simmschi (u/simmschi)

simmschi commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) · Posted by u/david927

simmschi · 4 months ago

I'm working on a cycling app that analyzes your Strava data and matches your activities to the OSM street grid. You get cool statistics which paths in your city you've already taken. The goal is to make your commute more fun :)

https://cyclonauts.net

simmschi commented on Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep (2018) estherschindler.medium.co... · Posted by u/mooreds

simmschi · 8 months ago

These points are also useful for your own photo library. Forget about your relatives going through your stuff after you die, that doesn't matter. But which of the hundreds of photos you took over the past few years would you look at again?

Right, it's the same kind of pictures mentioned in the article. Life happening. The kids helping you cooking, mom goofing around, the family hiking etc etc.

It's not the landscape, some flowers, fireworks, a beach usually. What you care about are people and the moments you spent with them.

simmschi commented on Ask HN: How can I learn to better command people's attention when speaking? · Posted by u/somethingsimple

simmschi · 8 months ago

I know exactly what you're talking about and have been in similar situations many times. For me it's not just limited to speech, but lots of other aspects. Sometimes it feels like being a ghost or some weird Star Trek like phase shift. E.g. one person walks out of a board game night to get some food, everyone stops playing to wait for the person. I walk out, things just continue.

What helped me a lot were 2 things:

1) There are ways to improve your conversation skills. Big topic, with lots of branches. Your speech matters. Your tone. Keep collecting interesting anecdotes. Culture some depth to your personality that is unrelated to work (e.g. interesting hobbies). Essentially train your charisma.

2) The big eye opener for me was the discovery that different groups of people actually react differently to me. I.e. I was simply friends with people who ... didn't care as much about me as I cared about them. The blunt fix here is to change your social circles. Not easy, but doable, slowly, over time.

The "interesting hobby" part of the charisma training actually helps there to connect to different groups of people.

simmschi commented on PR process killing morale and productivity blackentropy.com/your-pr-... · Posted by u/devslovecoffee

donatj · 9 months ago

My team has a bike shedding sort of problem where a 100 loc PR will sometimes get scrutinized to hell, but a 3,000 loc PR will get LGTM'd by enough of the team to be merged before anyone that actually cares gets a chance to look at it. I would say the second half of that is the much bigger problem.

People know who to ask to get a quick lgtm.

I don't know what to do about it. I can't make people actually review. I've had unrealistic dreams like holding people responsible for things they approved that had bugs, but anything like that would be supremely unpopular. I could do something like requiring review from the team members that actually review, but they already feel overwhelmed by being the only ones that actually review.

We tried setting soft limits on the size of PRs, but that comes with a lot of PR that are hard to review because the work is poorly divided and doesn't make sense in isolation.

simmschi · 9 months ago

Have you tried the code owners feature (assuming you're on Github).

IMO a good approach is to have the actual code owners (i.e. the team responsible for a specific service or library) review the PR. If they think a shallow LGTM review of 3k LOC is enough, they can also deal with the bugs :-)

If you don't have specific ownership in your code base I'd start there.

simmschi commented on A network engineer in search of greener pastures cropp.blog/2024/08/job-se... · Posted by u/tekeous

simmschi · a year ago

"I noted, too, that some of these rejections came instantly after turning in an application. [...] I determined that I was automatically being filtered because I didn't have a college degree. Sure, the job posting says it's required, but you do know I have more experience than the average college student my age, right?"

Sure, I never studied medicine and the hospital stated that they are looking for a doctor, but the experience should count no?

Oh man. I keep thinking about Software Engineering as a craft. Only in our profession is it considered completely acceptable to work without any professional education.

Lawyers, doctors, nurses, even tax accountants go to jail if they practice without being licensed.

You wouldn't get your house wired by some random dude, instead you're looking for a proper, licensed electrician.

But in tech? Somehow we normalized random kids just building critical architecture.

I wonder if that's an anomaly from the exponential, chaotic growth that happened to software engineering since the 60s. I wouldn't be surprised if things normalize, like in a lot of other, mature fields of professions.

simmschi commented on Difference between running Postgres for yourself and for others ubicloud.com/blog/differe... · Posted by u/pwmtr

pwmtr · a year ago

Hey, author for the blog post is here. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know!

It's also worth calling out the first diagram shows dependencies between features for Ubicloud's managed Postgres. AWS, Azure, and GCP's managed Postgres service would have a different diagram. That's because we at Ubicloud treat write-ahead logs (WAL) as a first class citizen.

simmschi · a year ago

I enjoyed reading the article very much. Thanks for the write up!

simmschi commented on SQL is now 50 What is coming next to the query language? coderoasis.com/sql-is-now... · Posted by u/SudoSH

simmschi · a year ago

Is there really anything missing from SQL? I guess adding a few semantic shortcuts like Postgres' SELECT DISTINCT ON (x) are useful.

But otherwise this feels like asking what's coming next for Algebra.

simmschi commented on Ask HN: My Cofounder was diagnosed with cancer, what should I do? · Posted by u/WatermelonSki

simmschi · a year ago

I have been in a similar situation and am sorry to hear about your cofounder.

From a personal perspective things should be pretty clear, no? Understand that your cofounder suddenly has a very different perspective on life and must change his priorities immediately. If he is going through chemo or surgery there will be long stretches where he will not be able to support you or the company. He may or may not come back. He may not recover. Cancer sucks.

From a company perspective things should also be clear? This is exactly why you have clause upon clause in your contracts, notarized, lawyered and signed. Life happens. People die, have accidents, quit, become sick. If you are unsure about your legal obligations get a lawyer.

simmschi commented on Infinite Craft neal.fun/infinite-craft/... · Posted by u/kretaceous

simmschi · 2 years ago

Well if you ever run into the 'Fresh Prince of Bel Sashimi', that's my world first combination :-D

simmschi commented on Endurain: Self-hosted Strava like service github.com/joaovitoriasil... · Posted by u/thunderbong

ImPleadThe5th · 2 years ago

This is more like an alternative frontend with backup right?

Because you still have to give your data to Strava before it gets to this tool?

simmschi · 2 years ago

Looks like it. Which is a problem, because the Strava API Agreement (https://www.strava.com/legal/api) specifically prohibits you from replicating features that Strava has.