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michealr commented on Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?    · Posted by u/45HCPW
michealr · a year ago
I have worked freelance in similar situations.

Personally, I find it really fun. It's a nice mix of development, design, and organizational understanding.

What I want to do is divide up the project. Usually, these legacy systems don't have clear division points; it's all a big bundle of interdependence. But in my experience, there's usually some less impactful secondary functionality that can be spun off.

That will allow you a few things:

Figure out what you quantify as success for such a project. Its limited scope makes it easier to identify the endpoint. Allow learnings about the legacy system, and perhaps identify what elements you can extract from it—not necessarily code, but in previous work, I've been able to wrap or scrape data in certain areas to provide a sort of external output. Figure out how to work with devs, manage your own time, and educate your organization about what you're trying to do. The third and last point is critical. The failure modes for development are obvious, but the political and design impacts are less so:

1. Lack of experience

2. Poor scope

3. Overly complicated solution

etc.

But the real failure mode is political. You need a developer with some political acumen as well. There's going to be a lot—and I mean a lot—of interviewing people about how exactly subsystem X fits into their workflow. You need the political skill to navigate that, in terms of getting buy-in and quality information.

Downstream of the political dimension, in my experience, is the possible design solution. The actual interviews with people and the regular, constant contact with staff about their job are critical to building something that replaces the existing system but doesn't replicate its design failures.

One mistake you want to avoid is building something too similar to the old solution and missing out on critical information about how the job is actually done.

Also, I'm not currently looking for work—enjoying my current role—but if you want to hit me up, feel free. I can at least impart some experience on what to do.

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michealr commented on Lessons From Linguistics: i18n Best Practices for Front-End Developers   shopify.engineering/inter... · Posted by u/open-source-ux
lucideer · 2 years ago
This is a good article, though as someone who prefers references/tables to prose for technical topics, the real find for me was the link out to the Unicode CLDR project (which sadly contains a LOT of broken links right now due to a data migration effort but I'll bookmark it & hopefully it'll be navigable in future).

As someone with a Polish partner, who also fluently speaks my own weird minority local language (Irish), I'm more than well aware of pluralisation pitfalls; Irish may have one of the most complex rulesets, so much so that I'm almost certain it isn't represented in CDLR (possibly can't be). But I see the plural pitfall brought up in so many of these guide - I've always been curious about other unexpected/unintuitive pitfalls across languages out there. Would love if there was a simple reference of the most interesting (starting with plurals I guess).

michealr · 2 years ago
Remarkable in similar situation, Irish + Polish learnt because of wife and extended family. Found when it comes i18n with the present codebase, I have inherited, it needs a lot of work, but it was immensely helpful to have two backgrounds in particular tricky languages, relative to English.

In quickly scoping out what needs to be worked, and where the inherited setup clearly falls short. Don't think knowing a great deal about other languages is necessary though for the same effect, just enough to smell something might be a bit trickier, like know say the case system in X language shows up in different ways, verb + pronoun order is not predefined.

michealr commented on Encouraging the NHS to build a small web service    · Posted by u/cs02rm0
Zariel · 4 years ago
I will counter this with the following.

My mother turned 60 late January this year, she received a bowl cancer screening kit which she did and they recommend she come in for a colonoscopy, which identified she highly likely had bowl cancer. 3 Weeks later she received the results for a CT with contrast scan which found no evidence of cancer else where in her major organs and nodes. 3 Weeks later she is having surgery to remove the cancerous bowl.

All for free.

Tell me again why America has the highest rate of Stage 5 Cancers over 65.

michealr · 4 years ago
To counter your counter and to refocus the point on the potential improvements for the NHS. I think the parent is correct with regard to the NHS there are a lot of issues with it. And with meaningful consequences for people's health and well-being, but having followed discussions about it there seems to be an overt focus on comparisons to America and American healthcare costs. The UK and by extension the discussions on issues with the NHS would be better served by comparing and looking at healthcare costs and outcomes of other neighbouring peer countries. Such as the Netherlands or France. Or even further afield in the likes of Singapore.

Note, I'm neither from the UK nor America, and looking in from the outside this aspect of the UK discussion comparing and contrasting with America seems to be the wrong idea.

michealr commented on Ask HN: Have you ever switched cloud?    · Posted by u/dustinmoris
vidarh · 4 years ago
Yes. I once did zero downtime migration first from AWS to Google, then from Google to Hetzner for a client. Mostly for cost reasons: they had a lot of free credits, and moved to Hetzner when they ran out.

Their savings from using the credits were at least 20x what the migrations cost.

We did the migration by having reverse proxies in each environment that could proxy to backends each place, set up a VPN between them, and switched DNS. Trickiest part was the database failover and ensuring updates would be retried transparently after switching master.

Upside was that afterwards they had a setup that was provider agnostic and ready to do transparent failover of every part of the service, all effectively paid for through the free credits they got.

michealr · 4 years ago
Would you have a write up in more detail of what you did, even high level. Seems cool thing to do
michealr commented on Ask HN: If you used to be socially awkward and shy, how did you improve?    · Posted by u/dondraper36
michealr · 4 years ago
As others have said, its a grab back of things, with various types of success. Of course no one true silver bullet. The common things of good sleep and excerise always a good idea, regardless. Perhaps even team sports, but personal interests will vary this.

I would say feeling ok with a certain level of personal experimentation, but don't let it neurotically consume you. You have already managed to navigate life to this point. Not everything needs to be changed and not everything needs to be queried.

Trying to dramatically change things can perhaps backfire. Fitting in something related to your existing interests, but with an extroverted forcing function aspect can help.

If you know a technical topic pretty well already, seek to present on it, or teach some intro workshops. Generally, seek to find things that would exercise certain anti shyness muscles.

One thing I found personally helpful was learning a language via immediate focus even at the beginner stages with talking, there are numerous online language learning sites with lessons delivered via video chat. Would say 30 minute lessons initial are ideal.

For me shyness feels like a certain analytical process turned inwards, like I'm DDOS my own brain. The excessive nature is the issue, not necessasrily the mere act of self analysis. Finding activities where I had to moderate that excessive tendency helped for me to recognise the difference

Therapy is always an additional option, but dependent on the person and the needs of course.

michealr commented on Ask HN: Neurodiversity/ADHD Friendly Companies    · Posted by u/adhd_thraway
michealr · 4 years ago
Like others I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, 31, 10 months ago and I have been taking medication since then. I am also in EU.

Nothing major to add, since there are some good comments from other commentators. Retrospectively I have realised ADHD has been perhaps an advantage in some areas. But additionally an absolute self sabatoge generating machine for the seemingly simplest of things.

Currently near the end my contract, being thinking more about the future. Full stack dev too. If you ever just want to chat and share stories of ridiculous periods procrastination, self doubt and future plans I'm always willing to chat.

I know speaking things out loud for me has lifted the veil of self doubt that can descend upon one after a bout of ill directed attention.

u/michealr

KarmaCake day59November 18, 2016
About
Currently working as the lead frontend at VSware, migrating a lot of legacy java, html and global heavy javascript to something that makes sense. While still keeping things running.

Previously worked in the energy recruitment sector as the lead dev. Managing, planning and much jumping from React, Django and React Native with a sprinkle of servers.

micheal (at) actuallymaybe.com

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