andreimackenzie

8 ms·

1.
by andreimackenzie 28d ago
This will shorten many test files!
2.
by andreimackenzie 2mo ago
This is spot on. Also, many orgs build to the needs of the business or whims of stakeholders rather than customer needs. Good product strategy and product discovery remain difficult despite AI.
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by andreimackenzie 4mo ago
Fair enough. I use plenty of disposable stuff in other contexts. The habitual part is what makes a difference for me with my local coffee shop. I usually walk over around midday when I WFH, mostly to move around and re-energize for the seco
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by andreimackenzie 4mo ago
My local Starbucks offers a 10 cents discount and extra loyalty points for bringing your own cup. I've started bringing an insulated one that keeps coffee hot for longer & doesn't sweat with an iced beverage. I seldom see othe
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by andreimackenzie 11mo ago
The Cambridge, MA location still has an aisle of keyboards and mice outside of their packaging. It's very nice to be able to hold and feel those peripherals as part of the shopping experience.
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by andreimackenzie 1y ago
From my experience: re-orgs and limiting backfills for attrition can lead to these awkward states. Someone starts off with a sensible number of directs, but it can devolve over time.
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by andreimackenzie 1y ago
> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory. This part doesn't make sense to me. Limiting bidders should drive the price down, because fewer advertisers are competing for the same potential ad im
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by andreimackenzie 2y ago
I think it does because a researcher can pick up context about the quality of their sources through the course of web research. The BigCo chatbot AIs are marketed to represent that BigCo, and people generally trust Google, in this case. It&
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by andreimackenzie 2y ago
"Lack of obstacles" really resonates. If we're talking about software dev, it's fun to get into a flow state and solve problems. Whether you actually get to do that at a BigCo seems like a roll of the dice. For every t
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by andreimackenzie 2y ago
Most people don't decide about their own medical "needs." They trust doctors, who are by and large expert and professional, yet frequently discredited by insurance companies. Insurance companies have too much power in this dy
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by andreimackenzie 2y ago
I would be surprised if they don't already do this. The question is how big a buffer to trade off for delay...
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by andreimackenzie 2y ago
A lot of BigCo people's (myself included) perception of Java is tainted by the challenges of old, inherited code bases. Java has been ubiquitous for a long time, and it's not surprising to accumulate code bases that have been und
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by andreimackenzie 2y ago
Early-in-career folks are more vulnerable. Even before major family/life costs start to play a role, it can be difficult to save enough for a safety net after moving to an apartment (even w/ roommates) from college & managing
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by andreimackenzie 2y ago
I've observed that the quality of third-party SDKs for Microsoft office formats improved substantially. The .xls format was notoriously fickle to process or produce from outside of Excel. As of .xlsx, the open source community produced
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by andreimackenzie 2y ago
Assuming the query language for the graph DB you have in mind is declarative like SQL, I recommend templated queries. I have found this technique scales pretty well for query complexity, makes it relatively trivial to "get to the query
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by andreimackenzie 3y ago
Simplicity is a feature. Sure, how complicated can effective enums really be, but Go's general philosophy is to think hard (& sometimes for a long time) before adding every bell and whistle. I have a far easier time delving in to p
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by andreimackenzie 3y ago
About 10 years ago we set up a pretty slick integration from our office wifi controller to Google's account directory using WebDAV and Radius. It allowed us to have a WAP for insiders who could authenticate with their Google-issued one
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by andreimackenzie 3y ago
Agree. The main benefit of environment variables is portability. They work pretty much the same way in every platform I have encountered. As soon as a system gets into files, it's possible to get bogged down in the complexity of Window
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by andreimackenzie 3y ago
Advertisers not spending as much
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by andreimackenzie 4y ago
I wondered about this exact risk as I learned about the "overemployed" phenomenon. It feels like a matter of time before credit bureaus offer this as a service to the many corps that already pay them for credit checks. It's
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by andreimackenzie 4y ago
I've really enjoyed Golang for this reason. The powers that be take a cautious approach before adding major new stuff, even when the community complains loudly about lack of important features (e.g. generics for many years until recent
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by andreimackenzie 4y ago
How estimation is marketed matters, too. Don't let your stakeholders think of it as an over-estimate. It's an estimate that considers the needs of the full software development lifecycle: automating tests, developing monitoring, r
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by andreimackenzie 4y ago
These are real problems, but there can also be mitigations, particularly when it comes to people scaling. In many orgs, engineering teams are divided by feature mandate, and management calls it good-enough. In the beginning, the teams are e
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by andreimackenzie 4y ago
Once ancient content no longer produces enough ad revenue for the companies storing it, I suspect they will support it only in paid tiers for users who really want it. Something like this is already happening in Google's paid tiers: ea
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by andreimackenzie 4y ago
Honest and collaborative companies will be as open as they can about their cash burn rate and prospects for more funding. If this aspect of the business is not done well, it can have pretty sudden and unpleasant consequences for the folks d
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by andreimackenzie 5y ago
I am getting an `alert(1)` when visiting this site. This smells like cross-site scripting. Beware.
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by andreimackenzie 5y ago
I'm happy to read encouragement to consider the wider group of stakeholders in the scope of testing. In many organizations, incentives are out of alignment to find issues beyond the obvious user-facing correctness ones, so "testin
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by andreimackenzie 5y ago
Arriving at Penn Station has benefits if you're traveling for business. Hailing a ride to get to an office within 15 minutes beats the long ride to get downtown from one of the NYC airports.
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by andreimackenzie 6y ago
Agreed. Jira makes it easy to add a new field, plugin, or workflow step for a particular use case, but it is much more difficult to determine if an existing field/plugin/workflow step can be safely removed. As a result, everyone i
30.
by andreimackenzie 7y ago
I completely agree that some types of changes are much more expensive with a bare metal architecture than with cloud. 6 years ago, I worked for a company in the mobile space. This was around the time of the Candy Crush boom, and our traffic

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