to the software. You can't maintain that and open up the hardware ecosystem; it's an either/or choice. So far, their choice has worked out
13.
by akeefer 14y ago
I'm not sure that's the right question to ask. More important, in my view, is the reverse side of that luck equation: if you assume that input A leads deterministically to outcome B, then if you didn't get outcome B, obviously you didn't
14.
by akeefer 14y ago
Your presumption is that there are jobs available; according to the bureau of labor statistics, as of March 2012 there were 3.4 unemployed people for every job opening (roughly double the ratio at the start of the recession back in December
15.
by akeefer 14y ago
Wait a minute: you say that our expenses versus income is too high, but then also say that higher taxes won't solve anything? Unless you're arguing that higher taxes won't increase government income (which is a totally specious argument t
16.
by akeefer 14y ago
Within the JVM, object references are strictly separate from integers. Object references are stored within a structure they call an OOP, short for "ordinary object pointers", and the gc works by inspecting the contents of oops and potentia
17.
by akeefer 15y ago
The problem with all these debates about "optimal" office layouts is that they're all a series of non-repeatable experiments: someone can always say "Sure, you were successful doing X, but if you'd done Y instead you would have been more
18.
by akeefer 15y ago
At Guidewire we've worked in an open-plan office for basically the whole life of the company (roughly 10 years), and it's worked really well for us (by whatever metric you like: successful products, financial success, employee retention).
19.
by akeefer 15y ago
I'd be curious to hear why you're so anti-IDE: do you have extensive experience working in Java with a good IDE like IntelliJ? I've heard this "IDE's are to help mediocre programmers be mediocre" argument before, but it's so alien to my e
20.
Gosu language plugin for IntelliJ IDEA is released(guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com)
2 points by akeefer 15y ago|0 comments
21.
by akeefer 15y ago
Sure, but that's not what I was arguing against; my point is that just because that's how market works it doesn't mean you can't say there's not a "shortage" of some skill. If the only companies that can hire engineers have to be able to p
22.
by akeefer 15y ago
It's true that many people who say "there's a shortage" are really saying "I can't find a top 1% engineer who will work 60 hours a week for $80k a year in Silicon Valley." Well, duh: raise wages, provide better working conditions, or look
23.
by akeefer 15y ago
To your points: 1) Sure, but effectively all income is multiple-taxed. Suppose I run my own business, and am paid by a consumer with their money that they earned as wages. If I turn a profit, I then pay taxes on that income. By this lo
24.
by akeefer 15y ago
That's a great, succinct way to put it. It pretty much exactly matches my experience, too: out of every 10 things I estimate, a couple go a little faster, most of them are within 10-20% of the estimate, and one or two of them blow out to
25.
by akeefer 15y ago
That's a fair point; there's no simple way that I know of to do that in any language (though many languages avoid having both constructs), and the general solution is to write parallel sets of methods to operate on the two types of data str
26.
by akeefer 15y ago
But again, other languages do offer the ability to write methods that apply to all collections, without the "complexity." Sure, it's different, but in Gosu for example you can write an enhancement method on the Collection interface, or on
27.
by akeefer 15y ago
See my examples below for how to do it in Gosu (via enhancements). In C# it's pretty much the same (via extension methods). Both are statically typed languages. Again, not 100% the same as Scala, and each comes with a different set of tr
28.
by akeefer 15y ago
I have to respectfully disagree. First of all, the things he shows aren't inherently complex: adding an additional function to the existing collections library is something that's possible in other languages in less confusing ways (see ot
29.
by akeefer 15y ago
In Gosu, it's pretty much the same (though enhancements are statically dispatched and thus subject to a different set of limitations): enhancement MyEnhancement<T> : T[] { function filterMap() { . . . } } Roughly the same in C# wi
30.
by akeefer 15y ago
It's certainly a related problem: with Go-style implicit interfaces, neither a person nor a machine really has the context to know if something that conforms to the interface is actually intended to be used that way, or if it just happens

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