ellius

6 ms·

1.
by ellius 6y ago
I wasn't imagining a full rewrite, more like a "holding area" that could defer some of the load. Again I may be totally wrong about this—I have never written a COBOL system, and if there is some plausible way to make it effec
2.
by ellius 6y ago
I'm a younger engineer, so I say this with a degree of humility, but is trying to modify these monstrous legacy systems on the fly during a worldwide catastrophe really the most responsible or intelligent solution? Is there no way to a
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by ellius 6y ago
This reminds me of the article "COBOL and Legacy Code as a Systemic Risk." Like the pandemic itself, this was a foreseeable risk: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/07/cobol-and-legacy-cod...
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by ellius 6y ago
If that's the case, that's what should have been made clear. OP clearly doesn't think that's what happened.
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by ellius 6y ago
Yeah whatever happened here, the communication from this person's leadership was bad. I'm not trying to vilify them—maybe they had their reasons—but OP is clearly confused about why they were laid off and how (if) it could have be
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by ellius 6y ago
This is the thesis of Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies." He argues, correctly I think, that you can find intellectual strands going back to Heraclitus and Plato which revolve around the idea of some "central fo
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by ellius 6y ago
"East of Eden." Steinbeck draws beautiful vignettes of human life and emotion, and I think the book's main idea about human motivation is largely correct and explains a wide variety of behavior. It helped me see both myself a
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by ellius 6y ago
Seconded, this is a really excellent book.
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by ellius 6y ago
I think that's a good example because it shows individual objects instead of curves on a graph, which for many people doesn't translate to reality.
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by ellius 6y ago
I think that's exactly the issue. People can't picture it. You can show them a curve on a graph, but that doesn't translate for people without a mathematical/scientific background into "a shitload of people will get
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by ellius 6y ago
If there are two "mental tools" I wish we could teach every person, they are exponential growth and statistical thinking. Neither is intuitive, but they would help people understand this whole situation (and many others) a lot bet
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Exponential Virus Spread(youtube.com)
2 points by ellius 6y ago|0 comments
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by ellius 7y ago
You're right, this is really the deeper principle. I'm talking more "useful rules of thumb" as people are trying to build intuition for why passive voice might be useful. But at the end of the day it gives you more optio
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by ellius 7y ago
He also freely admits at the end of the essay that he's sure he committed many of the sins he's preaching against. I suspect he'd also freely admit that there are reasons to use the passive voice. But I think his primary comp
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by ellius 7y ago
This is a great example of where to use the passive voice. Austen reverses the sentence structure to pack the punch at the end. In general, 2 good principles are: 1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence. 2. Put familiar information at th
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by ellius 7y ago
You'll find that even in the hard sciences, which are more objective many times over than the social sciences. Any complex field is going to generate controversy. That doesn't mean it isn't worth learning about. That said, yo
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by ellius 7y ago
"Money Stuff" is excellent. I also recommend the FT. Their Alphaville section is very good. One of my favorite classic Levine articles is "Regulators Want to Slow Runs on Derivatives." Some other resources I came across
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by ellius 7y ago
I saw this design on /r/security and thought it was a good idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22343786 It seems like if we want to solve this problem we need to somehow modify users' behavior by makin
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by ellius 7y ago
"The War of Art," if anyone needs a source.
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by ellius 7y ago
My most recent team ran a version of XP, and I found IPM (iteration planning meeting) to be one of the most effective and important things we did. We had a very good back and forth with our Product Manager, with conversations usually going
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by ellius 7y ago
There is only one physical bookstore I go to anymore, and it's for exactly the same reason. The walls are positively stuffed with books. Nothing can beat Amazon for speedy search. If I know exactly what I want, that's where I&#x2
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by ellius 7y ago
Any of those frameworks that you endorse particularly?
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by ellius 7y ago
As an addendum to this, I would frame the problem as "complexity," one aspect or symptom of which is requirements volatility. Complexity comes from two sources in software projects. The first is the domain. As other commenters hav
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by ellius 7y ago
It really isn't that surprising either. People want to write off the notion that some people are massively better than others at solving problems, but it's completely obvious that's the case. Of course there are insane outlie
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by ellius 7y ago
Sure, but what do you count as a "component"? It varies by language, framework, platform, and pattern.
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by ellius 7y ago
Debatable but I get your point. The thing is that Flux is a pattern, and you often want to test the full pattern to get a meaningful "unit" of behavior/logic. There can be meaningful logic in the individual pieces, but freque
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by ellius 7y ago
Bounced around 2 projects in the last 12 months, one Angular and one React, that are using the Flux pattern. It is a real bitch to unit test anything but the individual pieces, which ends up being kind of meaningless.
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by ellius 7y ago
This was my thought too. At least while they're getting ramped up, then maybe slowly let them go off and take pieces on their own.
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by ellius 7y ago
The Bullet Journal book actually has a really good point about this, which is that you should be archiving this stuff to have the exact realization you just pointed out and then figure out how to adjust your behavior to focus on things that
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by ellius 7y ago
I use a mix as well. I think plaintext lacks three qualities that are very important to me: 1. Discrete structure/form. Yes you can enforce this yourself, but it's not inherent to the system. This means it takes some additional la

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