bvirb

7 ms·

1.
by bvirb 6mo ago
When we (the engineering team I work on) started using agents more seriously we were worried about this: that we'd speed up coding time but slow down review time and just end up increasing cycle time. So far there's no obvious cha
2.
by bvirb 1y ago
Very much agree for the type of software I've worked on my whole career. I've seen way more time and energy wasted by people trying to predict the future than fixing bugs. In practice I think it's common to realize something
3.
by bvirb 1y ago
We attempt to address this problem at work with an extra caveat to never add code "in the wrong direction" -- so it's fine (usually preferable) to have a partial implementation, as long as it's heading in the direction w
4.
by bvirb 1y ago
Accurate, saw restroom use tick up 1
5.
by bvirb 1y ago
We've been using Elasticsearch + PG and it's pretty nice and fast, but it adds a whole layer of extra stuff to deal with when your data is in PG but then also needs to be indexed into an external server outside of those PG transac
6.
by bvirb 2y ago
Is there some way to normalize the amount spent on education per student with the need per student? NYC is also the most expensive place to live in the US, so conceivably the amount spent per student doesn't go as far towards their edu
7.
by bvirb 2y ago
I think it's possible that your numbers of amount spent per pupil don't take into account the total benefit to that pupil towards their education. If Norway say also helps comparatively more with housing, food, and medicine, then
8.
by bvirb 2y ago
I started out freelancing and eventually built a consulting firm w/ a partner, I left around 50 people because selling time for money just never got fun. Took a business partner, a couple engineers, and one of the products we had built
9.
by bvirb 2y ago
Recent spending in CA (Sep 1-now) looks like it's heavily landlord associations running ads against prop 33, which would allow for new rent controls. https://adstransparency.google.com/political?region=21137&to...
10.
by bvirb 2y ago
The argument would be that the marketing done by the label(s) she has signed with is a big part of why she has 7.5M monthly Spotify listeners (and the related fame is why so many people will pay to see her feet). Not sure if that's a g
11.
by bvirb 2y ago
In a similar boat (small team, have to balance new stuff, maintenance, customer requests, bugs, etc). We ended up with a system where we break work up into things that take about a day. If someone thinks something is going to take a long ti
12.
by bvirb 2y ago
> Going from 10 to 10,000 qualified candidates for a position allows a far more productive match Yeah going from 10 to 10k qualified candidates means wages go down. As companies get better and better at WFH the pool gets bigger and bigge
13.
by bvirb 2y ago
10yo+ B2B SaaS company we're still on Heroku. I think the value prop is particularly good for B2B SaaS and probably less so for consumer products. Our margin per customer is so much higher than the infra cost it just never makes sense
14.
by bvirb 3y ago
We came up with a rule “no single use abstractions” so any abstraction with a single caller gets absorbed by its caller. We eventually had to say except across MVC boundaries (the project is MVC organized) or else we got some weird code org
15.
by bvirb 3y ago
What a fun thread. I've always heard this as one of The Great Filters related to the Fermi paradox. FWIW the wikipedia for the Fermi paradox even mentions that: > The most commonly agreed-upon low probability event is abiogenesis ..
16.
by bvirb 3y ago
Years ago I was driving home and saw a Corona beer billboard and distinctly remember thinking that I would love a Pacifico. So it kinda worked on me.
17.
by bvirb 3y ago
If you can afford to and you have a team dynamic where "everyone makes mistakes" you can give them more responsibility -- like other people being stuck until they actually fix the build. But that can backfire if they're very
18.
by bvirb 3y ago
I’ve had the same experience mostly writing web apps in Ruby, which locks similarly to Python. Multi-threading is always needed to saturate IO, network, etc, never CPU, so GIL isn’t an issue. I always wondered what people were doing that r
19.
by bvirb 3y ago
Hmm well if I understand you correctly that's what I was saying as well: Things go wrong when the DB trusts the application layer (rather than doing its own validation) -- e.g. the DB should control what is valid data, not the applicat
20.
by bvirb 3y ago
I think someone mentions this every time nuclear power comes up. It seems to me nobody is completely sure what the future will hold yet, except that we need to decarbonize energy production. Nuclear still seems like it could be a reasonable
21.
by bvirb 3y ago
FWIW I think I agree with you if you consider "critical processing of data" data validations (IME via constraints, checks, triggers, etc...). I think where things can really go wrong is when the DB accepts anything the application
22.
by bvirb 3y ago
I've recently dealt with multiple companies who started using IBM Aspera (which as a vendor to them means we have to use it too) only for it to work miserably. I've also seen a couple tiny, perfectly functional MySQL databases rep
23.
by bvirb 3y ago
That sounds like Virgin America 20 years ago and I think it worked out well for them and for consumers. They had really cheap, reasonable flights, and they forced everyone else to put entertainment in the seat backs. I really miss their sil
24.
by bvirb 3y ago
I had this experience after the Equifax hack a while ago when something like 100M+ people's info was stolen. Until I froze my credit I was getting phone calls every few days asking if I had _really_ tried to open some line of credit I
25.
by bvirb 4y ago
We have some tests like that. We're injecting a stub to generate the error condition and then testing the output. The test code runs in the same thread as the server so we can temporarily inject a stub into the server for some cases. Y
26.
by bvirb 4y ago
We do browser based end-to-end testing which tests the frontend and backend at the same time using a single tool (Capybara in our case). We take snapshots at various points during the test runs which are then compared to previous runs for v
27.
by bvirb 4y ago
Same boat here. I'm doubtful that we could take on the additional maintenance work for less than the Heroku premium we pay. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm wrong and newer tools bridge the gap for a lower price and/or ti
28.
by bvirb 4y ago
Maybe I missed it in the article but it looks to me like they're hiring more junior candidates. For more experienced candidates (which it sounds like you are) I think years of experience doing similar things in a similar field/org
29.
by bvirb 4y ago
I inherited a project where all the validations were in the forms and it meant that you couldn't reliably use the model layer without the forms layer (you'd end up saving invalid data). We eventually moved the validations to the m
30.
by bvirb 4y ago
Yes if the user must retain their state after the modal closes a full page refresh would not be the right thing. I probably wouldn’t build Figma in Rails, but I probably would build a CRM in Rails.

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