matty_makes (u/matty_makes)

matty_makes commented on Ask HN: Drowning in technical debt and legacy systems · Posted by u/throwaway1140

matty_makes · 7 years ago

Your job isn't decision making but you can make sure management is fully aware of what they are dealing with. Outline major problems that you keep running across, you mention highly coupled platforms, that usually means changes in one system can have negative affects on another, and may not happen right away.

The big trade-offs for ignoring tech debt are software quality, system health and speed of development. Those things will get worse with time. If you bring up facts with evidence, on how those are poor because of the tech debt, it could help. Better yet, align tech debt with product strategy. For example, you know the product strategy is to do more X and system 1 is primarily involved with X but changes impact systems 2 and 3. Propose untangling system 1 from 2 and 3 as part of the effort with improving/building more X features. It really pays off when system 1 is loosely coupled from others and can evolve on it's own.

A common theme I've seen from some developers is basically to toss out the old system and build a new one. This usually never works. You probably need to start small with minor refactors to improve things and build credibility that refactoring is a path towards a better system.

When it comes down to it though, if management listens and mostly just ignores your advice, wait for the next failure and after it is resolved, gently (not "I told you so") bring it up again that maybe it could have been prevented.

matty_makes commented on Ask HN: Learning tech leadership vs. growing as a developer? · Posted by u/dark_lands

matty_makes · 7 years ago

Project leadership at a small company/startup is going to be much different than at a larger company and vastly different than at a Fortune 500. The path of a PM is typically to progressively manage more complex and larger projects whether in scope or budget.

A tech lead is a different role than a PM. Tech leads should be mentoring junior devs, guiding overall solution and working with a PM from a technical perspective like being a sounding board for crazy customer ideas.

Your company is small enough to keep dabbling in the project mgmt while coding. You don't need to make any decisions, just see where it goes. You may want to suggest to management that if there are enough devs doing PM tasks spread across X projects, at some point it might help to get a PM to do the PM stuff, then devs can focus more on development.

Having done the PM role, SW Mgr role, and lead engineer role, I found the PM role the most tedious/repetitive and missed coding. The problems being solved by a PM weren't technical and that is what I missed.

It ultimately comes down to what interests you more.

matty_makes commented on Does it matter where you go to college? theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/docker_up

basseq · 7 years ago

So it's a tautology. Prestigious schools attract top talent because top talent goes to prestigious schools. The best way to be successful is to be top talent—regardless of where you go to school for the majority—but top talent are likely to be those people who push and stress and play to win the "collegiate sweepstakes".

matty_makes · 7 years ago

I think you missed the point of the article. It only matters for certain demographics. The byline says it all: "they can have a big effect if you’re not rich, not white, or not a guy"

I'm not sure what 'rich' means in the article, but if it means 'not poor' then for middle class white males it doesn't matter what school is on your resume.

matty_makes commented on Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds nytimes.com/interactive/2... · Posted by u/pcl

matty_makes · 7 years ago

Someone should create an app that translates a companies T&C into layman terms with simple stuff like "they track your location", "sell your usage data", etc. Just need a team of lawyers to interpret them, and a nice web site.

Call it something like AppSideEffects.com "Things that may be harmful when using these apps/web sites"

matty_makes commented on Ask HN: What to do after $8M (all cash, post tax) exit? · Posted by u/throwaway8m

matty_makes · 7 years ago

Retire. You can live off the interest if invested in mostly stable stuff (so I've heard) assuming you don't have a larger tax bill looming.

You may read lots of "awesome coder, great bizdev person" stuff online but 95% of the people out there in Tech are just working on someone else's idea/company bringing home pay. You are free from that now.

Be bored for a while and your interests will emerge. Take up a hobby, be a stay at home dad, think back to what excited you as a kid and explore those things.

matty_makes commented on Fortnite dev launches Epic Games Store that takes 12% of revenue venturebeat.com/2018/12/0... · Posted by u/richardboegli

nottorp · 7 years ago

It's simple. 99.9% of the users play without paying a dime, and the game has to cater to the "whales" that spend thousands.

That's fine when you peddle digital hats, but if they want to open a store, they want paying customers in it don't they? Most actual games they'd want to sell need to be paid for upfront... and I don't see the average Fortnite (or any other free to play abomination) player doing that.

matty_makes · 7 years ago

My kids have put more of their money into Fortnite stuff in 1 year than they have paid for in total for any other AAA title game. So have all of their friends.

It isn't whales, its the 10-18 yo disposable money. They get into the stage where physical toys don't hold interest, their birthday and allowance money piles up and social/peer pressure comes into play.

matty_makes commented on YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M bbc.com/news/business-464... · Posted by u/happy-go-lucky

ACow_Adonis · 7 years ago

To me this little news snippet had just hit home how much of a bubble I live in, and how we're diverging into multiple streams of media for different cultures and classes.

These million dollar media businesses exist that I have no idea about and no exposure to. Presumably when my child reaches approx 8, he'll have been brought up without ads and with most of this content having been blocked (or more accurately, just never coming into the house/houses of his friends, blocking, even though that's what it is we're doing is almost too 'active' a word). And there will be a whole sub-class of the population brought up on this stuff that we never mix with.

Or maybe I'm naive and these media will get in past our defences, but judging by how current media bubbles work it's a distinct possibility that it will remain a bubble I'm never exposed to (I.e I know pay TV options and certain newspapers/you tube things exist, but struggle to tell you a single person I know under the age of 50 who subscribes).

I can't be the only one who feels a little sick at the prospect of making money heaping consumerism on children...?

matty_makes · 7 years ago

It's been happening for decades though. Kids don't watch Saturday morning cartoons these days or wait to see what toy will be in the next McDonald's happy meal. They watch YouTube and see ads there.

Internet advertising isn't regulated but in a way it self-regulates. Content creators don't want in-appropriate ads and YouTube doesn't want that either when a channel is targeted for 8yo, it would make them lose money.

matty_makes commented on YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M bbc.com/news/business-464... · Posted by u/happy-go-lucky

anonymous5133 · 7 years ago

My GF is an elementary school teacher and she says the amount of kids who are developing anti-social behaviors is increasing pretty rapidly. Kids these days have computers and are basically simply "escaping" to the internet to live in a fantasy world that is disconnected from reality. Some even display active addictions to computer games, like minecraft, while others say they only have friends online in the games or with these youtube personalities like you say. These kids literally do not know how to make friends or interact with other kids because they are so used to just sitting in front of a game or computer basically having a "friend" entertain them with only one-direction of interaction. They think this is normal relationship for a friend. They don't understand that in the real world in order to get friends you need to talk to other kids and interact with them. They literally do not know how to do this because they've learned it is not necessary...

Parents need to take it very seriously and limit the amount of time the child uses the computer...otherwise these behaviors continue into adulthood. If you are socially incompetent then it will hold you back in terms of jobs and so on. Very troublesome is that parents are basically using computers to babysit the kids or to keep them occupied...which only helps to reinforce the lack of social skills they get. How many times do you see a kid in a shopping cart holding a tablet watching some movie or whatever? Very common.

matty_makes · 7 years ago

A great feature on Playstation is Family Management using sub-accounts. You can set time limits where it will log them out automatically. You can also setup a schedule with certain hours per day and end time.

I hear lots of "how much gaming did you do when you were young?" but it isn't the same. Today big game companies engineer the games to be addictive to "win" screen time. Back then I may have sunk a lot of time into Nintendo but it was mostly solo playing or playing with friends/siblings that sat next to you. You tended to help each other out to get past levels, etc.

matty_makes commented on Ask HN: GraphQL or REST? · Posted by u/throwaway413

matty_makes · 7 years ago

Rails as the stack and REST as the implementation.

You can then spend most of your time on making sure you have a good understanding of the domain and then design the API to match that understanding.

Rails because you asked what _I_ would reach for :) Once you figure out your domain model you could just generate the REST API.

Rails has GraphQL gems so you could go down that path in the future if desired. Like anything though, GraphQL isn't a silver bullet. If you have a complex data model, that can be exposed and people unfamiliar with the data model will see performance issues.

When I hear API, I usually infer that it means other people will be calling it. The above answers are in context of that. If you really mean a back-end to your web app that nobody external will be calling, ever, then it really doesn't matter what tech stack or methodology you use. In that case, there are other factors like time to deliver and if there is a team building it, then it helps to use a common methodology (e.g. REST).

matty_makes commented on Why There Will Never Be Another RedHat: The Economics of Open Source (2014) techcrunch.com/2014/02/13... · Posted by u/jayliew

bubblethink · 7 years ago

I feel that there is an inherent conflict of interest in the OSS support sales model. Hypothetically, if your software were really simple and robust (think standard unix utilities), nobody would pay for support. On the other end, if you have to deploy openstack, kubernetes, or any other stack with a lot of moving parts, you need support and personnel. So in a perverse way, it's in your interest to make complicated shit. In reality, it is perhaps not quite as bad, but I definitely feel that with a lot of projects for which RH is the sole upstream, the quality or elegance isn't quite there when compared to more traditional linux or unixy things which have more diverse upstreams. This manifests in systemd, freeipa, glusterfs etc. too. These are generally hard problems though. So it's not quite black and white.

matty_makes · 7 years ago

Large companies sometimes don't actually 'do' any of their own IT work. There are layers of SLA's across data centers and applications, spread across multiple vendors, contractors, etc.

Everything must have a legal contract that specifies support terms, penalties, etc. Large company's motives are risk avoidance to ensure profits for shareholders.

Basically companies will pay a premium to have someone they can call and yell at if something goes sideways. Usually corporate finance departments have no logistical way to accept a reimbursement from a vendor for missing a SLA but they like to put clauses like that in a contract.

The other part is the professional services arm tied to the sales process. RH can provide experts that only they can provide - they are the ones writing the code sometimes. Other companies like Oracle have professional services but I doubt they are committers on the products being sold.