Hacker News: beastcoast

New comment by beastcoast in "Autonomy Is Real Now"

beastcoast — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:00:43 +0000

(2025)

New comment by beastcoast in "Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)"

beastcoast — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:17:28 +0000

Lego used to encourage building new things by putting alternate builds on the back of the box, but intentionally not giving you the instructions. Now they do 3-in-1 for certain sets instead, which misses the point of that.

New comment by beastcoast in "Scott Adams has died"

beastcoast — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:22:54 +0000

My therapist frames this as "family of origin" (FOO) vs "family of choice" (FOC).

New comment by beastcoast in "How life goes on after an earthquake: The ‘Lego schools’ of Lombok"

beastcoast — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 15:53:45 +0000

TIL that Lombok and Java are islands in the same country…

New comment by beastcoast in "TikTok divestment law upheld by federal appeals court"

beastcoast — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 01:34:33 +0000

I just did though - got lots of results about the massacre. Not sure what you’re alluding to.

New comment by beastcoast in "A Made-Up Name Is Better Than No Name"

beastcoast — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 01:03:32 +0000

I’ve been on teams that did generic names, and inevitably you end up with names like “work manager service” - whose work? Then it becomes an acronym, like WPS, and everyone ignores it anyways :)

New comment by beastcoast in "Show HN: A free alternative to Typora –– IF"

beastcoast — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 05:19:16 +0000

Your site doesn’t explain your product very well. I know about GTD but I literally haven’t heard of any of the other products listed in the page. The screenshots are tiny and hard to parse on mobile. The descriptions of each feature include many paragraphs of philosophy before getting to what it actually _does_. I suggest “bottom line up front” and a clearer description of the product that better appeals to people who haven’t tried alternatives before.

New comment by beastcoast in "The Waterfall Model was a straw man argument from the beginning (2015)"

beastcoast — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 16:31:55 +0000

Time to get a new TPM. Any TPM worth their salt should be doing everything in their power to catalog and mitigate those risks, and communicate them upwards. Lack of communication in both directions and adversarial conversations with engineers is a whole parade of red flags.

That said, Gantt charts absolutely have their place alongside Agile. Our budget and goals are set yearly so inevitably there’s going to be milestones and work back dates to meet, as well as cross-team/org dependencies to track.

New comment by beastcoast in "Peppermint: Open Source Helpdesk Solution"

beastcoast — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:18:15 +0000

The site doesn't do a good job of explaining what this is, precisely. It has several typos ("mailbox's", "corprate"). The "costco (sic) of helpdesk software" - what does that even mean? What's unique about this solution compared to other solutions on the market - why would I use this?

The "get started" button just takes to documentation about how to install it, but why would I click that without knowing what it is? The documentation is also broken, as mentioned.

Is Peppermint labs a business, or is this a community project? https://peppermint.sh - why the .sh TLD? Is this related to shell scripts? The GitHub page (https://github.com/Peppermint-Lab/peppermint) links to "buy me a coffee"

New comment by beastcoast in "Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office"

beastcoast — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 17:10:19 +0000

Amazon has decided the worst of all worlds: a return to office mandate (stick) and agile seating plans with no assigned seating (stick). No carrots…

New comment by beastcoast in "The away team model at Amazon (2022)"

beastcoast — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 04:38:26 +0000

Away teaming is definitely a last resort at Amazon, and has all the pitfalls mentioned here - much better to do a budgetary transfer so the host team is properly resourced to make the changes, assuming the feature doesn’t make it into the host teams operational plan.

New comment by beastcoast in "The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews"

beastcoast — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 17:23:58 +0000

Seems like Blind should get in on this game, since the premise of the app is that it requires a company email address. Use an LLM to extract insights from the comments and give them to prospective job hunters for a small fee, or even just run ads.

New comment by beastcoast in "The Prime Video microservices to monolith story"

beastcoast — Sun, 07 May 2023 22:34:31 +0000

Even worse than that - Amazon spent dozens of engineer years migrating their wiki from PHP MediaWiki to Java XWiki, pretty much for that reason only, and for dubious customer benefit. There was a very epic post mortem at the end of it.

New comment by beastcoast in "The Prime Video microservices to monolith story"

beastcoast — Sun, 07 May 2023 22:12:54 +0000

Amazon is actually better thought of as a collection of independent startups with their own software architectures, roadmaps and P&Ls. There’s commonly used infrastructure but very little is really mandated at the company level.

New comment by beastcoast in "Inkscape is hiring: Accelerating the GTK4 migration"

beastcoast — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 16:06:00 +0000

Any word on spot color support?

New comment by beastcoast in "How Software Companies Die (1995)"

beastcoast — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 01:42:23 +0000

Click “raw” then it flows pretty well. Reader mode on Safari is fine.

New comment by beastcoast in "Why are developers expected to estimate tasks at all?"

beastcoast — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 19:46:29 +0000

I’m a big fan of AMZN’s approach:

- make an operational plan (OP) for the entire year, which sums up all the HC on your team

- figure out your goals for the year

- have some senior engineers estimate those goals in # of HC (usually 0.5 HC is the lowest granularity)

- add up the HC, prioritize the goals and figure out the cut line against your budget for the year

- when the new year rolls around, start execution. Launch dates are usually set by quarter, with the majority launching by Q3

- individual teams have complete leeway to use whatever project estimation techniques they want. It really doesn’t matter at all. Even waterfall is “fine”. All that matters is whether they can deliver the goals they signed up for in their OP.

- if a goal goes off the rails, report a “traffic light status” (red/yellow/green) and path to green, and engage leadership accordingly to reset expectations.

People accuse this process of being too waterfall / unagile, but it’s actually really helpful in centering the deliverables with business value, while giving teams extreme autonomy to achieve those goals. Mature businesses think in terms of quarters and bottom lines, not sprints and story points.

Mastery-Based Learning

beastcoast — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:58:19 +0000

Article URL: https://launchschool.com/mastery

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34454820

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by beastcoast in "Show HN: A device that only lets you type lol if you've truly laughed out loud"

beastcoast — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 01:22:30 +0000

Video doesn’t play - is HN capable of breaking Twitter now?

New comment by beastcoast in "Modules, not microservices"

beastcoast — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 21:22:52 +0000

>1000 services, each with many APIs :)

Amazon's warehouses have incredible domain complexity which drives the complexity of the software architecture. It's also one of the oldest parts of the company with a direct lineage going back 20+ years. (for example, our inventory databases still have the same schema and are still using a RDBMS, albeit RDS Postgres instead of Oracle).

About five years ago we started rearchitecting to a centralized orchestration service which is being used to abstract this complexity from process teams. This is to avoid projects where 20+ service teams must be engaged just to launch a new solution.