Getting so tired of the war metaphors in attempts to describe software development. We solve business problems using code, we don't make a living by role-playing military tactics. Chill out my dudes
Readit NewsRoelven commented on Splitting engineering teams into defense and offense greptile.com/blog/how-we-... · Posted by u/dakshgupta
Roelven commented on Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job? · Posted by u/sujdes
Regardless of your job or responsibilities, if you are new to a certain domain, find users or customers to talk to. If you can't talk to them directly, find colleagues who do, and ask to be a fly on the wall. Meet at least 10. Write down their day to day jobs, their challenges and their frustrations. Even from just listening to others talk, you will get a good perspective.
To speed it up, write an interview script with a set of questions. Use an LLM to make the questions non-leading if you want, but point is to show colleagues who have customer contact your script. If you manage to do the interviews, record them, transcribe them and share them around. You are now a customer advocate who knows the customer's needs and wants.
Don't wait with doing this only after you've met the team, start immediately. Let this be your driving force to meet colleagues. It's useful, offer to share the results, or ask for question ideas to whoever wants to listen to you.
You now have laid the groundwork for your success. Now you can focus on the organisation, the team, the mission, the proposition, etc. Everyone you now meet, talk about how customers want to do A or B but can't, or about their challenges. People will appreciate your insight and you're off to a great start!
Roelven commented on Ask HN: What type of lamp (or light/lumen) do you use in your home office? · Posted by u/boredemployee
I've got two IKEA FLOAT Led panels on my ceiling, each 2400 lumen. The panels can be adjusted in Kelvin (2200 to 4000) and are dimmable, so when it's evening and I need to get some work done I turn them a lot more yellow to not mess with my sleep rhythm. I find making the room very bright helps a lot with waking up and focus, compared to when I had only one or two bulbs as lighting. It does take some getting used to as some have already pointed out here.
I've seen more people interested in this topic so I'm adding some recent links I've came across:
Roelven commented on Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster brianchristner.io/how-a-s... · Posted by u/pmoriarty
I've been running a pi-hole on my home network for years and I love it, it consistently blocks about 19% of outgoing requests. Some of the benefits for us are:
- It disables (and hides) the annoying ads on our Samsung smart TV
- Browsing is noticeably smoother (especially recipe websites on mobile!)
- Most front-end browser trackers are blocked
- It's now possible to see how often apps or devices tend to phone home by just logging into the Pihole web interface
- We're not giving (most of) our DNS activity to our ISP
- Updating to a newer version is a breeze with docker
- I've not locked it down further with a firewall yet to force all DNS requests to go through the Pihole, but I'm planning to.
- I won't run a Pihole container on my UDM as it will likely mess with future updates and settings, keeping things separate feels better.
- Sometimes I consider adding more blocklists but every time I do, something gets annoying somewhere and I usually end up reverting to the standard config.
(edit, formatting)
Roelven commented on Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything? · Posted by u/apitman
A book I keep coming back to (re-read every two years or so) and recommend others is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
It has shaped my thinking on 'what is good' or 'what does quality' mean. As an engineer it is easy to appreciate the author slowly going insane about the details he keeps coming back to, and as a human it is invaluable to have an understanding yourself of when something is 'good'.
Highly recommended.
I'd like to add https://soverin.net/features here as well. It's similar to Posteo but offers unlimited aliases and more storage. Servers hosted in the Netherlands.
Roelven commented on Scientists warn of potential serious health effects of 5G (2017) [pdf] ehtrust.org/wp-content/up... · Posted by u/_j4jc
Is this credible? Can someone with more experience weigh in on the mechanism behind this?
My understanding of physics is that 5G wavelength is much longer than visible light (millimeter vs nanometer magnitudes) and visible light only really starts to get harmful in the UV+ spectrum.
How can electromagnetic radiation in the millimeter range do anything but heat the tissue to a minimal degree? How can it be harmful?
Just browsing the papers linked in the article you can find some relevant things:
[Effects on trees and plants]
The microwaves may affect vegetables. In the area that received radiation directly from “Location Skrunda Radio Station” (Latvia), pines (Pinus sylvestris) experienced a lower growth radio. This did not occur beyond the area of impact of electromagnetic waves. A statistically significant negative correlation between increase tree growth and intensity of electromagnetic field was found, and was confirmed that the beginning of this growth decline coincided in time with the start of radar emissions. Authors evaluated other possible environmental factors which might have intervened, but none had noticeable effects [103]. In another study investigating cell ultrastructure of pine needles irradiated by the same radar, there was an increase of resin production, and was interpreted as an effect of stress caused by radiation, which would explain the aging and declining growth and viability of trees subjected to pulsed microwaves. They also found a low germination of seeds of pine trees more exposed [104]. The effects of Latvian radar was also felt by aquatic plants. Spirodela polyrrhiza exposed to a power density between 0.1 and 1.8 μW/cm2 had lower longevity, problems in reproduction and morphological and developmental abnormalities compared with a control group who grew up far from the radar [105].
[source] https://www.pathophysiologyjournal.com/article/S0928-4680(09...
Roelven commented on Show HN: Dollar Lean Club – Get and Stay Fit Starting at $1/mo dollarleanclub.com... · Posted by u/clervius
I agree about #3 - right now it looks pretty faceless and doesn't have a story. In fitness we seem to need an exemplar who is fit, talks the talk and walks the walk.
The stock images of attractive skinny people don't establish the same credibility as a first person or team bio.
This is an increasing problem in advertising everywhere. If we keep using attractive skinny people in our product shots, photo shoots and marketing communication, we will push a growing disconnect between that and actual, real people.
When people can't identify (which is the initial goal of using people in your communication) with the messaging, they won't think it's for them.
Roelven commented on Ask HN: Product Managers, how did you get there and what's your background? · Posted by u/mezod
Head of PM here. I lead 3 PMs in my current position at Styla.com and have taught product management at General Assembly courses.
I myself come from a self-taught programmer background and found myself questioning the product strategy or design decisions towards managers until I was offered a PM position. I do find the technical background enables me to level with devs quite easily but I don't think it's a requirement. A pattern that has been working very well at SoundCloud is that we liked to transition customer support people into a PM role.
Important feats or skills I additionally look for in good PMs are:
- be a users advocate. Has to be good at putting themselves into the users' position and transfer that perspective to the team.
- has to be really good at email. Org/management/soft skills aside, the most powerful tool of a PM is email.
- eager to learn and apply those learnings quickly.
- be comfortable with numbers but be skeptical at the same time. Data is important but be wary of bias.
Happy to see there is an increased interest in this topic. I've been reading a bit about hydroponics lately which was sparked by IKEA's indoor gardening product line [1].
I think there are definitely technological advancements being used to make this more accessible, although most of it seems heavily focused on hydro- or aeroponics.
While Grovegrown is a super exciting product [2] it doesn't fit the yield you are looking for.
Perhaps Farmfromabox [3] is an interesting pointer, which seems closest to what you described.
[1] http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/indoor-gardening/ [2] https://grovegrown.com/products/the-garden [3] http://www.farmfromabox.com