Hacker News: kenoyer130

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?"

kenoyer130 — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 12:54:40 +0000

Also DO NOT CHEAP OUT ON THE FREELANCERS. A good team of freelancers is going to cost MORE then in house developers. The plus side is they are relatively temporary so not a long term financial burden. The projects I see that fail with freelancers are the company gets greedy and pays the bare minimum but as always you get what you pay for. In most cases the work just ends up being thrown away as a CRUD app that does no have your business logic and work flows is actually harmful.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?"

kenoyer130 — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 12:50:54 +0000

Consider not only freelance developers but a freelance "scrum" type team with a PM or PO. Vet these carefully as a bad PO will sink the project. A good PO will gather requirements, keep the team on track, report back progress etc. Since this is an outsourced solution you must be "waterfall" as in be crystal clear on how the app will work, what is the business logic (the devil in the details) etc. Freelancers will not stop to ask questions or clarifications. They will do exactly as asked no more or no less. While I do agree if software is not your core competency you should not bring it in house it is worth mentioning most software starts as an in house solution that is then upgraded to a commercial offering in the B2B space you operate in. Its a long shot but if you stop thinking of your software as a cost center but as your actual core competency its possible to turn it into a revenue stream that is some cases outstrips the original company. I would say at least 95% of the attempts to do this fail though so don't take it as granted.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Nobody Cares About Your Git History"

kenoyer130 — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 12:56:48 +0000

I don't understand why this causes so much confusion and conversation. If you are working with others then a force push is off the table. The only time you force push is to fix a catastrophic error. Forget it exists. When working locally please rebase LOCALLY and clean up your commits before pushing an MR. No one wants to see fix 1, fix 3, rollback etc. Plus team environments usually have strict commit templates linked to Jira tasks etc. Rebase -i is your friend. I think people for some reason struggle to understand their local git repo versus the actual shared git repo everyone is using.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore"

kenoyer130 — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 15:14:15 +0000

Developers confuse technical stack (the how) with the why (what business value is my solution delivering).

There are just more choices today. You don't query for the latest stack and work back words.

Are you building a dog house or a skyscraper? If its a dog house use vanilla js or whatever works. If your building a skyscraper then use a react stack or something that has wide developer support since now your working on a large team on a large web application and the requirements have changed.

Server side rendering for example is to solve the issue of first load but is that actually something the business must have? It also adds CPU processing to your back end and more complexity. Is the trade off worth it for your business?

The reason the business pays us money is so we learn the trade offs and make the correct technical decisions, not that we blindly grab the new hot.

Most hacker news links I see like this is a developer confusing their world (small shop, internal IT dev, large shop, enterprise development, contract work for medium size business, FANG company etc) with the whole world and think there is one solution that applies to all worlds.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Software engineering books"

kenoyer130 — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 16:26:03 +0000

I really enjoyed Common-Sense-Guide-Structures-Algorithms https://www.amazon.com/Common-Sense-Guide-Structures-Algorit...

Since it was more pragmatic and less math driven.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Software engineering books"

kenoyer130 — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 14:53:45 +0000

Read Code Complete first then read Clean Code with a healthy dash of skepticism and do not follow it blindly. I still think Clean Code is a great book but does fall into "the one true way" and dogmatism.

This is the advice I give junior developers. I explain that Clean Code turns everything up to 11 and can make the code less readable then more if followed without thought.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Tasking developers with creating detailed estimates is a waste of time (2020)"

kenoyer130 — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 12:04:07 +0000

The iron rule is the person doing the work also supplies the estimates, which are the only ones with any chance of getting them right. This article seems the developers have not been properly trained on how to give accurate estimates.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Deep dive in CORS: History, how it works, and best practices"

kenoyer130 — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 12:50:39 +0000

We just ran into this CORS Same-Site cookie issue and it is going to become much more common. If the original author expanded to include the Same-Site rules as it applies to cookies it would be great!

New comment by kenoyer130 in "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988) [pdf]"

kenoyer130 — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 12:51:16 +0000

"If someone wants to learn something you cannot stop them and if someone does not want to learn something you cannot force them"

New comment by kenoyer130 in "MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small"

kenoyer130 — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 20:07:16 +0000

THIS! Not having a defined Date format has caused so much confusion with consumers of our API since every json API might have a different ISO date format (or some homegrown madness).

New comment by kenoyer130 in "You’re better off using Exceptions"

kenoyer130 — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 17:36:33 +0000

In Java/C# land exceptions are EXPENSIVE. Like magnatudes more expensive. You have to build a full stack trace etc. Removing places in the code where it is "Throwing exceptions for non exceptional circumstances" has a dramatic performance increase benefit.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "My Favourite Git Commit"

kenoyer130 — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 12:39:31 +0000

While humerous this comment is way to verbose. We prefer the following template >

Issue: What is the problem we are attempting to fix

Cause: What is the root cause of the issue, since with bug reports this is usually much different then the random musings of the reporter

Fix: How does the commit address the cause.

Each of these should be 1-3 brief lines

New comment by kenoyer130 in "In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs"

kenoyer130 — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 19:45:43 +0000

It is a good chapter to read to see their methodology even if you don't agree with the results. For example, comparing stricter/easier gun laws and prison times in different cities and not finding a correlation to the drop in violence since it was across the board.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs"

kenoyer130 — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 19:21:53 +0000

Freakonomics makes a case the drop in crime is directly correlated with the passing of Roe VS Wade and the legalization of abortion. This led to the 18 year later drop in unwanted male children now adults. Very interesting read on a very explosive topic :)

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Version Control Before Git with CVS"

kenoyer130 — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 14:48:17 +0000

Work on a code base with 40 plus developers and 30-40 commits a day. Having a clean commit history is a must versus "test commit", "fixed that thing", "added" etc.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Railway-Oriented Programming (2015)"

kenoyer130 — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 19:29:02 +0000

For a web server under high load, exceptions are extremely expensive to build the stack frame as mentioned below. The rule of thumb is to reserve Exceptions for Exceptional Circumstances (oom, unable to connect to db etc) and to use a pattern like in this article for un-exceptional exceptions such as required field validation errors. Having done this clean up a few times, it makes a huge difference.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "What I learned by living without artificial light"

kenoyer130 — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 13:45:27 +0000

night owls or just owls. Cuz if they were actual owls that would be awesome.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role"

kenoyer130 — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 15:42:30 +0000

They asked to use the restroom and never came back. True story.

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role"

kenoyer130 — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 15:39:31 +0000

Also if your trying to make that drastic a switch, are you willing to take a paycut? Just because someone has 15 years kernal experience does not mean they deserve the same pay for mobile (or visa versa).

New comment by kenoyer130 in "Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role"

kenoyer130 — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 15:37:42 +0000

If you come into the interview and say "I am a kernal developer but I want to work on mobile" and you show us a working mobile app you developed on your own, we would consider it. If you come in and say "I am a kernal developer and I want you to take a chance and pay for me to get up to speed on mobile development" that is a harder sell. If you ran a business, would you choose that person or the person who comes in with actual mobile experience and hits the ground running. I sense a lot of hostility in this thread from people who have never been on the other side of the desk. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who interviews a ton of people, and where hiring the wrong person is much worse then not hiring the right person.